pikemurdy

I have always treated the internet as essentially public. Despite the privacy policies of websites I use, I make assumptions that any tweet, any Facebook post or comment, any entry on my blog or the like is completely public. This is a policy based upon equal parts common sense, paranoia and seeing friends find out the hard way that their tweets were not as private as they’d thought.

Google recently announced the coming of an updated privacy policy. I was a bit upset, but I shrugged it off. A few days later the Wall Street Journal published a report that Google did a bit of technological trickery to track users even if the user had blocked such tracking. This seemed to be crossing an ethical line, and I couldn’t just shrug it off.

There is an old saying I heard somewhere: if you’re not paying for something, you’re being sold.

It should be made clear that Google’s search, Analytics software and email services are top-notch, and I believe they deserve to be compensated. I regret that no one at the company seems to have figured out how to make money, except through advertising. I currently pay cold, hard cash for my email service, hosting, even the content management system running this site. I (and probably many others like me) would certainly pay a yearly fee to Google to take ads and tracking off my search results, however that’s not an option. Or at least allow me to not tie what I see on YouTube to messages I’ve sent to my wife through Gmail.

Advertising companies have long made a lot of money from knowing who people are and what they like. For example, CBS knows certain things about the audience of Late Night with David Letterman. They know that it’s primarily male, with a median age of 54. What CBS does not know, is about the individuals watching. CBS doesn’t know about me.

Principles being principles, I decided to stop using Google where there is a suitable alternative.

The nagging feeling that I use Google for everything is all that held me back (building loyalty instead dependency is a subject for another article).  But the thought of becoming even more dependent certainly encouraged my leaving.

The first thing I did was get my personal email off Google. A few years ago, I started routing my pikemurdy email through Google’s servers. I did this for reliability and spam filtering. This was my hardest decision. But I backed up my email, and changed my mx records and now host it elsewhere.

Next came Google Docs. I’ve never been a heavy user of Docs, because Google Docs offers very little, except that it can be accessed through a web browser. Numbers, Excel and Pages work much better. I converted the few spreadsheets I had to files and placed them in my Dropbox folder. Yes, I know about iCloud syncing of Pages and Excel, but with Dropbox what’s the point?

I then visited google.com/history and deleted my browsing history, and my Google+ account. To double check everything, I visited (and I highly recommend you do the same thing) the dashboard.

For RSS reading, I decided to return with my old favorite, NetNewsWire. Unfortunately, the only way to sync the feeds between devices is to use Google, so I would have to make do without synchronization. But I can probably live with this.

I switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.com, chosen because of their honest privacy policy. At this point I realized that Google was, in fact, not as essential to my life as I had thought.  This was easy.

No Google at all?

All that I have left that I use is Google Analytics, this is tied to a secondary Gmail account. This is not my pikemurdy account which I use as my primary email. I have a secondary account which I believe still has a Google+ profile, but I’ve only logged in once. I’ll eventually zero out that account as much as possible as well.

I still intend to use Google every once in a while. Google needs to make money, and deserves to. I don’t mind seeing ads when I search, use maps, or even when I use the developer tools that Google provides.

What makes me feel queazy is Google using my search history in concert with my email to track my “interests” and advertise and feed content to me based upon the results. The easiest way to prevent this is to simply sign out of Google and never sign back in.

What do I expect to happen?

Nothing. I don’t expect Google to change its privacy policy or even attempt to “keep my business”. I simply expect to not have to sign into Google very much.

Yes, yes. It’s the holidays. Which means that the internet is full of those saying how much they hate Christmas, or those posting photos of their recently decorated tree.

If you’re not feeling “in to it” this year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a handful of videos and links to help you get into the Christmas spirit.

Videos to get you in the Holiday spirit

UPDATE: I previously somehow forgot the craziest, hardest to explain and flummoxing Christmas video ever made: Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa”.

