Google Is Watching You. Are You Watching Them?

Ever get that feeling that you’re being watched? Turns out you don’t need to talk to Dr. Jim- you are being watched – by Google. It’s one of those things that you don’t even realize but it’s obscenely prevalent almost anywhere on the web (even on our site!). See, they’re hunting for your data. So of course if you go to Google Mail or YouTube you know they’re tracking you. But so many sites rely on Google Search, Analytics or Adsense. In practice, they’re following you everywhere. But don’t worry, you can watch them watching you with a plugin called Google Alarm for FireFox and Chrome (I know Chrome…the belly of the beast). Watch these noninvasive alarms sound as your data is transferred to Google’s servers:

While we’re being paranoid, there’s a real reason why you want to avoid Google (at least search). Barracuda Networks looked into Malware in search engines and crowned Google as “King of Malware”. 

Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution – turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 per cent; Yahoo! at 18 per cent; Bing at 12 per cent; and Twitter at one per cent.

All of that data and they can’t tell the difference between malware and legitimate sites? Just one more reason to fear them.

Google Alarm is available here. But of course, I’m sure many of you just love your Goog and love giving them your data. So call me crazy…