Internet Bias and Privacy

 

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 left-wing political view.  This is because the underlying algorithms in Google are designed that way, and common usage has also slanted Wikipedia to the left.

 Also, as you may have heard, these “free” internet tools collect every little bit of information about us, so that the cyber world can target us and sell us stuff

 There are alternatives to the most common internet tools and some are listed below.

 Brave browser  - From Brave’s 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.

 https://braveinternetbrowser.com/download/

 https://duckduckgo.com/

 This is a Wired Magazine article on Wikipedia, infogalactic, other online encyclopedia wikis.  Remember, Wired is rated as “left center bias” by Media Bias Fact Check, so their characterizations are dubious.

 https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-the-wikipedia-of-the-alt-right/

 https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page

 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. and June 17, 2022