Simplifying Technology

If you are the net-savvy kinds, web surfing and searching  would be keeping you engaged all day. And your browser copes up to provide you with the relevant information. Your browser comes with certain default settings, while you can always alter those settings to improve your browsing experience. Here are a few settings for Google Chrome that may enhance your surfing experience. Click on the tools icon (to the right of address bar) and select the “Options” menu item. Under the “Options” click on the tab “Under the Hood” and you are all set to tweak the browser to your preferences. The following are the various services, features and settings which you can turn off to protect your privacy:

• Suggestions From Navigation Errors: The browser sends Google the URL of the page you’re trying to reach in order to offer you suggestions of alternative or similar webpages. This setting comes in handy when the url entered by you is not available. But if you don’t want to send this information to Google because of privacy concerns, you may want to uncheck this box.
• Address Bar Suggestions: If your default search engine uses Google’s suggestion service, Google Chrome sends the text you type in the address bar to Google in order to retrieve suggested searches and sites, which are then displayed in the address bar menu. Google records a random two percent of this info. It does save you keystrokes by providing suggestions from across your browsing history and popular sites, but turn it off to avoid contributing to these stats from your system.
• DNS Pre-fetching: DNS stands for Domain Name System and refers to the IP address of  links on a web page. The browser uses the IP address to load the web pages. When you turn on this feature, the browser looks up or pre-fetches the IP addresses of all links on the webpage. This way it enables your browser to load the web pages faster. But this does involve transmission of all the link information etc. to the Google DNS servers. Turning this option off stops the transmission of this information.
• Phishing and Malware Protection: This is a security service that saves your system from getting infected by phishing and malware sites. So, if you visit any suspected site, the browser warns/alerts you. The browser sends a partial copy of the URL you’re visiting to Google to check it against a list of known phishing and malware sites.
• Usage Statistics and Crash Reports: Permit the browser to send Google information about your installation of the browser and information from files, applications, and services that are running whenever you experience a browser crash. This actually can be a scary thought for some. And you never know when some statements are edited or jumbled in Google’s privacy policy to reflect this as a precondition or a valid data collection policy.
• Content Settings: You can also set your preferences for cookies, images, JavaScript, pop-ups and plug-ins. All you need to do is to select the appropriate radio buttons. Cookies are files created by websites you’ve visited to store browsing information, such as your preferences for the website or profile information or even info about returning visits, visitors etc. Turning this off hurts your browsing experience but you can set it to clear coolies etc. on quitting the browser and to prompt when a site tries to set cookies (this can bug you almost every few seconds).

While privacy concerns can’t be termed paranoia, for those who have valid reasons to protect their information to transmit through public channels to a third party server for possible analysis, recording, tracking etc. it makes sense to tweak these settings for maximum privacy protection.

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