Internet Bias and Privacy
It is a known fact that continued use of the most common and
ubiquitous online internet tools, Google Chrome as a web access page, Google
Search as a search engine, and Wikipedia for encyclopedic topic lookup, will
invariably guide us toward a leftist view.
This is because the underlying algorithms in Google are designed that way,
and common usage has also slanted Wikipedia to the left.
There are alternatives, and I list some below.
From the boiler plate: “The Brave browser is
characterized by an unapologetically pathological focus on user privacy. Its
primary mechanism for delivering this is something called Brave Shields, which
combines traditional tracker-blocking technology, paired with several
under-the-hood browser configuration tweaks.”
Duckduckgo - Private Search Engine, in spite of weird
name.
Privatizes, and does not track searches, which is Google’s “bread
and butter”.
Infogalactic is an online encyclopedia that aimed to
be an improved version of Wikipedia. To this end, Infogalactic is a fork of
Wikipedia, meaning that its content is derived from a past version of Wikipedia
and has diverged from it over time. Infogalactic aspires to avoid the
bureaucracy and biases of Wikipedia.
Also, a word about VPN, or virtual Private Networks. Once quite expensive and used only by
corporations, VPN has become cheap and ubiquitous. From Norton, “A virtual private network (VPN)
gives you online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from a
public internet connection. VPNs mask your internet protocol (IP) address so
your online actions are virtually untraceable. Most important, VPN services
establish secure and encrypted connections.”
Many inexpensive VPN’s are available.
I bought and used VyprVPN to defeat the “The Great Firewall of China”,
when I was there in 2015.
There are other techniques, like the Linux based TAILS (The
Amnesic Incognito Live System), using both the conventional web and the dark
web, use of even more robust encryption technology that ensures completely un-trackable
access. These latter impinge on dubious
and sometimes illegal activities, and are better left alone by the average competent
user.
But use of Brave, Duckduckgo, Infogalactic and a VPN will
ensure effective, relatively unbiased, private and uncommercialized internet
access.
Ray Gruszecki, June
17, 2020
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