Privacy and Convenience - A Lesson From Google
January 14th, 2008 by Richard CockrumSoftware habits. We all have them. Until recently mine included Google Reader as my feed reader of choice. I had all my email accounts available in GMail. Firefox is my browser of choice since it has so many terrific addons that take care of things from remote blog posting to Sqlite database management. Whenever I would see something I liked in Reader, I would right click, tell it to open in a new tab, and go straight to the item’s true home on the internet. Everything right there in the browser - email, research, writing, pleasure reading, work.
But then I found that Google’s ideas of privacy and mine don’t come anywhere near coinciding due to a continuing integration of Reader and GMail, so I decided it was time to rearrange my workflow.
First, I deleted all my accounts out of GMail except my actual GMail account and went back to using Thunderbird as my primary mail client rather than the backup it had been. My primary email account became the accounts I have on my domains. Next I exported my feeds from Reader as an .opml file, deleted the feeds from Reader, then imported the .opml file into Thunderbird, which works okay as a feed reader.
Then I discovered inconvenience. I work mostly from a memory stick. My laptop basically gives me hardware to run on, an operating system, a place to back up, and a place to work on programming. All the applications I use regularly and the data I need lives on the memory stick. This meant that when I wanted to go to a site from its feed, I had to copy the link to the clipboard from inside Thunderbird, switch to Firefox, paste the link into the address bar, then hit enter. Do that 20 or 30 times and you’ll know how inconvenient it is. So today I went looking for a feed reader addon for Firefox. I found Sage.
Sage is pretty neat. You open it from the Tools menu in Firefox. It sets up in a sidebar to the left of the screen. You click on a feed, it opens in the browser pane to the right that has the focus. All the feeds are stored as bookmarks in the folder of your choice, so they’re always right there. You can get different stylesheets for Sage from the Sage wiki. What’s best, right click on a link in an item in the reader, tell it to open in a new tab, and it does while the reader stays open. Life is good again. Inconvenience minimized. Google not getting more data than I really have to give them (though that is still too much).
The large internet companies retain more data about us than is good for us. Someday it will be used in ways that we don’t consider to be in our best interests. To minimize the ease with which it is used, we’re better off spreading the data we do give up, knowingly and unknowingly, through several different sources. We can do this while still retaining the benefits of using this network that has changed our world.
We don’t always have to sell our privacy for convenience.
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January 15th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Thanks for the insight,we should not trade our privacy for the sake of convenience.
January 15th, 2008 at 8:25 am
No more than we have to, Oluwatoyin. Thank you for stopping in.
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January 17th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Hi Rick, I have a theory that 5 people own everything in the world. The groups for me are mass media, retail, distribution, food, and finance. The world of the internet is collapsing into a few mega-players. I won’t be surprised when Google acquires say a Digg and uses your preferences that you Digg with tags to serve up “better results” customized according to your preferences.
I don’t know of any such acquisitions in the works now, but it’s only a matter of days.
Cheers,
Nneka
January 17th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
They own Feedburner. A huge number of people use GMail and Google docs.
I’m sure they’re already using the data from these, as well as their search data to serve results. Most people don’t care, any more than we care when grocery stores use our shopping habits as shown by those snifty little savings cards they give us to market to us.
Nothing is free in the wired world. It may not cost us money, but it costs us many other things.
You did forget at least one group. A large part of the resources of the world are owned or controlled by governments.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
FWIW, FeedDemon is a pretty decent feed reader. Not free, but not terribly expensive, either.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Thanks, Bill. FeedDemon looks much fuller featured than Sage, and from what I saw on it’s download page, there is a free version.
Now, if only they could do a version that integrates with Firefox. Portability and integration with the browser are very important to me.
January 18th, 2008 at 8:41 am
I know exactly what you mean about those scan cards. I worked in business intelligence and I did a few projects to read the data off those cards and mine it. Also because food companies cross ownership like say Phillip Morris who owns the majority of Kraft, they own both sets of data and while they may not put it in the same place, their people spend a lot of time talking to each other about observed trends. They use the same tactics used to promote tabacco products to promote processed food. They also spend tons on understanding demographics. It’s all really fascinating.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:22 am
[…] while back I went on a quest to find a feedreader that I liked, would run off a memory stick, and didn’t involve Google. I happened on the Firefox extension, […]