Googleholics Anonymous is now March on Google. My pun-loving roommate pointed out that any other name for a blog about giving up Google for the month of March was just silly. She is correct. I am duly ashamed.

But not as ashamed as Google ought to be. (Transitions!) I have been away, enjoying the sunshine of a much warmer clime, and have therefore been a) remiss in blogging, and b) out of the loop. Thankfully parts of the Internet are always there to keep me informed about the happenings in other parts of the Internet.

Apparently Google has been circumventing Safari privacy settings on both computers and iPhones. Part of the March on Google plan involves getting rid of my Droid and getting an iPhone (eventually. Burner phone first), so this is disturbing. From a practical standpoint it only tracks your Safari usage if you have a Google account, and if you aren’t logged into a Google account this problem should go away. But the fact remains that Google is writing code to override the security settings of other products. Not exactly a great example of “Don’t Be Evil.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good resources and information, like how to remove your Google search history and a link to this article about How to Opt Out of Google’s New Privacy Policy (Sort Of). The “sort of” is key there, but the article does provide more context than the EFF’s step-by-step instructions.

Thanks to the EFF I also saw that Google’s circumventing of Safari’s privacy settings caused an outcry. Google has since agreed to add Do Not Track technology to its Chrome browser. This is a small thing, but it demonstrates that web privacy advocates (and regular consumers) can neither relax their vigilance nor shut up and uncritically take whatever tech companies dish out.

I have a huge to-do list for this blog and am also making a bunch of other life changes in March (MARCH MADNESS!), so stay tuned and watch me flail.