Dispatch 5 - Enough Already
In this dispatch, I give you some perspectives that can help you cut through the complexities of our current news environment. How can you ascertain the intentions of companies like Google and Facebook who have become our main arbiters of what is popular? What do we, as digital media participants, need to be aware of in our own actions on-line? How involved do we want these companies in our political process? Is it time to say… enough already?
References
If you are looking for alternatives to using Google Search, this article lays out what Google extracts from your searches and gives you three examples of competent search alternatives that claim they don’t keep any record of what you do.
This article chronicles one man’s crusade to eliminate Google services from his life. The big one is Gmail. He gives you alternatives to Gmail that doesn’t data mine your e-mails.
I always thought that setting up a VPN service to mask my web activity from my broadband provider would be difficult or slow down my net speeds too much, but I decided I didn’t want them selling my data to third parties anymore.
VPN has come a long way. This “top ten” list from Natural Intelligence has some good options. I recently picked one of them and it installed and worked seamlessly. You may have issues with services like NetFlix but you can easily turn off the VPN to view those programs.