[john61]

The power comes from combination. Even very small bits of information in your email, photo tags, searches can build a very precise picture of your personality if there are a lot of them. You can not control the small information bits that go to Google if you are using their tools. This is a dangerous illusion. The solution is to limit the overall amount of information leaking and diversity. Therefore not using Google or other well known data mining companies at all. And yes it is possible.

[electrichead]

I would disagree that you can escape from all data mining companies. For instance, I would be willing to bet a lot on the fact that a company like Acxiom knows a hell of a lot about you that you don't know yourself. And they are not that well known.Facebook uses Acxiom, but you would never know that. You would really only look at Facebook's privacy policy where Axiom would just be listed as a "third party" in there.

It is very difficult not to be tracked at all, unless you are using Tor or other anonymizer.

Edit:misspelled Acxiom

[john61]

I did not say that it is possible to escape all of them. But if you limit the leaked data, their profile is useless. I do not get very well targeted ads. That is a good sign that they do not have a good profile of me. But I never used gmail or g+ for example.

[harel]

Retargeting companies share their cookies amongst themselves. So when tracked by company A goes to a site published by company B, company A gets notified. You are tracked, be sure of that. It might not be enough data to show you exactly the ads you might accidently care about but its close enough and closing in all the time.

[john61]

No targeting does not work in my case. Not at all. The targeting does not get better. But I surf with JS disabled when possible (you'd be surprised how many sites actually work _better_ with JS turned off) and ghostery. I use duckduckgo and do not use any Google Service or Facebook, Twitter. And yes I still enjoy a rich online live and have a lot of friends online and offline.

[harel]

But what is one to do, when a large collection of tools from one provider ends up being superior to others? I'm not religious, and if someone offered me a better-than-Gmail alternative that works better for me, I'd take it. Give me a better search engine - I'm there. In the same way that I'm using Facebook and not G+ because I find the party is better over there with all of my friends.

[john61]

It is called a trap.

[harel]

Not if you don't feel trapped nor care about it being so. Every service coming up with a superior level product which then has to support it at scale will have to resort to charging users or showing them ads and using their 'data' as a channel to target ads by. Yes Google is a trap and so is Facebook, skype, iOs, windows, mac, linux. You choose what you like to use, get used to it or not find anything better and are trapped with it. Until you chose not to because you are either paranoid or something better came to be.

[john61]

No Linux is not a trap, because it is Free Software. Freedom is the contrary to a trap.

[harel]

Its a trap to me because I don't like windows and osx. I'm trapped in a bash shell. :-)