Security Focus on Google AutoLink

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I'd say the controversy over AutoLink is starting to gain a bit more momentum, when a site like SecurityFocus starts picking up on the problems with Autolink, the investor sites can't be far behind...

Even worse, there's no way for site authors to opt out! At least Microsoft indicated that it would respect an opt-out META tag that site creators could insert into their web pages (of course, it would have been far better if it had instead offered an opt-IN META tag, but such is life with Microsoft). Google offers nothing: no opt-in, no opt-out, nothing. As a result, code has already appeared that web site developers can use to block Google's AutoLink (and it works with JavaScript, ASP, PHP, and Perl!).
I work hard in these columns to pick interesting, informative links that back up my statements, provide detail where I must be terse, or entertain with a sarcastic comment on my text. It's as much part of my writing as the words I use. In fact, in 2005, I would go so far as to say that for any writer using the web as a platform, links are in fact part of his or her writing. When Google changes the links on this web page, Google changes my writing, without any input from me, and for commercial gain that certainly doesn't benefit me, or SecurityFocus, the publisher of my columns. If I was an online bookstore, the fact that my ISBNs turned into links to a competitor like Amazon would make my blood boil. In essence, Google - and selected partner companies - benefit commercially from my work, and I see nothing for it. Alternately, on my web site, I provide a lot of stuff under a Creative Commons license, but AutoLink ignores it and commercializes things I do not wish commercialized.
On top of those objections, let's add one that should particularly resonate with SecurityFocus readers: privacy. Google's cookie doesn't expire until 2038; add onto that the data that the Google toolbar can gather about users, and you have a data mining tool second to none. This makes me very, very nervous. "Don't be evil"? How about "Don't be evil ... mostly. Kinda. Pretty much. Maybe."?

It's an interesting read for all of the information and links on using Google to find vulnerabilities, but the link to the Autolink Killing Code caught my eye and what Scott Granneman has to say in that second paragraph is bang on the money.
Hello, anyone home at the 'plex?