Its Time You Ditched Gmail, Chrome, WMT, GA

[gorang]

Pushing my protection agenda and policy for Blackhatters I thought I'd urge you to make an effort to protect your self and your property form the attacker which is Google.

Our best asset is being one step ahead of Google and not taking chances by believing they cant do that.

We've done this many times before, we said they cant manually review the SERPS, we said they cant take down private blogs networks and we said they cant penalize websites for building backlinks but yet here we are, in a situation where all the impossible things have become a reality.

So lets not say Google cant anymore, there is nothing wrong with being paranoid and careful in this industry.

Some will believe i'm scaremongering, and I agree that this is on that level, but sometimes we should be a little scared, fear is not a bad thing, fear stops you making the wrong decisions.

Lets just honestly imagine that Google will snoop in yours or your link seller's Gmail, will track IPs across WMT accounts, will use GA data to see where your traffic comes from and will use Chrome to identify you as well as blackhat communities you belong to.

Its a scary thought, right? So this is the time to get one step ahead of Google and begin protecting ourselves before they start gearing up and up-scaling their tracking of our activity.

An alternative to Chrome is obviously Firefox, however im not 100% sure we can trust a company who accepts money form Google. You can install lightbeam to see who is tracking you too https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/. *EDIT* I was alerted to this privacy browser through twitter https://www.whitehatsec.com/aviator/

If anyone knows an alternative to Firefox which is very privacy focussed that would be good.

An Alternative to Google Analytics is an Open Source analytic software called Piwik http://piwik.org/ - You host the software yourself, so you are in control. And https://metrica.yandex.com/.

An Alternative to Gmailis to buy a domain and use that domain for email, then you control it yourself.

Alternative to Google Drive is mega.co.nz, created specifically to protect your files, it encrypts them and gives you a key, even mega.co themselves cant access the files.

An Alternative to Google DNS is Use OpenDNS or an alternative:http://www.opendns.com/home/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...t_DNS_services

A message to Blackhat Blogs, Forums and Communities
Going into 2014 this is all extremely important and I believe all Blackhat website and forums should also begin thinking about outlawing the use of gmail on registration and urge members not to browse their content using Chrome.

 

[lucasbraydon]

G00gle should change their name to oogle the way they be watching webmasters and all the moves we make.

 

[ok888]

G00gle should change their name to oogle the way they be watching webmasters and all the moves we make.

I actually think thats a good name for them

 

[Orbit143]

Your alternative to Gmail is really not a good option, the main value of Gmail (atleast for me) is great web interface, labels, filters and spam protection.

You would have to build all of that by yourself, which is next to impossible I think.

 

[Beven]

Honestly I think you're a little paranoid, I don't mean to offend you.

What you're suggesting G could be doing would be illegal. I don't think a company this big would risk being caught out.

 

[indianfreak]

If you don't want to use your own domain email, try GMX (http://www.gmx.com/).

If you want google search results without being tracked, use Startpage (https://startpage.com/) as your search engine.

 

[geniusenterprise]

Hey I think you're a bit too paranoid. You want to start ditching browsers, email clients and others because Google owns them?
Btw did you look at the manual review of a website handbook by Google? They advise their employees to use Firefox.

 

[Gyuman82]

Dude you're way to paranoid bro.

By the way, Piwik blows. It's self-hosted which means that database gets pretty large quickly, which f###s with your hosting.

Better option would be Clicky or Statcounter, though those are paid options.

 

[gorang]

I think history demonstrates how these things play out. I won't be getting caught out, thats for sure. While MAtt Cutts is posting about directly looking for footprints on link networks and taking them down I don't believe it is much of a stretch to take this to actual marketers being targeted now. And as some of you know, i've been targeted by Google directly and they do break the law when they come for you. There are other marketers who have been targeted directly by Google too, one messaged me directly(a well known marketer) and described Google like this "There is no end to how deep Google's colonoscopy is".

All I can do is warn you. I was right int he past when I said Google will manually review SERPs and I got laughed at and I'd make a strong bet i'm right again here, especially when it has already been demonstrated to me by Google's webspam team attacking me.

 

[Wania]

An Alternative to Google Analytics is an Open Source analytic software called Piwik http://piwik.org/ - You host the software yourself, so you are in control.

Another alternative to analytics, if you don't want to bother with installing own scripts is Yandex's metrica ( https://metrica.yandex.com/ ) - it offers similar functionality to analytics and is "installed" in same way - just paste the javascript code.

You can preview how interface looks like at https://metrica.yandex.com/stat/?counter_id=5265289 to see if it suits you.

