is big google watching you ?

Last week's cover story of the German news magazine Der Spiegel was all about the masses of information that google collects on its users, and the potential threat in that should the company one day go over to the dark side. Some of that really did sound scary, especially the quote from a top executive who didn't seem to have an understanding of the concept of privacy at all.

Personally, I am not worried that much, as I like to believe that my preferences and habits are sufficiently eccentric to confuse all market researchers that care to look at them. Amazon.com has been trying to figure me out for ten years now and aren't any closer to understanding what I really like, or to knowing what I haven't bought yet. They don't even understand that the same person can act as a writer, bookseller, and reader, and that in four different amazon markets (US, UK, France, Germany). So I'm not worried that the google robots, just from managing my blog, will figure out what I'm thinking (*wave to the nice robot*).

But I think that everybody should make sure they think about what information to reveal to whom, and, crucially, not to reveal all to the same company. I.e. if a given company is already handling my email and blog, I wouldn't want them to run my mobile phone and my bank account as well. It's just elementary "don't put all your e-eggs in one e-basket" kind of thing, but I think it can prevent considerable damage should one of the baskets go awol one day. Oh, and for anybody worried about what their search habits may reveal, there is ixquick.com a meta search engine that doesn't record customer details.

And come to think of it, my shiny new phone (not from google) doesn't have an off switch, but it does of course have a microphone and a camera. After reading this article I began to wonder whether the phone was maybe spying on me. Now that would be a big brother type scheme extremely easy to implement. I think the next few years in communications are going to be interesting.

PS some of the Spiegel content is online in English translation, but I don't think this article is.

website news

As geocities closed down in October, I've had to move my website to the yahoo webhosting service. As part of the service, I'm also getting a domain name, which means that, in addition to www.michaelgross.co.uk, I now also have the domain name http://michaelgross.info/
Forwarding of traffic from www.michaelgross.co.uk to the new site seems to work. The address http://geocities.com/michaelgrr auto-forwards to the new name for the moment (but that may stop at some point, so if anybody has any links to the geocities address, please update them). Links to secondary pages, e.g. http://geocities.com/michaelgrr/journal.html will also auto-forward, but to the front page, and not to the specific page. So again, please adjust your links accordingly if you have any.

Oh, and in the brave new world of bit.ly, my web address is: http://bit.ly/1XVNXb or http://bit.ly/1v7bQK

The blog is unaffected by all this, physical address still proseandpassion.blogspot.com, and the domain name www.proseandpassion.com points at this.

While we are talking domain names, please note that I can not read email addressed to the domain names (such as michael@michaelgross.co.uk ) as both domain names attract hundreds of spams per day and I have been forced to target this traffic directly to the trash folder.

Also, as a novelty, I am now putting up a new title photo every month, like a good, old-fashioned wall calendar ...

PS I just noticed (Nov 5th) that the front page of my blog now has a google ranking of 6 (that's out of 10). How on earth did that happen ? Thanks to everyone who linked here !

what's in a domain name

I remember when I first bought my domain name (way back in the 1990s) how excited I was that any email directed to any address ending in @michaelgross.co.uk would find me. Not that anybody did ever email me under "Iwannashout@michaelgross.co.uk" or similar.

Now I'm having second thoughts as the domain name attracts more than 30 spams per hour (and that's only the ones that get past the Yahoo spam guard, which used to be nearly perfect a couple of years ago!). After wasting a lot of time deleting spam I've been forced to filter the @michaelgross.co.uk mail to a separate folder, where I let it accumulate so I can admire the numbers going astronomical.

oh well. another internet dream gone bust. But the good news is that my proper email address is pretty clean since I fixed that problem.