As a matter of fact, Google has been making use of your personally identifying information across some of their services for quite some time now, in case you weren’t aware of that.
Just think about the Google services you make use of on a day-to-day basis, such as: Gmail, Maps, Android phone or tablet, etc, and think about the information that passes through those.
However, if until recently the company has refrained from incorporating that information with their subsidiary DoubleClick (ad network), nowadays this is no longer the case.
Google has updated their privacy policy so that they could make use of PII (Personally Identifying Information) across all their services and the reason they did that is, they claim:
“to match the way people use Google today: across many different devices” – a result of the “smartphone revolution”. [1]
The way the updated policy is streamlined to users goes thus: existing users get the option to opt-in to the tracking process, whereas new users are opted-in by default.
To put things in perspective, Google is actually not the only big company that tracks PII about its users. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, are also able to track logged-in users whenever they are sharing items from other websites.
Facebook also previously announced they would track users on websites that contains their action buttons, such as the “Like” and “Share” buttons, even when these buttons aren’t being clicked — this is why IWF1.com uses customized buttons which prevents that kind of tracking.
So, with all the above in mind, here’s how you may protect your privacy when online.
Protect Your Privacy
1. Opt out from Google tracking.
Click here: Click Me to go to Google’s activity controls page.
In there, log-in if you aren’t already logged and opt-out of any service you don’t want Google to track you on.
Google’s activity controls on
Google’s activity controls off
2. Delete your tracked history.
Click here: Click Me to read Google’s official help guide on how to delete your search and activity history.
3. Make sure you’re not logged-in to any online services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc…) during your ordinary web strolling – log-in only when needed.
4. Consider using a VPN service such as IPVanish to become anonymous online.
* To learn more about IPVanish from a 3rd-party’s perspective, you may want to check out IPVanish review before subscribing.
