There's a spy in front of you

If you go to Google's home page and click on "about" ... the first thing seen is there mission statement.

"Our mission: 

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."         

Google what are you doing and what have you become?

Apple recently raise a complaint and now Microsoft is saying the same thing: 

Google is circumventing your computer's privacy settings.  

Naughty, very naughty.

There's a number of articles about this, here's one from CNN.

Related and perhaps different,  I really don't know ...

I've written a previous blog concerning the fact that my computer gets unknown cookies from blogs I visit. That seems wrong and I thought it was a function of Safari, the Apple browser.  

A note about these tag along cookies.  If your blog has things you've added via the design page gadgets ... for example, book clubs, political webpages, cute photos or humor from a third party... chances are, visitors to your blog will get cookies from those sidebar references ... even if your visitors never visit those sites, cookies will be deposited in their computer.

No matter how many times I've emptied Safari's cookies files, deleted the browser's history, emptied the cache and even gone deeper into the OS and deleted a "plist", whenever I opened my blog's dashboard, I still find cookies for sites which don't belong.  I was ready to humph and grump at Apple but I don't think they're the culprit ... it's Google who's doing the cookie plopping.

Numbers-wise, when I open Safari with Google's main page, I get four cookies - all from Google.  Then I type in my gmail address and password and 19 cookies immediately are listed.  Included in that list are a few rogues.

*Update.
After opening three blogs, "Moments of Perfect Clarity", "That's Why" and "Film Noir of the Week" ... the total numbers of cookies increased to 59.  In the next posting I will show the new list.

I chose "Joe-the-Programmer-net" as my test target for watching the cookie list simply because no matter how many times I delete that cookie (or scrub everything from Safari), the cookie for "Joe-the-Programmer-net" reappears.

Using a different computer I Googled this guy ... apparently he's a programmer who hires out to other people.  Why is his cookie like herpes? I especially wonder why I can't delete his cookie from my computer.  Remember, his cookie only appears when I access the Blogger Dashboard (Google's blog business).

Anyway, here's what a scrubbed Safari cookie list looks like when first opened with Google's main page.

And here's Safari's cookie list after signing-in to Google's Blogger.

(Safari has a small-sized window who I stitched together the list and several names are repeated.)

The blogs you see listed have not been accessed, they show-up via a route I can't determine.

I blurred the numbers because I don't don't know what they represent.

As far as I can tell ... cookies aren't benign, they are insidious invaders.  Business sites will say cookies are to make things easier and faster for you to do browsing and visiting their sites ... but if you look at a cookie list which has been in your computer and not cleared away ... you will see a ton of cookies from ad trackers, site counters and a bunch of places (often with disguised names*) who's purpose is one thing: To see and track what you are doing on your computer.

*An example of this, one of the cookies I erased is 'i-m-r worldwide'. I looked up this site and it's, "Nielsen's online audience and consumer-generated media measurement and analysis solutions ..." and it has quite a negative reputation amongst those who worry about internet spying. I inserted dashes in the name so it won't be noticed by web spiders.

And now we have to question Google's motives.  I'm certain they're doing more than tracking with simple cookies because they have direct access to your web pathways and they know what you search for and they know what sites you've visited. 

Things Orwellian and "Big Brother", those faceless, powerful (tho' fictionalized) entities were metaphors for the loss of control people thought they were experiencing ... and they usually blamed invasive government forces as the culprits controlling our Brave New World. Whatever.  

... but maybe the real and larger threat to computer and personal privacy is our trust of search engines, such as Google.