 

[eveneven]

A great alternative to Gdrive, Dropbox etc. is mega.co.nz ... More space, better encryption etc. Though, they don't have any docs interface, just a cloud drive.

Those of you that are using Wordpress, can use Jetpack for analytics.

 

[divok]

what about google public DNS ?

I am using it , as my ISP's DNS system seems pretty fragile and i get random link-buck redirects .

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Great post, gorang.

Why would google go after expensive link analysis trying to find footprints for Anglo Rank or whatever, when all they had to do is open up their gmail and find precisely the paypal names and emails and exact URLs of every single customer who ordered? It is obvious to me that they use everything at their disposal in order to protect adwords against any form of SEO....

Your alternative to Gmail is really not a good option, the main value of Gmail (atleast for me) is great web interface, labels, filters and spam protection.

You get that for as low as $1 per mailbox. Just search for email hosting, you'll find several alternatives.

Also when you're paying for your email, you own the thing. If you're not paying for something, then YOU are the product.

 

[Wilson Grant Fisk]

what about google public DNS ?

I am using it , as my ISP's DNS system seems pretty fragile and i get random link-buck redirects .

Use OpenDNS or an alternative:

http://www.opendns.com/home/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Alternative_Internet_DNS_services

 

[bartosimpsonio]

what about google public DNS ?

I am using it , as my ISP's DNS system seems pretty fragile and i get random link-buck redirects .

You should pay for your DNS service, there are excellent services out there to buy. If you use Google DNS then you are a voluntary lab mouse, they are watching even the slightest thing you do on your internet browsing.

 

[Chicilikit]

I will stop using chrome today, especially after what I read yesterday that google reads your gmail emails and than gives penalisations based on that, its pretty crazy they do such illegal stuff, but they are so big that they can pretty much anything they want. They can destroy whole large business in matter of seconds if someone there makes decision that the company will no longer in search results. I guess when it comes to google it is always good to be paranoid, because if someone can do something, sooner or later he will do.
Probably onle service from google i just cannot stop using is adsense, because google is monopol and there is no alternative to that.

 

[lucasbraydon]

i think i'll stick to gmail thanks

You have nothing to lose anyway

 

[ikilledkenny]

this is chrome, but not google's chrome

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

 

[waitier]

there is no way of ditching google really. unless you're not dependent on adsense at all.

I switched out to another email provider upon the panic attack recently, and it was horrible. Due to their previous hotmail spam, their filtering is now 200%, even legit emails get deleted without even reaching my junk mail.

Do i want to continue on my venture to find an email that's on par with gmail? Probably no. Do sellers stop using gmail? Even reputable ones? Probably also, no. Am i going to question them if they use paypal that's not linked to gmail? Using IE explorer?

 

[sirgold]

Couldn't agree more with OP and even if, even hypothetically, there was only a small chance of getting better protection by using a few different solutions from those involving the obnoxious prying eyes of ( G )oogle, why not giving it a shot? It's not about being paranoid or wearing a tin-foil hat: it's about safeguarding your business the best you can.

Piwik is as easy as GAnalytics, it'll guide you through the first setup steps even if you are retarded and you won't depend on any 3rd party products like google, yandex, kissmetrics, etc ever again, since their software model is basically the same: one server, put the tracking code on each one of your websites... Furthermore if you are a coder creating your own tracking system, maybe a light one based on sqlite is not exactly rocket science, should you feel inclined to do so.

Generally when these days someone gets in touch with me to do business with a gmail address I tend to dismiss almost automatically what he has to offer because if you can't afford to buy a domain and hosting you probably are not a prospect I want to deal with in the first place... Might be stereotypical, but every little bit counts for me... The fact that there aren't web ui's as versatile as gmail is a good point even tough you can setup an imap inbox in a very short time even on a raspberry pi with a lot of the same functionality and I read on HN there were a few guys actively working on a free gmail web interface clone that's on github. Maybe look this up, after all it seems like a pretty worthy endeavor having to do with your own way to make a living...

I personally prefer the webkit engine because it's the one I also chose to code and debug my bots for a number of reasons that go way beyond this scope, so it's handy for me using the same rendering engine, inspector, etc... So if you don't want to use firefox (you might or might not have similar reasons...) you can use chromium, the opensource build before google puts its sticky fingers on it and repackages the compiled version with their "special sauce" as chrome.

The most critical part is -obviously- the search engine, but as some other guys already mentioned above, there are some good ways to limit what they can do and track... A number of plugins like disconnect can help minimizing the impact of 3rd party tracking.

And a final thought on top of my head: do yourself a favor and enable "click to play" on flash: if you start checking out what's sent on wire with any sniffer you'll risk a heart attack...