Welcome! Google, Privacy, Incognito Mode plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Published: July 18, 2020, 1 p.m.

Welcome!

Craig discusses privacy and why what you thought you knew may not be true. Google suits over spying and more. 

For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, are you a devoted user of Google tools? Hey, and you know how to hide stuff online, right? Incognito browser mode. Guess again.

This is Craig Peterson. Thanks for joining me again, everybody. Google has had a mixed history of keeping your information safe. Right? One of the big problems with Google is how they make their money. They make their money by what? Selling your data, selling information about you. Selling it to marketers.

Heck, they're even selling it to the police and China. They are cooperating with the Chinese government and telling them who the dissidents are. That to me is really rather scary. Right?

[00:01:00] Facebook does the same sort of thing in China pretty much. Well, really every US company that has a nexus in China, if they want to be in China, is being forced under the socialist government, to hand over information about anybody that might want a little bit of freedom of choice in their lives.

Personally, I think that's a problem. Many people tend to not think that. Now as part of our hacker killer cybersecurity course, I go into a lot of depth about how to keep data safe and secure.

Even if you go over to China, believe it or not. But, Hey, listen, if you're going to China, you better have a Macbook and it better be using full disk encryption, and you better be using really good passwords.

 I would advise against using their wifi over there, et cetera, et cetera. Anyways, that's the subject for a very in-depth course. We're not going to get into right now.

[00:02:00] How do you as a user, keep your information safe from prying eyes. There are obviously some things we don't want people to know that we're searching about. Look at @amazon.com, for instance, if you're looking for certain types of toys on Amazon, it is not going to show those in your general search history.

They're not going to just pop up and say on the ad on a website as you're on an oh a so-called family-friendly website that is running ads that are paid for by Google. Maybe a third party who's using Google's data. It's not going to pop up about that little toy that you were searching for over at Amazon at the worst possible time. Right?

[00:03:00] We already know that there's data that we don't want to have out there. And many times data are used to blackmail us. We've seen that very frequently recently with the hackers who go on to our computers, particularly our small, medium businesses. Steal the data that's there. They, actually have people who get on your computer and look around on the computers and then all of the other computers on the network to see what kind of information does this guy has, does this company have, right?

What can we do to really screw them over? Right. What ends up happening? Well, they get their hands on set information and then they blackmail you. Well, there's nothing illegal necessarily about what a business does. Right? You, you sell a product. But you're concerned about your intellectual property.

You're concerned about regulatory fines that might come into play. In fact, almost certainly would come into play in some cases, but how would you like to be the company? Like one of the ones that we came in after the fact. They were just having some email problems. So we started poking around and we found the worst case of infection. Chinese, active Chinese back doors that the FBI Boston field office says they've ever seen.

[00:04:00]So that means that you as a business person, and in this case, is a guy in his seventies. Who'd been building this company for decades and had all of these designs, had all of these customers, his pricelist, his everything up there now stolen by the Chinese. That's socialism for you, right?

Well, It's one thing to steal it from some poor guy, some schmuck that spent 30 years building it. And then we'll just go ahead and use slave labor in order to make it really cheap. So now you get to compete against your designs and this something that's always bothered me about the tax code. 

Here you are struggling for 10, 20, 30 years. We were just in the last segment talking about flash and how they struggled for eight years just to come up with a concept for a business that might work. They had businesses that failed.

[00:05:00] So with the tax code. I'm struggling, let's say I'm working for, for 10, 20 years. I'm not even making minimum wage.  I'm going back and forth. I'm trying different things. Then, all of a sudden, after 20 years of hard work, I'm an overnight success, right? Isn't that the way that works, an overnight success, right, that took 20 years. So I make 2 million dollars in that year, 2 million.

Now I have to pay huge taxes on that. But wait a minute now, if you amortize it, cause I didn't get paid for the 20 years. I got paid for it at the very end of the 20 years. So how about we say, instead of making $2 million in year 20, I made a hundred thousand thousand dollars a year, right? A lot different tax bracket, right?

[00:06:00] Anyways it's something that's always really bothered me. The whole socialist idea of the progressive tax system has really bothered me. But in China, they don't bother with that. If you're a good member of the party, you make more money. We'll steal information for you from American companies. You have no idea how often this is happening. It is absolutely insane.

