What Search Sites Know About You

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67062,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

Regards - Charles

 

I don't know, Charles. It seems to me we're getting a bit overly obsessive-compulsive about all this security. There's a point at which we need to recheck our sanity, it seems to me, when we rush to overturn every rock to see what's underneath it. I'm not saying that we should simply put on blinkers, but one of the reasons I don't come to this particular group all that much is this very reason: I'm not going to obsess over this stuff. I take what I consider to be, "reasonable" precautions BUT I'm sure that some here would think I'm far too lax. It seems to me that there is a certain amount of danger in simply leaving the house every day and conducting business "outside" the worldwide web. Will I eventually fall prey to some nasty? Maybe. Maybe not. I think, however, that one can become overly obsessed about all this. Geeze... it wasn't two weeks ago that my wife and I downloaded and installed the newest Firefox 1.0.2 and now we're told that a security glitch in the javascript has rendered it insecure and that we must either disable javascript OR download the beta 1.0.3. It's crazy! Absolute lunacy... in my opinion, anyway.

 

Hi James,

What's obsessive-compulsive is in the eyes of the beholder.

True, too often people get overly obsessive about minor issues like tracking cookies. It all comes down to judgement. The particular issue here is not the use of search engines, but it's terms of use, do I have to register, and if so, how much info do I have to give about myself? and what kind of intrusion from the site in terms of cookies or ActiveX - java - scripts and etc and if I don't allow that kind of intrusion and the site doesn't work, what is it trying to do?. Those are the kinds of questions that should be asked when making use of any service.

Regards - Charles