• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • When you search google it fingerprints your browser then attachs that to the other information it amasses from tracking your other activities from other websites.

    By not giving them the search content you reduce what they know.

    Scenario a) you search up particular health issues on google, for the US say “how do I know I’m pregnant” then you go to an online pharmacy (Walgreen is the big US one I think) and order “plan b” (anti pregnancy drug). Google doesnt even need to know from walgreens what you ordered it will infer a pregnancy test and/or plan b then from later activity

    Scenario b) you use proxy and thus google knows nothing of your search, then you go to walgreens, for all google knows you ordered makeup or hayfever tablets.

    Scenario a is or will be illegal in some US states - best not to leak it.

    Not a perfect example, i can poke holes in it. The point is searches are usually sensitive info, keeping them out of the hands of the most egregious activity collator keeps more privacy then if you don’t. The proxy buries your senstive search in with thousands of others that can’t be attached to you





  • Theoretically the major cloud providers like MS have redundant geographically dispersed servers that mean there should only be an outage if the individual user can’t reach the internet.

    In practise however those promises are hollow for a number of reasons, cost usually. Legal issues like GDPR also impinge (EU data being allowed to be in the US has been blocked by the courts the other day for example). In addition there’s a long list of other configuration reasons which almost always come back to cost indirectly.

    Theoretically an ideally configured cloud solution is far superior to on-prem.

    In the real world, not so much: corners cut, pennies saved by non technical managers not understanding the ramifications of their choices & etc

    On prem is certainly better in the real world if you’re big enough to afford proper redundancy and to hire and keep good techs.

    Many many firms can’t tick those boxes though and so you get to imperfect world optimisation where what is good for coy. A is bad for coy. B