Some ostensibly holiday-related links

• Christmas Poem from Calvin and Hobbes
• The Christmas Photos of Families. And I thought my family was weird.
• The Year in Legos
• John Lennon: ‘I was sick of White Christmas’ – a classic interview from the vaults

“Trustworthy” is a word that gets thrown about with little care these days. I recently read an article titled Building trust is the key to promoting your organisation online.

It’s the typical marketing/SEO/Let’s-do-some-business tripe that crosses the internet constantly. To be clear, there is nothing specifically dangerous that is mentioned in the article. It’s the vacuous ‘sentiments’ masquerading as business help that I find annoying.

For example, one tip for success mentioned is to use “quality photography”. There is not a thing wrong with this advice. Indeed, it’s good advice. At least it’s good advice in the same way “Don’t wear sweat pants to work” is good advice. It’s obvious. It’s so obvious that it need not be stated.

Keep your website fresh. Get your copy right. Treat your customers well. All good advice.

Other advice is just odd, “Include an About Page”. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. Sure, include one, I have one too.

Allow me to give a bit of my own very, very obvious piece of advice: The internet is fast. Attention spans are short. You have (anecdotally) about two seconds to capture a user’s attention. The user should know what your site is about, and by extension what you are about on the entry page. If they have to go looking for an about page, you’ve lost them. Keep it, sure. But don’t expect it to build trust for you.

The problem with these sorts of articles is that they offer advice that is tied up in neat, pretty packages. They’re the self-help business books of the internet. You can’t really argue with them because they’re not really saying anything.

Sometime in 1997 or 98 I clicked an icon that looked like an eye. I was a still a student. It was the first time I opened Adobe Photoshop. The software was amazing to me. I don’t remember which version it was, either 3 or 4, but I remember being simply amazed by the fact that I could adjust the contrast of a photo without going to a darkroom.

A short time afterward, I changed my major from Mathematics to Art. After that, I concentrated on graphic design. Nearly instantly two companies dominated my computing world: Apple and Adobe. Apple made the hardware tools. Adobe made the software tools.

Apple produced crap. Adobe produced gold. I was not well versed in computer history. I knew who Bill Gates was at the time, but I don’t recall knowing who Steve Jobs was.

Since 1997 (or was it 98?) my attitude about the two companies has reversed. At the time, I didn’t give Apple too many more years to live. I knew that Adobe was a company with its sights firmly set on the future.

I recall being very, very excited about everything Adobe did.

Times change.

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Looking at blogs and technology sites, you wouldn’t guess this: but graphic designers rarely spring for the latest software. It’s expensive, and rarely does it make a significant impact on workflow and efficiency. Most of us are concerned more with what helps us create, not what is shiny and new.

In late 2003, I acquired Adobe CS (Creative Suite 1). This was a rare thing. Brand new software. State-of-the-art software.

I recall being very, very excited about it. New features. Faster. Shiny.

Not long after version CS2 was released. After that, Adobe bought a company called Macromedia (who made Flash). When CS3 was released, the company I worked for purchased it, but it was mostly out of compatibility issues (and Quark seemed less and less like the horse to ride).

I’ve not been excited about any version of any Adobe product since Creative Suite 1.

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One fellow from Knoxville, Tennessee being not “excited” about a product is hardly enough for a company such as Adobe to be worried about. But CS1 came out in 2003, and I’ve not been optimistic about anything Adobe has done for eight years.

I don’t get excited about new Adobe products, I get worried about new Adobe products. With each upgrade more features are added. Usually features that do not help me. With the passage of time alternative products start to replace the bloated, expensive software that Adobe produces.

Graphic Design is not there yet.

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Now I get excited about new Apple products. I worry about Adobe products and wonder how much longer they have left.

Adobe recently stopped production on its mobile version of Flash. To me, this seems like a step in the right direction. They also seem to be throwing their weight towards open standards, creating products like Edge.

Flash crashes constantly. Photoshop is a bloated mess. Dreamweaver is… Dreamweaver. But lets not give up on Adobe yet. This is the company that created Postscript. There may be some awesome to come. Hopefully, Adobe is just going through some growing pains, the same as Apple did in the nineties.

Lets hope.