Free Tools Around the Web, Are They Really Free?

Ok I’m sure you have heard the old adage “Nothing in life is free”, yet search engine results are brimming with free this and free that.

A majority are only offering free trials. With limitations on what you are able to accomplish with the software, or how long you are able to use the product. These free items are great; you get to test a product to see if it’s worth buying. To see if the product is really what it claims to be.

Then there are the free items which are just gimmicks to get you on a website. Companies often use these free items as bait, they lure you on to their site with the freebies and once your there they try to entice you with catchy phrases and skillful advertising methods into making a purchase.

Although these types of free tools or game are fun to play around with. They rarely offer any useful or sound advice.

Then there is the more sinister free tools and advice. These freebies are normally very useful and they offer sound advice to help you with a problem. So you have to ask yourself what’s the catch? Large corporations are not in the business of giving money away.

After all, no organization can prosper by doling out there hard earned assets, or can they?

Well, I guess it is a matter of what they receive in return. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN for that matter regularly supply web surfers with free tools and advice. But just what are they receiving in return for these useful hand outs? Information, the amount of personal information which Google acquires about you in this manner is staggering.

Now it can be argued that these freebies are handed out to build customer loyalty, but let’s look at what information is being mined. 

• Free toolbars disclose the websites you visit, the lengths of your visits, how often you visit them, which links you click, the searches you make, and when you make them.
• With PPC advertising you divulge your address, and credit card information,
•  When you opt for free conversions tracking you are reporting all online sales and revenues.
• With desktop searches you are opening up every file on your computer for inspection, emails, word documents, everything.
• With free personal home pages you expose which subjects interest you, financial information such as the stocks you own, and your political views.
• Search histories inform Google of the plans you are making (Yes that search you made last month for motels at the beach let Google know when your vacation was.)
• With SMS your cell phone # is collected.
• Gmail reports your private messages, the contact list you write to, and any party which writes to you.
• And then finally to tie it all together, through the use of cookies, you are identified and all this information is tied together into a single account.

This is a fact finding operation which the CIA could be proud of and I’m certain most people would be reluctant to divulge all of this information to their best friend.    

Although life is a lot easier with all of these free tools, they are not truly free. Each person has to decide if the advantages out weigh the cost.

Personally I use many of these same free tools, but I do turn to 3^rd party tools as well to protect my personal privacy in this information age.

There are many steps which you can take to protect yourself as well.

1. Remember the old saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Don’t use one provider for all of your free services. I’m sure some services seem far superior to the closest competitor, but no one has a lock of the best at everything.
2. There are many 3^rd party conversion tracking solutions on the market today, two that I would recommend are Site Analytics from ENC Hosting Depot, or a free trial at Web-Stat.
3. Opt out of personalizing your free homepage, instead purchase an inexpensive hosting package and build what you need for private personal activities. The Internet is full of hosting companies like ENC Hosting Depot that offer free hosting with the purchase of a website design package and domain name.
4. And finally use different email sources from your other activities. There are many, many free email providers out there, and even the paid services are not expensive. Features do vary from one provider to the next, but you should find paid services provide the most services. Check out ENC Hosting Email Accounts.

Look, there is no way to get around cookies, they are a part of internet life, but you can protect your self from having your entire information end up in one basket.

ENC Hosting Depot, Biker web hosting and design