Is Google the Spyware King of the Net?
- By: promediacorp [privmsg - website] On 25th Jan 2006 In
Today's Official Google Blog post struck me as quite ironic.
The title: "Putting a stop to spyware".
Google is sponsoring an effort to combat the "spyware" industry (or at least the portions of the industry outside of Google).
Does that mean I should uninstall my Google Toolbar? Should I delete Google Earth & Desktop Search? After all - are these applications "not" spyware?
It seems to me that with all their "free" privacy infringing applications, they are most likely the king of the spyware industry. Although their applications are relatively benign, they are monitoring your Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes.
Brett Tabke referred to the announcement of Google's recent anti spyware partnership with Sun by saying:
Sounds like the wolves taking care of the sheep.
Google's pet project StopBadware.org is accepting horror stories.
- Google Desktop killing computer speed.
- Google Autolink destroying published content.
- The ever shifty Google Browser Accelerator prefetching to hog bandwidth.
I am sure we missed a few as well.
Although their applications
How is something like Google Earth monitor my web browsing activity? Or are you saying that Google knows which country and which city have I been visiting with their mapping/satelite software?
Then you are saying that *everything transmitted over network* has a potential to become a spyware, because I am revealing information about myself over an untrusted channel. Even posting on Threadwatch.org has potential to have my privacy invaded -- you guys know where I came from, which other pages I've been to, what OS/browser/screen resolution I have, etc.
On the other hand, if Google is interested in monitoring your web browsing activity, all they need to do is to send an unique cookie along with their AdSense ads (I'm pretty sure they already do). Since AdSense ads are pretty much everywhere now, they can effectively track you have you been today, and it works on all Javascript-enabled browsers. No local installation of "Google spyware" is needed.