A Day in the Life without Google

Benjamin Ellis is trying a fascinating experiment - trying to live a week online without Google. Why? Well, those who are watching the runes are getting increasingly worried about Google's view of privacy (aka None, Get over it - see our comments here ) and wondering what steps can be taken. As he notes:

I’m just curious as to how pervasive a part of my Internet experience Google has become and how much data they really are amassing. The only way to really know is to pay some attention to it for a few days, so why not a week? At the end of day 1 I have to say I’m quite shocked. I’ll post a full summary at the end of the week, but here are some of my observations from today:

He goes on to list some things he's noted about how pervasive Google is:

- Firstly, I didn’t realise that Safari uses a “Google Safe Browsing” service, so that had to be switched off in settings before I could do anything else on my Mac.

- I couldn’t change the default search engine in Sarafi – the setting that I’m SURE used to be there is GONE! The site with instructions on switching Google off in the Safari web browers, returned by the Bing.com search engine, had both Google Friend Connect AND Google analytics, as well as google ads and google blog search on it. Doh! Foiled there as each of those services passes data back to Google, and so is off limits this week.

- Finally I thought, ok, I’ll just take “search” off of the safari tool bar. Would you believe I can’t remove the search box with out removing the address bar too? Apple, what where you thinking? Do they really love Google that much?

I've had a policy for about a year now of not using any Google products knowingly, including search, with one exception - YouTube. But what is interesting about Benjamin's findings to date is you may be unknowingly passing data back to Google via pre-sets in the architecture such as in Safari.

He also later noted later that he sees Doubleclick (aka Google) based Ads popping up on Amazon for example. This puts Google seemingly into increasing conflict with what users want, ie search results for the most relevant content. Be interesting to see what he concludes after a week.