4 years ago when I told my non-techy friends about the risk of using Facebook, Google, allowing full access to photos/camera/location etc, I was a tin foil hat man. I don’t blame them.<p>Today those same people are the ones discussing and raising their concerns.<p>I think privacy will be the next big selling point of any platform and there is already one company that figured it out; Apple.
> <i>Google use your personal data to put you in a bubble of your own interests. Creating illusion of objectivity, it narrows our perspective down and slows down the process of personal development.</i><p>I don't agree. People want this. Long before computers, let alone Google, people had no problem in absorbing themselves in themselves and their interests.<p>But, wait, really? Google uses my personal data to put me in a bubble of my own interests? A large chunk of the results for anything I search for are SEO-d garbage and many are irrelevant in other ways. <i>That's</i> supposed to be a bubble consisting of my interests?<p>> <i>Google ignores websites privacy. Even if the website owner doesn't want to expose any content for search engines, Google will come, get it, and show it on its search results and will make money off it.</i><p>Absolute, unadulterated nonsense. The Google spider identifies itself via HTTP headers. It's trivial to refuse service to specific clients.<p>Example log:<p><pre><code> 66.249.79.219 - - [23/Jun/2019:15:36:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 66 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
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I could easily set up a filter to turn that into a 404 based on the request coming from Googlebot. Also note that it's accessing robots.txt. I don't have a link to that anywhere; it is spontaneously doing so; why would they if they had no intention of honoring the content.<p>I sometimes put private content on a URL to make it easily from somewhere. No links to it exist; you have to know the URL. I've never had such a thing accidentally indexed.<p>If people leave documents in searchable directories, don't use robots.txt and don't filter out the Google indexer, they shouldn't be surprised if those documents end up indexed.
I'm still in the (long) process of de-Googling my life.<p>Does anyone know of a list of addresses that I can plop I to my hosts file to block Big G's tracking on non-Google sites? Something that is updated regularly?
I'd like to completely de-Google but the thing is that I have sites that run AdSense and I'm happy with it. Not that I wouldn't mind for a viable alternative.