Google just recently announced a change in their “privacy” policy, and everybody started screaming, as if there was any privacy to start with! The best that can be said is that Google is at least being honest about what they intend to do with the information they have about us. What we should ask is: “When did we ever have any privacy?”

When your browser downloaded the page containing this article, you probably had no idea how many servers it went through before it got to your machine. Even if you did a traceroute just before you requested the page, the routing may have changed by the time you actually made the request. Most routes on the Internet go through dozens of servers to make it from the web server to your browser. Almost everything that goes any distance at all goes through the “back bone” servers that comprise the heart of the internet. These machines are “owned” by the Department of Defense, or some other government agency, and “No Such Agency” (sometimes know as the National Security Agency) has access to many of them. The point I’m trying to make is that every packet of information that you receive from the Internet is potentially being copied by someone and the information filed away for purposes unknown to any of us. Expecting privacy on the Internet is just plain wishful thinking. Sort of like expecting to have a private conversation at a coctail party.

So, what, if anything, can you do to protect yourself? You could use PGP and encode everything you say or send. This would, of course, require that everyone you communicate with has the tools necessary to decode what you send them. That they provide you with their key, so you can encode it only for their ears. Otherwise, if you just encode with your key, anyone can decode it and know for certain that it came from you. That’s how it is expected to be used, so that the receiver of your message knows it came from you and not from someone trying to pretend to be you. If you use their key with your key, then only the recipient can read it, and they will know it comes from you. This makes it hard to talk to a group. On the other hand, if you are doing nothing nefarious you needn’t worry if the spooks are reading your email. In fact you can guarantee they read it by creating a signature that gets added to every email you produce with all the nasty terrorist keywords in a list, so your mail is guaranteed to get “caught” by their filter. The idea being that you overwhelm them with non-information, making it hard for them to catch that secret email, when you decide you need to send it. My solution has alwasy been to do nothing on the Internet that you wouldn’t do in a crowd of sunday school teachers. Just behave normally and you look like a normal guy/girl.

The bottom line is, if “they” want you “they” will find an excuse to come get you, or will decide “they” don’t need one and come get you anyway. We all live with threats in our lives, but compared with the 15 wheeler barreling down the highway in your lane, Google’s use of the information they have on you to push a tailored add onto your browser, and extort more cash from the advertiser, isn’t one of the things that should be high on our priority list. There are some things in our lives that we can control and many things that we can’t. This looks like one of the latter.