If you care about your online privacy, you should read this

People are paying for digital services with their personal information. This is only becoming worse. I am talking about smartphones, social media and online games. You pay with your privacy, whether you want to or not, because you have ‘’no choice’’. You just follow the crowd. Many people have an iPhone, use Twitter, play Wordfued or Draw Something. They also agree to a huge list of conditions (which almost nobody  reads), and give away all the personal information to a few American organizations who can do whatever they want to with your information. You tell them everything; who you are, what you like, who you know, what kind of music you listen to, and the movies you watch. But also; who you are mailing, what you write in a mail, your location and where you are going to. You tell them everything.

In the meantime you are being filmed by security cameras and other iPhones. You are in a video on YouTube, being tagged on Facebook, or someone is mentioning you in a blog or Tweet. All this information will be saved, exchanged and even sold behind your back.

The online privacy is getting more and more public. I am writing this blog post to make you aware of this situation, because one thing seems certain: privacy as we know it today, will no longer exist in the future.

More tips to secure your privacy are coming soon. The next post will be about the privacy on Facebook.

Today is the last day to delete your Google browsing history

Google will change its privacy policy on 1 March. From this date on, Google will be able to combine your information from Google+, Gmail and YouTube.

Before 1 March, the browser history of  Google+, Gmail and YouTube were separated. Criticizers of the new policy argue that this information should stay separated, because  the search history could contain private content. If the information of the three sites will be combined, Google will built a permanent profile of you including your age, gender, religion, health, hobbies and location.

The site’s Mat Honan wrote: ‘It means that things you could do in relative anonymity today, will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number. 'If you use Google's services, you have to agree to this new privacy policy. It is an explicit reversal of its previous policies.’

If you want to stymie Google from building this permanent profile, you can delete your browsing history. It will limit your information on Google’s services. 

Three simple steps to do it:

1.    Go to the Google homepage and sign into your account. Use the dropdown menu under your name in the upper right-hand corner to access your settings. Click on 'account settings'.

2.    Find the section called 'Services' and you'll see a link to 'View, enable, or disable web history', shown in the red box below. Click on it. 

3.    You can remove all of your search details by clicking on 'Remove Web History', shown in the red box below. Once you have done this your history will remain  disabled until you turn it back on.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2105435/Three-simple-steps-delete-Google-browsing-history--late.html#ixzz1nmS1nTti

How to protect your online privacy settings

‘’I made a Facebook account because my friends have one’’

‘’I’m drowning in the amount of Tweets of the ones I am following’’

Does this sound familiar to you?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. There is no escape anymore from these websites in your daily life. Each one of these has its advantages, but more importantly, also disadvantages. The most of us are already active on Social Media. It is fun to share and stay connected to your growing network. In the meantime we are giving away so much information without realizing it. For example, people do not only know where you live, your age, your relationship status, but also where you are at the moment or which events you will be attending.

Of course there are privacy settings you can change to hide(personal) information. But how can you stop someone from posting a photo of you or how can you prevent to be mentioned in a comment?

In the following blogs that I will be posting every week, I will give updated information about changes in the online privacy settings. So if you’re interested, please follow!

Let’s end this blog with a video about Google saying: ‘We are only doing it for you’.