A year or so ago, I removed Amazon.com’s links on my site because of growing concern of their obvious attempts to monopolize the publishing sphere, both off- and online. I will admit that I still do purchase from the site; the current state of the economy means lots of penny-pinching where we can do it, regardless of the source. Heck, I might start going to Wal-Mart again. (But probably not.)

Now I’m removing Google AdSense from my blog pages. An email sent to all Google AdSense partners yesterday announced that the search engine giant will now begin to track the sites that blog readers visit so that the ads will be tailored to their “interests,” e.g., “sports enthusiast.” (That’s an example Google mentioned in the email.) The letter informed us that we must now change our privacy policies to reflect these new changes.

Welllllll. No. I have one privacy policy on all my blogs: Any information you send via this blog (e.g., your email address if you choose to subscribe via email) is used solely for the purpose for which you gave that info, and nothing more. I don’t use the info to send anything other than updates to this blog; if you send me a direct email, I use that address only to respond to you personally, not to bombard you with even a single page of spam. And I certainly don’t want any visitors to this blog to have to worry about any tracking service that follows them around the Internet.

So I’ve removed all Google AdSense ads from this blog and will do the same for the others that I maintain. Eventually I want to create advertiser space for companies/individuals to buy directly, but for now, whatever advertising is on this page is from non-Google networks with which I’m affiliated but which don’t [yet?] use tracking services.