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How To Block the NSA From Your Friends List
Atticus Rex writes "The fact that our social networking services are so centralized is a big part of why they fall so easily to government surveillance. It only takes a handful of amoral Zuckerbergs to hand over hundreds of millions of people's data to PRISM. That's why this Slate article makes the case for a mass migration to decentralized, free software social networks, which are much more robust to spying and interference. On top of that, these systems respect your freedom as a software user (or developer), and they're less likely to pepper you with obnoxious advertisements."
On a related note, identi.ca is ditching their Twitter clone platform for pump.io which promises an experience closer to the Facebook news feed. Unfortunately, adoption seems slow since Facebook, Google, et al have an interest in preventing interoperability and it can be lonely on the distributed social network.
I read the article from theatlanticwire, and it did not even suggest that Google was forwarding anything. It stated that the NSA wants a "Google" for emails, not that Google is forwarding emails. It stated that NSA analysts were listening to phone sex from US troops overseas, not the Google was forwarding phone sex calls.
I did not read the first article about the Google employee who monitored chats of teenagers. However as I recall, he was fired and convicted.
Google might be involved in something sinister, but you have not highlighted anything.
So I've switched to Duck Duck go, because the EFF said it was ok (and I'll change again when a better non-US alternative comes along),
https://startpage.com/ is an anonymizing front-end for Google search, based in the Netherlands.
Details here: https://startpage.com/eng/prism-program-exposed.html
https://www.ixquick.com/ is an independent search engine, apparently by the same company in the Netherlands.
I started using startpage.com yesterday. So far so good, although I'm not used to seeing ads in my search results.