I don’t like being tracked by Google or Facebook, for whatever reason. It gives me the creeps to see which of my friends read an article on Salon, or to be presented with ads for the thing I searched for six months ago. For that reason I installed ghostery, a nifty free browser plug in that tells you what’s tracking you, and allows you to block tracking on a site-by-site or universal basis.
Mark Rothko, No. 4
Now, as for passwords. Like many of us, I used to use the same password for every website I frequented. Then one site (I think it was gawker) got hacked and, holy buckets, my security just went down the tubes. So I got a free password manager called LastPass. This program generates and saves unique secure passwords making it very easy to log in to all your sites. It synchs up all the devices you use, and can be accessed remotely. It has a lot of flexibility in its preferences, so you can tailor security to your personal needs.
I then went around to all my password-protected sites and changed out passwords, which took a little while but once it was done, it was done. My one complaint with LastPass is that it took a month or so to achieve good compatibility with the latest version of Safari. I suspect that problem might’ve be on Apple’s side, and am anticipating the day when I abandon all Mac programs because they are too complicated, glitchy and incompatible with the real world. What’s next? Open source? Back to Windows?
