Cutting off Google’s Tentacles

I just realized how easy it is to cut off one of Google’s tentacles throughout the web. This is a WordPress blog and I used the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin to keep track of the number of visitors, where they come from (referer, not geo-location), keywords and so forth.

Google Analytics is just one of the many tentacles, Google spreads throughout the web. There is the Google Fonts API, there is Google Hosted Libraries and probably numerous other things that I am not aware of. Visitors to websites that include any one of these Google services will always contact one or multiple Google servers, thus identifying themselves (to some degree).

So I uninstalled the Google Analytics plugin, deleted my Google Analytics account and installed the WordPress Statistics plugin instead. It works flawlessly so far. I can recommend it.

Mere users of the web can monitor and block these tentacles as they browse the web through a Firefox add-on called Disconnect. I can recommend this plugin as well.

Let’s work together to make the web a less centralized, more private place for everyone. Let’s try to exclude large corporations from our interactions between each other. It is probably none of their business and certainly should not be their business.

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