Found - and Lost Again, Thank Heavens...

They know where you are.

Oooo… Scary, huh? But unfortunately, it could be true. If you are on the Internet (a bit of a no-brainer there, since you are – I mean, you are reading this on the Internet, right?) then you can be located with surprising accuracy.

Is this news to you? Want to check it out further? Then take a moment and examine this: Geode
I’ll wait here while you convince yourself. Granted, this particular tool is careful to request your permission to gather location information about you, but that is because it’s a nice application.

If Geode can find you from your connection information, so can anyone else out there – good or bad.

Sometimes, the location information is used in a general way to tailor advertisements to your local area, or merely pick your most-likely native language. Other times less friendly usage is intended – adding you to spam lists with derived personal information attached (called spear fishing).

I bet you wish you hadn’t explored those wacko fringe websites now, eh? Are you ready to hang up your web browser??

Never fear – there are ways to be safer, if you wish. One of these methods is to use something called an Onion Browser – so called because layer after layer of re-direction is involved. The king of onion browsers is TorPark – found here: Tor

Using TorPark, you appear to be in Italy one moment, California the next, and so on it goes…

There is a price, and that’s speed. All that re-direction causes a slow-down in loading web pages. Some places will not allow you to visit via TorPark, because they can’t verify who you are – and Google is one of those places.

Makes you wonder about Google, eh?