CNET: “You turned off location history on your Google account, so now your Google apps can’t track you, right? Not exactly. While disabling that setting sounds like a one-and-done, some Google apps are still storing your location data. Merely opening the Google Maps app or using Google on any platform for a search logs your… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Search Engines
A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World
Wired: “Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has earned it an aura of objectivity. Its dominance in search, and the disappearance of most competitors, make its lists of links appear still more canonical. An experimental new interface for Google Search aims to remove that mantle of neutrality.… Continue Reading
How to Make Your Web Searches More Secure and Private
Wired: “When it comes to looking something up on the web, most of us default to Googling it—the search engine has become so dominant that it’s now a verb, in the same way that Photoshop is. But using Google for your searches comes with a privacy trade-off. Google’s business is, of course, based on advertising,… Continue Reading
Google’s been recording you: 3 ways to delete your voice history
CNET – “Find your My Activity page and purge it of all those awkward Google Home or Google Nest voice searches. People were understandably freaked out when reports surfaced in 2019 that Google and Amazon were giving human contractors access to audio clips from their customers’ Google Home (now Google Nest) and Echo devices. Google… Continue Reading
New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700 Million Users Exposed
Restore Privacy – “Data from 700 million LinkedIn users has been put up for sale online, making this one of the largest LinkedIn data leaks to date. After analyzing the data and making contact with the seller, we have updated this article with more information, including how the data was obtained and the possible impact… Continue Reading
Google launches new search tool to help combat food insecurity
The Verge: “Google announced a new website designed to be a “one-stop shop” for people with food insecurity. The “Find Food Support” site includes a food locator tool powered by Google Maps which people can use to search for their nearest food bank, food pantry, or school lunch program pickup site in their community. Google… Continue Reading
What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work?
Libvine, Melissa Rothfus – “Google Scholar recently released a new feature to the Scholar Profile section that tracks whether articles that are supposed to be open access under funder mandates are actually freely available. The feature is controversial. Some have decried the accuracy of the information and the suggestion to use Google Drive to make… Continue Reading
How to See Trending Searches on Google With Google Trends
Make Use Of: “With Google’s ubiquity, seeing what people search for is quite interesting. By looking at trending searches, you can easily find what the hottest topics are, which terms people care about, and gain insight into the minds of internet users. Did you know that Google provides a powerful tool called Google Trends that… Continue Reading
Google’s No-Click Searches—Good Or Evil?
Forbes: “…Google is an early case study in my book Friction, where I show how they focused on minimizing user effort. Their home page was essentially white space with a search box in the middle—no confusion or distraction. This focus on the user’s intent stood in stark contrast to their competition. The big difference, though,… Continue Reading
Google gets a new rival as Brave Search opens to the public
CNET: “About 32 million people now use Brave’s ad-blocking browser each month. Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. Brave Search will become the default search engine in… Continue Reading
Physics explains why there is no information on social media
ZDNet – Physics dictates machines should minimize entropy, and humans are complying on TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms…Social media is…trying to recover a signal from noise in a communications channel. But what kind of communications channel is social media? It’s not a communications channel between people, for the problem of how to send a… Continue Reading
Alexa’s recording you. What’s she doing with it?
YouTube: “Read Sara’s article about the privacy settings on your smart speaker…In fact, over one-third of U.S. adults has a smart speaker. In 2014, Amazon debuted a simple but industry-changing product: the smart speaker. Technically the Amazon Echo was just a microphone attached to the internet that you installed in your home. But it let… Continue Reading
