DuckDuckGo shows why Google may not be good for you

To show that DuckDuckGo, a search engine site winning rave reviews, doesn't "filter bubble" or track you, they have illustrated guides to demonstrate how Google may not be as saintly or good as it may appear. The facts they present are something to ponder on.

On a different note, DuckDuckGo provides a great API alongwith other goodies like the easily configurable Karma Widget that displays your online karma (e.g. twitter follower count, facebook fans, etc.), for your blog, profiles or other Web sites.

Here's how a sample Karma Widget looks -

Related:
Say Goodbye to Privacy

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Are you building a WikiLeaks of your own life?

New York Times reports that there are now several people database websites that can aggregate personal information & present a dossier with your age, home value, marital status, phone number and your home address, even a photo of your front door. 

Snoops who take the time to troll further online may also find in blog posts or Facebook comments evidence of your political views, health challenges, office tribulations and party indiscretions, any of which could hurt your chances of admission to school, getting or keeping a job or landing a date. Many privacy experts worry that companies will use this data against users, perhaps to deny insurance coverage or assign a higher interest rate on a loan.

Like the way some weight loss clinics charge for each pound lost, there are sites that charge a price ($75-$99) for removing personal information from the top online databases!

Also see:
Say Goodbye to Privacy
Impact of online reputation on job recruitments

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Impact of online reputation on job recruitments

Did you know, while only 7% of U.S. consumers surveyed believed information about them online affected their job search, 70% of responding recruiters and HR professionals have rejected candidates based on information they found online. 

86% of human resources professionals surveyed stated that a positive online reputation influences hiring. (Microsoft Online Reputation Research, 2010)

A Microsoft Privacy & Safety blog post offers these tips for individuals to protect their online reputations:

• Monitor your reputation by searching for information about yourself on the Internet.
• Apply appropriate privacy settings on social networking services.
• Enhance your reputation by posting positive information in your online profiles.
• Defend your reputation by correcting online information about yourself that is untrue.

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Say Goodbye to Privacy

Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Regina Brett

Danny Dover makes an interesting point on privacy -
The privacy conflicts .. encountered in the offline world are nothing compared to those .. in the online world.

With a story & hard facts he illustrates how our private details are tracked by popular websites -

• Google is storing hundreds of .. metrics about it's users.
• Apple is rumored to be building a $1 billion data center..
• In total, 25 Terabytes of user activity data is stored daily by Facebook.
• AT&T reportedly has 20,268 servers. This is infantile compared to Google's estimated 1,000,000 servers.
• Twitter recently peaked at 5,000 messages a second following Michael Jackson's death. Odds are one of them was yours.
• Digg says that only about half of its server load is from visitors to its website. The other half is a mix of Digg buttons and API calls. This means a non-trivial amount of information that Digg collects is from people who are not even on the Digg domain.
• Youtube serves over 1,000,000,000 (billion) views a day. Odds are you are one of them.
• The major credit card companies (like Visa) are now hiring psychologists and statisticians to mine your buying data and figuring out who is a liability.
• Microsoft is in the process of finishing one of the world's biggest data centers in anticipation of creating the world's first mainstream cloud-based operating system, Microsoft Azure. In Microsoft's eye, the future is in your data.
  
• Amazon has more than 55 million active customer accounts.
• Mint Software was recently bought by Intuit Inc. making its combined collection of personal finance information one of the biggest in the world.
• The United Parcel Service (UPS) can reach more than 4 billion of the earth's 6.3 billion people to which it delivers more than 13.3 million packages each day.
• Each of the 40,000 systems in Domino's Pizza's franchises are connected to their global network. Your pizza order is not alone.
  

And some people actually think nobody is interested in them :-)

Also see:
Internet activist: The dark side of web personalisation

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