Reliable Computers Newsletter
Pay for Your Privacy – The Google Conundrum
How much is your privacy worth?  $10 per month?  $25 per month?  Would you just give it away for free?  All of your private data?  Information about what you like?  Your shopping lists?

Giving it away for free is exactly what you’re doing when you use Google’s products.  Now some people may not care all that much.  Maybe you think it’s okay if Google and other big companies know everything about your online activities, but businesses and especially governments need to think again.

Think this is a whole lot of to do about nothing?  The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) doesn’t.  They filed suit against Google on February 8th to try to prevent Google from combining data from across Google’s services in to a single profile, making all of your data available to all Google services.  In practice this means that you may see advertisements customized based upon the content of your Google searches.  You may also see advertisements when looking at your photos onPicasa based upon the contents of your e-mail or Google Talk chats.

Picture this: a friend is getting a divorce and asks you to recommend an attorney.  You do a Google search for “divorce attorney.”  Later, your spouse goes to read your shared account and is presented with a slew of advertisements for divorce attorneys.  Awkward questions ensue…

Another example with photos and instant messaging: you’re having a discussion about good times at college with a buddy on Google Talk.  You mention playing drinking games and going to clubs of ill-repute.  Later that day you’re sitting with your 5-year old looking at family photos on Picasa and a pop-up ad is targeted at you for Viagra (or something worse).  Mommy, what’s Viagra?

So let’s talk about Google Apps.  Google says that Apps’ education, business and government customers are safe and that they won’t use their data for advertising.  Apps isn’t quite free, but it is a very low cost service.  Where is Google making their money then?  Is it from subscriptions?  Really?  I don’t believe Google cares whether people use Apps or not… they’re counting on creating new Google search customers.  Even if they aren’t directly using the data that organizations store in Google Apps the 900 less-well regulated applications that you use when you’re a Google Apps customer aren’t covered by their privacy policy.  Don’t tell me that Google isn’t going to use information from those other apps to choose ads to display to users.

It’s a slippery slope.  Get a discount on your cloud e-mail, file storage and sharing but be aware that there is still a cost for using Google’s services.  It’s your information… your privacy.  That’s how you pay for low-cost and free services from Google.

So, am I going to stop using Google services?  I used Google search for some of the references and related articles in this blog post.  I don’t plan to stop using Google anytime soon either.  But am I going to trust my customer’s data to a company that makes 97% or more of their revenue on aggressive search advertising?

Not a chance!

Restore previous versions and recover deleted files in Win7
Have you ever accidentally deleted a file or changed a file and then inadvertently ‘saved’ the alterations?

Windows 7 provides a “Restore previous version” option to help us overcome such eventualities. The ‘Previous Versions’ feature is part of the volume shadow copy service, which is also utilized to create restore points and image based backups in Windows 7.

NOTE: For this to be available, System Protection must be turned on for the drive on which the files/folders are stored.

It is very easy to access older versions of files and folders…simply right click on a file or folder you wish to restore and select “Restore previous versions”. For instance, if you accidentally deleted a file from a folder in ‘Documents’, browse to that folder and open previous versions from it:

After clicking on the ‘Restore previous versions’ option you will then see a screen which displays details of all available copies for this folder:

Click on the version you wish to restore from and you can:

• Click on the Restore button to restore the full contents of the folder as it appeared at that time. NOTE: This will replace the current version of the folder and cannot be undone.

• Select Copy to copy the full contents to another location.

• Or choose Open to browse the contents of the folder. You can open, copy, or do anything you wish from here; e.g. if you accidentally deleted a file, you can copy and paste that file back into the current folder.

If you accidentally deleted a single file or entire folder from one of the root folders you may still be able to restore it:

• 1) Go to Start>Computer, right click on the entry for the drive and select “Restore previous versions”.

• 2) In the new window; double click on a version dated before the file/folder was deleted.

• 3) Navigate to the location which contains the original copy of the file/folder.

• 4) Drag and drop the required file/folder to another location; such as the desktop, another folder or back to the current root folder.

The even better news is, this very useful feature is available in all editions of Windows 7

March Monthly Specials

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