Privacy
Google and China
Clearly, China is too important for any search company to ignore. Like other companies, Google has tried to develop a Chinese presence while balancing the Chinese government’s censorship. Google has been criticized for bowing to government censorship demands but now Google says it won’t censor and may leave China. The company has even posted an [...]
Parental Internet controls
The Internet can be a dangerous place with scams and malware to waylay the unwary. Also, there are plenty of seamy sites with porn of every imaginable type. Nonetheless, millions of young children are using the Internet every day. To protect them, various types of parental controls are available in Windows and in other software. [...]
About Facebook privacy
I don’t use Facebook, but friends and members of my family do. As a result, I am concerned about the privacy issues regarding the posting of personal information on this social network. Facebook has recently published some practices governing the management of privacy settings. I have already made one post on how the settings [...]
Facebook privacy
Facebook has some new privacy settings. Security Garden says watch out for pre-selected settings and gives some information on how to guard your privacy.
Added later: Here’s some more discussion of problems with Facebook’s default privacy settings. ChannelWeb reports:
Thanks to updated privacy settings, Facebook users now have to fear everyone — literally.
Starting Wednesday, Facebook users who [...]
Internet safety to be taught in British schools
In a move that other countries should follow, the British are going to teach Internet safety to school children. Neowin reports:
Lessons in how to use the Internet safely are to become a compulsory part of primary school education in England from 2011. Drawn up by the new UK Council on Child Internet Safety, the plans [...]
Personalized search at Google
“Personalized” search means keeping track of what you search and tailoring the results of your search queries to take into consideration your individual preferences. It may improve the efficiency of your search but it also gives Google a dossier on your search activities. Previously, Google only “personalized” the searches of those who were signed in [...]
Command line tip #13- Find flash cookies
The previous post discusses Flash cookies in some detail. I commented that I have found that the Windows search function is not the best way to find Flash cookies. However, the command line can be used by entering the following:
dir “%appdata%\macromedia\*.sol” /s/b
The quotation marks are necessary. This command works in both XP and Vista. To [...]
Flash cookies revisited
Some years ago when I first wrote about Flash cookies, they were little known and not heavily used. They weren’t even called Flash cookies but went by the name of “persistent identification element” (PIE). Back then I noted:
Marketers want to know what people look at when they are online so that they can target their [...]
EU cookie control
American politicians have demonstrated more than once that they don’t understand technology and now they have been joined by their brethren in the European Union. In an attempt to answer privacy concerns, the EU has passed a law that regulates the use of Internet cookies in a draconian and impractical way. TechRadar reports:
While the law [...]
Find out what Google stores about you
If you have a Google account, you can now take a peek at what kind of information Google has stored about you. Google has announced Google Dashboard:
Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple [...]
More on people search
Periodically, I write about sites for finding people (for example, at this link). Recently, Steve Bass did several pieces in his newsletter about finding people. One is called Find Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime (Almost). It relates a specific example of how he went about finding someone. He followed that with a list of some search tools [...]
