Turn On, Plug-In, Opt Out!

Starting today, Google will be collecting information on the web pages you view in order to target advertising at you.

They don't need your permission - if you don't opt out then the law apparently allows them to assume your "implied consent". They also have little obligation to make sure you know they're doing this, which one might think would tend to make it rather difficult for you to choose to consent to it even if you wanted to. Anyway, now you know, so now you can choose to opt out.

In fact I hardly ever see any advertising on the internet any more since I got the almighty Adblock Plus for Firefox. Honestly, even if you're the least technical person in the universe, if you use Firefox then click here, click on "Add to Firefox", and let it install. It will tell you to restart Firefox, and then you need to click on a filter to tell it which ads to look for - pick the first US one if you're in an English-speaking country. That's it.

It's easy, I promise it won't go wrong, and I swear I only see advertising on the internet now when I use someone else's machine which doesn't have Adblock installed. Then everything is suddenly plastered in the stuff, which the normal user of the machine usually insists they "never really notice". If they really don't notice that amount of junk on the screen all the time then advertisers must practically have electrodes implanted directly into their subconscious. Give yourself a couple of weeks without the distraction of incessant advertising, and then see how cluttered and shouty other people's experience of the internet begins to seem.

Google, however, will still be collecting information about the pages you view in order to target advertising at you, even if you're not actually seeing the ads. It's the data collection aspect that I object to most, so I still want to opt out of their intrusive scheme and stop them virtually spying on me in the first place.

Trying to find out how to do this involved having to read pages and pages of corporate drivel about how to "improve your online experience" by letting Google show you "the most useful and relevant ads online" which can be "tailored to your interests" with a system based on "transparency" and "choice".

To save you the sheer annoyance, click here, and then click on the big blue thing that says "Download the advertising cookie opt-out plugin". If you have more than one browser then you'll need to do this in all of them, e.g. you need to do this once in Firefox, once in Internet Explorer, and once in Chrome or whatever else you use for browsing the internet. (If you're not sure then you probably only need to do it once.)

After that they should bugger off and leave you alone, at least until the surgeons call round to give you that lobotomy you've implied your consent for by failing to let them know you didn't want it.

Change of Address

I mentioned recently that I've been having big problems with bluebottle.com, who have provided my e-mail account for a couple of years now and who are crap. I just about managed to dump them before they dumped me this week, but not without spending several sunny days indoors staring at a stupid computer screen. Sorry if I’ve been ignoring you.

When I first set up my account I couldn't get it to talk to Outlook properly/at all so I ended up just leaving everything on the server, and it was oh-so-convenient to be able to access it all from any computer anywhere. This did eventually mean having two years worth of correspondence saved somewhere out in cyberspace and not backed up anywhere, but hey, that’s not a problem when it’s all working fine, and what could possibly go wrong…?

A few days ago, just as I was beginning to get warnings about having reached my capacity and needing to delete some old messages, Bluebottle sent an email to all their users to let us know that they're no longer going to be providing free accounts, we have ten days to download any of our correspondence that we'd like to keep, and then please would we bugger off if we're not going to give them any money.

“Panic” would be too strong a word considering the way I’d probably feel about, say, finding that I’d fallen into a polar bear’s private swimming pool, or being trapped in a lift for 41 hours, but I was pretty quick to send a pathetic message to Techie Friend begging him to come over and make it work please. Techie Friend being good at this kind of thing, it now does work in that all 3000+ messages that were on the server are now on my machine and won’t be deleted by Bluebottle. Unfortunately, the downloading process and the fact that I haven’t bothered to organise anything into folders for two years means that I now just have a very very long list of messages in no particular order. In fact it looks quite a lot like my paper filing system.

I've spent nearly four hours today putting thousands of messages into 38 sub-folders in Thunderbird. This is in addition to time spent persuading five Yahoo groups to use my new address, trying to somehow capture all the e-mail addresses I've ever used which Bluebottle holds onto forever in a massive, badly-punctuated list rather than permit me to keep a proper address book, changing 38 subscriptions to various accounts and websites many of which I'd forgotten I had, and writing to everyone I’ve ever met to let actual real people know my new address.

So, apologies to anyone reading this who has written to me recently and who I haven’t yet replied to.

If you still only have either of my old addresses then my new one is the same username @riseup.net – I will get anything sent to the riseup address, but the process of moving has left me with three different inboxes and a large folder called “dump” which is going to take me a while to sort through. I will reply to you all, but for the moment you are probably marked blue for “To Do” in a funky new Thunderbird folder somewhere.

I honestly don't remember it being this hard to change my physical address, although it has been a while since I've moved house and I'm probably forgetting.

On the plus side, I've got my new address talking to Thunderbird to avoid ever having all this hassle again. I can now do italics and different colours and all kinds of exciting things, and other people's text gets wrapped rather than keeping going for six feet or so off my screen to the right. Unwrapped text quite unfairly makes people seem very longwinded. I haven't even started on creating my own mailing lists yet, but look out world…

Bluebottle.com Is Crap

My STUPID e-mail account is TOTALLY inaccessible because NO bluebottle.com pages will load at all because bluebottle.com is so CRAP.

Apologies to anyone trying to contact me by e-mail - if it's urgent and you don't have my phone number then try leaving a comment here.