And we were worried about the Bush administration spying on us? Google just took away our privacy and safety. I haven't tried it, am just seeing it on the news today, and if anyone knows how to block it please post it.

Google has provided internet users a way to locate you through your computer. You can read the license plate on your car in your driveway as internet users view where you live. If you walk out the door, you can be seen.

I'm only repeating what they showed on the news. Does anyone know if this can be blocked? What an outrageous and unsafe situation! A pedophile's delight I would imagine as just one example.

Over the line.....way over....boycott called for.

paula

As a search engine it is a great source of junk mail. Funny how the sales pitches come first.

As a news source it is both censored and manipulated.

It will show me what you are doing in your back yard but it won't show me what I need to determine if my leaders are lying or not.

"Beware the Suits."

I am horrified. I use google all the time...my only concern being that when I did a desktop search it showed me ALL the first lines of my threads,posts and worse...my private mail.
Anyone know of a safe alternative?

This is monstrous
Thanks for drawing attention to this.

Privacy was stolen from us long ago without our even knowing it. Since the 1950s it has been possible for anyone with enough money to know what you do in your backyard. Now it is possible for us to know what "they" are doing in theirs.

Like the ICBM, technology can be an equalizer.

After a bit of searching on the subject of privacy and browsing- pertaining to Google anyway, I found a Add-On for FireFox called Customize Google.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743
and
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
info-Features

* Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you're typing)
* Add links to competitors
* Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
* Removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search
* Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
* Block Google Analytics cookies
* Hide the Gmail spam counter
* Make URL previews on sponsored links visible NEW!
* Add favicons in the web search result NEW!

* Remove ads
* Anonymize your Google userid
* Add a result counter in search result
* Filter spammy websites from search results
* Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
* Remove click tracking
* Add links from Google to your bookmark manager
* Use a fixed font for Gmail mail bodies
* Stream Google search result pages NEW!
* Sticky Google Preferences NEW!
************************************************** **


Next week I'll try to look up other search engines - but I bet they all operate the same way.

tips-
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/search/searchtips.php

Thank you!!!

paula

I was wondering about this part-
[You can read the license plate on your car in your driveway as internet users view where you live. If you walk out the door, you can be seen.]

Is this part of the story talking about the Google Maps and Google Earth?
In the satellite view? Those use overhead photos probably updated only once or twice a year - they aren't live streaming pictures. Just a one time snapshot.
here's a link to the Oregon Zoo- you can't read any lic plates and the people just look like a dot. this is the closest it magnifies.
http://maps.google.com/maps?tab=wl

I made a thread about this topic on the Computer & Technology forum -
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...ad.php?t=21075

Jo,

Thanks so much again. I am going only on what I heard on news all day a few days ago. They showed a picture at street level and a picture of a license plate close up. They were talking about people seeing you in your hot tub. I'll post when I find more.

paula

iI was aware of this quite some time ago, but had no idea that private messaging was also traceable. I googled up something and was shocked silly to see some blabber from my maw as a url. Couldn't believe it. Was very sad to see that all facets of a private life are now public. Imagine how our celebrities must feel.
I'm afraid that it's the end of an era; as Janis Joplin put it "freedoms just another word for nothin left to lose"'
I must tell you guys and gals of an experiment that i performed recently. I'm travelling and gave the contents of my wallet away on a friday, (except for 5 bucks ) to someone who needed it more than I did, with no chance to get to a bank till monday. What an eye opener! I was pushed back 30 years to a time that I hadn't a dollar in my wallet, and no way to get any money. Let me tell you that those of us who don't have to worry about where their next dollar is coming from, are just one kind of two kinds of people, and once we get on one side of the tracks we forget what it was like on the other side. I now have a new outlook on life. (sorry to bore you with off topic to this thread). cs