We've been involved in at least one of the 1000 investigations that are underway right now by the FBI. They just don't have enough time to investigate them all.

So now he has lost his 20 years' worth of building this company to the socialists, who are now going to should be selling his product.

Now, remember they didn't have to spend money developing this. They didn't have to spend money on the failures, the things that didn't work, the marketing that didn't work, the products that didn't work, the integrations that didn't work. They didn't have to spend the 20 years learning how to do all of this stuff. Figuring it out on the back of an envelope, all the way through, on, on a computer diagram system. They didn't have to do any of that. No, all they had to do was steal it. Right.

[00:07:00] So you are a regular, small business person. You're a home user, whatever it is. So how do you keep your data safe?

You know, this reminds me, I have a series of tutorials on keeping your browsers safe. I'm thinking maybe I should release those again. Maybe put them together as a little package. Let me know if you guys think I should. These plugins are going to help keep you safe. Email me@craigpeterson.com. If you think that's a good idea, me, ME@CraigPeterson.com.

How to keep your online browsing experience safe. I've got others too but, you know, I think that's important.

[00:08:00] What do you do tell people are using incognito mode on their browsers, right? It's called different things in different browsers on the Google Chrome browser, call it incognito mode. There was a suit filed last month filed against Google, saying that Google was tracking people, even when they had incognito mode turned on.

There was a lawsuit filed this last Tuesday that alleges that Google tracks, user activity through hundreds of thousands of apps, even after people opt-out of sharing information. This is a good article by CNET. You'll find it on CNET Angela Lang wrote or she's got some decent stuff. I've got up on my website@craigpeterson.com, but this is a very, very big deal because the lawsuit is seeking class-action status, which means that these individuals that are involved in the suit are saying, Hey, we want thousands of people potentially in on the suit. Very, very big deal.

[00:09:00]Last month, the same law firm filed another suit, related to privacy and Google's Chrome browser. So CNET said, we reached out to Google, of course, they didn't respond in time. Isn't that the norm here? The suits filed it in the US district court for the Northern District of California. So it's in the ninth circus. We're not going to get into a whole bunch of the suit. You can find out more on my website or just do a search online, duck, duck, go search.

Here's the bottom line incognito mode, it does not stop people from tracking you. You're still sending requests out. Remember we talked about DNS before the domain name, service or system DNS. Well, that's another way to track you.

[00:10:00] What websites are you going to? What IP addresses are you visiting? What websites are you looking up? All of this stuff is a way to track you. So. Incognito mode isn't really doing much other than stopping certain cross-site cookies from being looked at. So it's a real, real problem.

Now I have some training specifically on all of this browser safety and security and privacy, but the bottom line, if you want privacy, I would say stick with Safari, just for the general user.

Now, in my courses would go into a lot more detail on different browsers, when you might want to use a tor browser, versus Epic, versus Safari, Firefox, et cetera.

[00:11:00] In reality for the 80% rule, Safari is going to get you a long way because Safari is from Apple. Apple does not make money off of your information. Google does. Apple does not. Apple makes money by selling you hardware, and by selling you services. And that's why it's a little bit safer. Right now, by the way, Apple is in their promotion saying we are 50% faster than Google Chrome. As well as more secure and Google Chrome has removed some of the support for some of the ad word blockers and other things, things that you might want to be using.

So Google Chrome's falling a little bit out of favor. However, on the other hand, you've got Microsoft with their latest incarnation of the Epic browser, which isn't the EPIC browser, which isn't the Epic browser. Which isn't isn't Internet Explorer. It's crazy. And we go into a lot of depth on some of that stuff on my courses.

[00:12:00] But Microsoft Epic is now actually Google Chrome under the hood. Anyhow, stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about her at the start of the hour, and I appreciate you being with me. Make sure you go right now to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Get on my free newsletter list and I'll be sending you information about some of the training.

If you're interested in being in some of the FBLives. Stuff for the webinars or watching the videos. That's how you find out. It's like what we're doing right now only better. CraigPeterson.com/subscribe. Stick around. We'll be back on some stations we won't and others and of the course, we're on YouTube and CraigPeterson.com too.

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