Menoducational - one of those things

Last Thursday, I laboured on about how we are all part of society and that it involves having to travel the same highways as everyone else at one point or another and that in doing so we will always leave our mark, whether for short of long time.

"What? Is that what she said?? In an entire post and now in a single sentence???" Yeah. Kind of. You can only begin to comprehend that sentence, though, because you read the full post. The way you can comprehend is because you plugged bits of info into memory which related to the words above and there was a recall greater than the sum of the sentence as to the nature of being part of a group, rather than an isolated entity.

You created 'cookies' in your mind so that today's post is not looking totally foreign to you. If you are only visiting today, you are now completely lost, due to lack of relevant cookies. You can still read the post, but the full experience will be lacking.

This may all be a bit corny, but I think the point is coming across.

Bottom line; cookies are out of the jar now and there's no drumming them back in. What is more, the variety and quality of cookies has expanded. For the vast majority of the time they are innocuous and helpful little crumbs and, quite frankly, the internet would not be the internet without them. Very occasionally, they are a bit more invasive though. It pays to read the cookie policies of the sites you visit.

Don't all scream at once. That's a tall order. However, if you DO care about cookies, then it pays to read those policies and be clear about the type of cookies being used. The ones which can be a pain are the Third Party Cookies (aka TPCs); these are cookies from sites other than the one you are actually visiting. For example, most sites now have 'buttons' for their social media connections and each of those is liable to bring cookies along with them. If, like me, you object to (and do not subscribe to) most of those things, you can select to NOT have TPCs attached to your browsing. TPCs are also the most prone to bringing in any mischief; which as another reason the https:// protocol is better, it secures against most nefarious coding. All the pages which display the notifications that sparked this discourse will offer a 'learn more' option and that is what you click to go to the cookie info for that site.

What if you don't see such notifications? Go to the cookies policy page which is compulsory on all sites based in EU, or to privacy policy on other sites, in which there OUGHT to be a paragraph with regard to cookies; as an example, I looked up Sears Online, an almost entirely North American site, and located their paragraph (you need to page down that link to read it).

Something else we all know we ought to do but tend to forget is to run a regular 'cookie clearance'. Whilst we can notify each site we visit that we don't favour TPC's , we can, if we choose, opt within Google to "do not track" - it's not ideal and can be ignored by some sites, but is still a guard available if you wish to use it. Okay. What to do?

If you run on Chrome CLICK HERE.
If you run on Firefox CLICK HERE.
If you wish to do same for Android CLICK HERE.

If there are other search engines or operating systems you are using which don't fit into these categories, simply typing in 'how to block cookies on...' will bring up relevant help for you.

Now, the main reason to block TPCs is to stop ads, or at least most of them. Another approach, therefore, is to block the ads rather than have to think about all that cookie mess. Easy peasey... CLICK HERE! The thing with that, though, is that more and more sites are alert to the block and it can affect usage of the site. Some politely request being 'whitelisted' on the blocker as their only income is from ads; I permit a few of them, even though I don't ever click on ads. If you wish to block ads on your tablet or phone (android) you can in a few different ways... CLICK HERE.

On a slightly different tack, but not altogether unrelated, Joanne posted about the horror of GPS on photos and offers of sharing with folk she didn't even know she 'shared circles' with. ... this possibly deserves a whole separate post again, because learning how to maximise the benefits of G+ and the networking it offers is a tad more complex than it needs to be. However, the key thing is that it is not necessarily a bad thing to be 'tagged' by someone; but even if you have not tagged them back, sharing is still potentially there... because the world which has fallen so besottedly in love with "being social" assumes we all want to air our underwear in public. Here's the lowdown on this one though; it is not a single-button process, but you can opt out of such 'location sharing'. That link is the basic one, but all you need is there. For a little more understanding and help, you can also click here.

Another factor which Joanne's case raised, though, is that you need to alert Google if you don't want your photos used. Click on the next image to biggify it - or download it if you wish - it is just a screen shot from the settings in the 'new' G+ page profile... but there will be similar in the 'old' version. (...if you have still clung on to the old Blogger profile, be aware that pretty much everything else is centred on the G+ anyway... I am assuming there will be a similar profile settings option in that though...)

The next thing to be aware of is that all images which go into Google Photos (and that is only if you have enabled 'autosync' or have put them there manually) are by default private - they can only be seen by others if you choose to share... and that too you have control over, be it one person or the world...and remember that G-Photos is different from the 'archive' where every image you upload to your blogs is stored and by default is public - which is why it is a good idea to 'watermark' them and it is possible to ensert some HTML to prevent the search engines finding your online photos so that they don't appear on image search... IS ANYONE INTERESTED IN A FULLER "YAMrun" ON G+ AND PHOTOS??? ...

There is actually a lot of control to be retained by the user - but you have to fund the will to exercise your rights! By now I hope that you are all getting the feeling that you can take charge of your computers a bit more again. It is generally not difficult, but does require a bit of patience.

Third and final part of this particular etherwobblie mini-series on Thursday.