Alphabet Spy Agencies Got You Down and Blue? Try These 5 Things to Hide Your Email Activity

STEALTHY SEARCHING

Don't want a digital dossier of your personal interests to be stored and analyzed? Wean yourself from the most popular search engines — Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of them collect and dissect your queries to learn what kinds of products and services might appeal to you so they can sell advertising targeted to your interests. Just because that trove of data is meant to be used for commercial purposes doesn't mean snoopers such as the NSA couldn't vacuum up the information, too, to find out more about you. A small search engine called DuckDuckGo has been gaining more fans with its pledge to never collect personal information or track people entering queries on its site.

Just 10 percent of those participating in Pew's survey said they use a search engine that doesn't track their searching history.

___

SCRAMBLE YOUR EMAIL

Encryption programs such as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, can make your email appear indecipherable to anyone without the digital key to translate the gibberish. This can help prevent highly sensitive financial and business information from getting swept up by hackers, as well as a government dragnet. Yet only 2 percent of the people surveyed by Pew used PGP or other email encryption programs.

___

CLOAK YOUR BROWSER

A privacy tool called Blur, made by Abine, enables its users to surf the Web without their activities being tracked. It also masks passwords and credit card information entered on computers and mobile devices so they can't be lifted from the databases of the websites that collect them. Blur charges $39 annually for this level of protection. Privacy Badger from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, offers a free way to block tracking of browsing activity.

Only 5 percent of the Pew respondents used these kinds of tools.

___

CUT OUT THE INTERNET

It might sound old-school, but if you want to share something really sensitive, meet face to face. The Pew poll found 14 percent of respondents are choosing to speak in person more frequently rather than text, email or talk on the phone because of the Snowden revelations.

___

GET SMARTER

If you're looking to become more literate about the ins and outs of digital privacy, two of the most comprehensive guides can be found through the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense site, https://ssd.eff.org/en , and https://prism-break.org/en/ .

http://www.chicoer.com/business/20150316/dont-want-nsa-to-spy-on-your-email-5-things-you-can-do

The 3 Amigo Heavy Weight Search Engines Duke it Out: User Traffic Showing New Trends Now

Google’s dominance took a hit in December, dropping from 77 percent of U.S. Internet searches down to 75 percent, according to StatCounter. That’s its lowest market share since tracking began in 2008.

Web pioneer Yahoo, still in the midst of a turnaround, rode a nearly 20 percent bump at the end of 2014. Its traffic increased from 8.6 percent of searches to 10.4 percent.

Rock bottom was almost a year ago, when Yahoo commanded just 5 percent of web searches in Feb. 2014.

StatCounter attributes the Yahoo bump to a new deal that makes Yahoo the default search engine on the Firefox web browser.

"The move by Mozilla has had a definite impact on US search," said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, in a press release. "The question now is whether Firefox users switch back to Google."

Home Article Found Here:

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/google-loses-market-share-to-yahoo-lowest-since-2008

Astonishingly, More Digital Data Was Transmitted Over the Internet in The Year 2010 *Than All Previous Years Combined* !!!

""Skaugen said although there are currently 4 billion connected devices around the world, Intel expects that number to increase to 15 billion by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020.

Many servers and computers will face challenges from these increases, including those that support the 48 hours of YouTube videos uploaded each minute, 200 million tweets sent per day and 7.5 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month.

To support this amount of data sharing around the world, Intel and other computer companies have to find ways to make the Internet hardware cheaper and easier to use. It is an extension of Moore’s Law, and is necessary for the expected increases in data sharing.

“When Intel entered the server market, the average server price was $58,000, and today we’re under $3,800 and dropping,” said Skaugen.""

http://mashable.com/2011/10/20/kirk-skaugen-web-2/