Protecting your online privacy

If the idea of marketeers peering at your online activities is creepy, here are a few things you can do:

• Opt out of data mining from advertising networks, such as networkadvertising.org ( the select all button is conveniently broken) and aboutads.info.
• Check what they know about you through privacychoice.org.
  I've noticed, however, that what Google lists there is different from what it lists in its own Privacy Tools.
  
• Change what Google tracks about you in the Privacy Tools.
  
• Change your Facebook settings to seal what you share tight.
  Marketeers scrape whatever information is public about you. Quite often, Facebook introduces new settings and  selects the most open option for you, so you should check news about new features. They're frequently hidden and easy to miss, even though they have huge privacy implications. Watch for settings that let your friends share information about you (like tagging you in pictures or letting third-party apps suck in your information when they play another stupid game or use a worthless app).
• Set the privacy option of your browsers.
  Chrome and Firefox allow you to request that companies not mine your data. Note that it's just a request. Companies don't have to respect your expressed wishes, but ethical companies will.
• Ghostery.com lets you download a tool that lets you see what data companies know about you.
  It has been featured by a few news organization, but we haven't tested it nor investigated it. Download at your own risk. 
• Pay a monthly fee for reputation.com to keep trackers off your browser.

Attribution: Tips from Joel Stein of Time; wording from us. Picture, I See You, from Brandi Korte.

Relaunching Mac Finder (10.6)

Finder, like Sarah Palin, is always on. (Is that woman ever not hamming things up? I mean, honestly!) It always runs. You can hide it, but you can't quit it or anything. You can, however, restart it by doing the following: 

1. Press and hold the option key while you click the Finder icon on the desktop dock.
2. Click Relaunch.
3. Press command + tab to toggle to the relaunched Finder.  

Showing hidden files on the Mac (10.6)

Mac hides some files in Finder so you can't muck around with them and mess things up royally. But if you know what you are doing and want to see the hidden files (they usually start with a period, for example: .hidden), you can open Terminal and run this command (in a single line):

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

To reverse the operation, just change YES to NO, as in the following:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO

You have to relaunch Finder to see the hidden files. To learn how to do that, see Relaunching Mac Finder.

The dimmed folders were hidden files, now exposed.