This is mostly for anybody from the UK
I do realize that this doesn't really belong on this forum but as it is something that should concern everybody living in the UK at the very least, I thought I do raise the issue here.
Councils, Privacy and Google
In the current economic climate in the UK (and elsewhere of course), there is a quickly growing and worrying trend to incorporate numerous services that Google offers to webmasters.
Where I live it started by utilizing googleapis.com (
Google Code) (you may find that where you live they use yahooapis.com
Yahoo! Developer Network instead), a service that provides webmasters with free API's (Application Program Interfaces, for details about what API's are and what they are used for, read the Wiki article here:
Application programming interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), next followed google-analytics.com, a service that offers website analysis tools for webmasters, information on what you did where, how long you stayed on a certain page, etc. and I am sure, since Councils are driven to save money, more will follow. After all, the number of domains that Google uses is huge.
This then raises a number of severe privacy issue.
1. Most Councils offer a link like 'Where I live' to give accurate information about services rendered there, ie. waste collection. To do this, you will usually be required to enter your postcode and for convenience this will be encrypted (if you are lucky) and stored in a cookie. This cookie identifies where you live, not roughly but it'll point directly to your front door and guess where that cookie is created? On one of Googles servers.
2. More and more connections these days come with a static IP address, Sky, Virgin and all other cable providers will assign you a permanent IP address. Basically a unique address on the web, so that servers know who requested a page and where to send it to. This is of course also required in setting the cookie I mentioned under 1.
3. The combination of IP address and cookie(s), there are usually several of them, then is an explosive mixture that allows you to be tracked, in fact you provider can even assign a name to you, after all, by law they are obliged to keep track of your movements anyway. Though I don't think Google is powerful enough to access those data (yet), postcode in combination with IP is quite sufficient to build a profile of exactly where you live, where you surf to, how long you spend on any given website, which pages you look at and more.
4. This information gathering (data mining in webspeak) is, via the cookies and you IP then sent to the USA, we ought to be aware that their privacy legislation can be a bit lax to say the least.
5. What is worse, unbeknownst to the vast majority of internet users, Google also uses so called tracking cookies, cookies designed to track your movements not merely across a single sit but across a multitude of domains. Are you beginning to feel just a tad paranoid? Well, you should be.
To sum it up:
In order to save on operating costs running their websites, Councils across the UK are breaching and intruding into your privacy, providing a commercial American giant corporation with all the details they could ever ask for and as I discovered here, had not even had the decency to alter their privacy statements.
A few weeks ago I complained to my local Council about this, I will post my letter here later, and requested full disclosure of any data shared with Google, this was done in a Freedom of Information Act request. I have not received this information yet.
They did reply yesterday to inform me that they had altered their privacy statement to accomodate their, in my opinion, wrongdoing. I will post a copy of there too in a subequent post.
What can and should you do?
There are a few things to ensure your privacy is at least guaranteed to a certain extent by following a few simple rules.
1. Surf the internet using a stable FireFox version, not a beta and most certainly not Internet Explorer (did you know that IE sends any request for a webpage you make to Alexa.com?).
2. Once you have FF, install NoScript. NoScript is a powerful tool that allows you to actually see ALL the sites that are opened in the background on any given page (you'll be amazed, believe me, when you see who else is listening in to your surfing).
3. Set up FF to only accept cookies from a Whitelist (a list of domains you trust and be sparse when you create that list).
4. Blacklist anything that remotely starts with google*.* and forbid any scripts of theirs from being executed. You can always temporarily allow a forbidden site but only ever temporarily and don't forget to withdraw that right as soon as you are done surfing a page.
5. This may prove diffcult but whenever you can, avoid google as a search engine full stop but then don't just move to yahoo, they are just as bad. Try
https://ixquick.com instead, they are publicly funded and will never store your IP. Also, as you may have noticed, you can use a secure HTTPS connection to their server.
6. If you can't stay away from google, don't click the links they offer to open a website but rather copy the link, create a new tab or window and paste the link. This way, the referrer will always be from about
:blank (oh, I nearly forgot, set your initial browser page to be a blank page).
7. Should you be familiar with the process, you might want to go through a web based proxy server. All you page requests will then be addressed to the IP of that server and not the one at your home. Only the proxy will know where the data eventually ends up, so be careful who you trust.
I am fully aware that this is an incomplete list of how to secure your privacy, maybe someone on the forum has more to add to this but it is a start and do make sure that you check out your local Council for any breaches of its own privacy statement, complain till you are blue in the face and let others know about what our Councils are up to. I recently discovered a website, unfortunately I lost the link and I could kick myself over it, where UK Council webmasters discussed and bragged about how easy it was to implement all the wonderful offerings that Google makes and that leads me to believe that there may be grim times ahead for us in Britain, and of course elsewhere in the world.
People used to be paranoid about what information Microsoft might be collecting about its users, they even went so far and tried to break the company up. Let me tell you, Microsoft is nothing compared to Google, nothing, they can't even begin to imagine what their vision of our future is.
Google has and/or we have allowed them to, become so powerful, these days they are in a position to decide whos business thrives and who goes down the drain. Unless you show up on the first say 5 pages in the search results, you might as well not exist.
Every time you complete a Captcha, you are giving Google more ability to OCR books, even ones that they have no right to digitize on the first place. You may soon find that history may be written by Google, not the people that made history. Besides, our Governments are helpless and without the background knowledge about this, so where does that leave your local Council?
Sorry but I felt that this needed addressing. It may not be directly related to this site but the impact is such, that we all ought to be aware of it. After all, your real name, your nicknames, all stored and with that nice little IP address with it. If you were to ask google the right questions, you might not get that next job you've just applied for. And if that is not something to worry about, I don't know what is.
Invitation:
I would like to invite anybody with any insight into these security/privacy issues to share the knowledge with the community.