Google keeps hounding me to install their toolbar, but I am concerned about privacy issues and performance impairment. Am I being a nervous Nellie, or are my concerns valid?
Your concerns have legs:
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Um, this is standard referrer stats. Almost every single commercial website out there records the same stuff. It’s not like any of them track you down and confront you with what you searched in any kind of reaction to anything you do. What a lot of paranoid nonsense.
I’ve had the toolbar since it was first introduced. It’s fantastically convenient and useful.
There has been nothing identifiably coming from them in return.
I can’t even figure what that would look like. They wouldn’t spot my frequent trips to the Dope, since I don’t use Google to find it. They would instead spot the million different oddities that I then go to Google to learn more about based on the Dope. But that’s not going to give any commercial company a niche into which they could wedge advertising. It’ll just give them a headache trying to figure out what the correlation could be.
And you can easily turn off Pagerank and most of the other info collectors and lose little, since they aren’t the useful part of the toolbar.
I don’t think I’m being naive. It’s just that I can’t find the bit that’s supposed to harm me, and nobody has explained in real world terms where that harm would come from. In the meantime, I’m happy taking advantage of them.
Every non-commercial one too… here’s me checking that my xmas list is up-to-date in case any passing websurfers want to buy me something:
10.0.0.16 - merry [21/Dec/2007:21:24:04 -0700] "GET /~nanoda/xmas/ HTTP/1.1" 200 1705 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9b2) Gecko/2007121120 Firefox/3.0b2"
Despite being a large multinational, Google ostensibly at least tries to do the right thing (hence their motto, Don’t be evil), and are fairly clueful about technology. I trust them at least more than I’d trust the U.K. or U.S. governments with my data, at any rate.
OTOH while one point of data is interesting to have, many allow for datamining, which is a fun thing with which my searches for ‘“intake manifold gasket” malibu’, ‘dealerships near Leduc, AB’ are combined to figure out that I goof off at my AB workplace at around 2pm, have access to a PC during work hours, will shortly be spending 1000$ on a Chevy Malibu, am probably the same guy as this other user who made similar searches at 6:00pm that week from another IP, have no searches from 5:15 to 6:00pm daily so probably have a 1/2hr drive, etc. etc.
(Netflix recently had problems with this when research data which was supposedly ‘anonymous’ in fact, through datamining, contained enough information to identify individual user’s movie selections based on the rating they gave certain movies.)
OTOOH, none of this applies to the toolbar any more than just searching for ‘“nude chickens” -roosters’ at their website, and you get popup blocking and other stuff in to the bargain. I install it on all the PCs I use to help keep them protected should Firefox fail me; you can always do what Exapno Mapcase suggests if you’d like to avoid the ‘extra’ concerns at least.
I like it very much, especially the “auto fill” option that recognizes all the name/address/e-mail fields on web pages when you buy stuff on line, and allows you to fill it all in with one click. You can use it for credit card info, too.
But they can be amputated! Anonymizing Google’s Cookie
CMC +fnord!
As I see it, the Google toolbar (“GT”) was a fine addition to the browsers of 2003. Most of the functionality in the GT is now built into the browser, IE or FireFox or …
So why have the additional clutter of another toolbar?
It does use some system resources. When friends ask me to “clean up” their computer, I usually find that (most) people with Google Toolbar have dozens of other little things running in the background that are equally unnecessary taking up a lot of system resources.
I disagree that “most of the functionality in the GT is now built into the browser.”
First, and perhaps most importantly, is the readily acciessible google search box. It’s right there! I use it all the time, and couldn’t imagine living without it. Plus the search history very helpful.
The autofill is also another future I use and abuse. Oh, and the really cool “find word” feature by simply typing a word into said search box. Then there’s the universally accessible bookmarks. And how could I forget the pop-up blocker that catches everything IE’s and Firefox’s miss. And I’m sure there’s several other features I’ve forgotten to mention.
These two I’ve bolded, at least, ARE built into Firefox. I’m quite confused about what this “find word feature” might be that’s somehow different from ctrl-F (although Firefox will initiate a word search just by typing, if that’s what you want). “Universally accessible bookmarks,” if that means loading the toolbar onto someone else’s computer to get to your bookmarks, is just unconscionable.
How do I get to Firefox’s autofill? That’s the big one for me with the google tool bar, and I’d like to get rid of google’s just because it takes up screen space.
You don’t actually buy that horseshit, do you?
Infinite data retention?
Censorship to appease the Chinese?
A cookie on your computer that doesn’t expire til 2038?
Puh-leeze.
OK, I put it on. I notice that it tries to contact something on the intarweb when I don’t even have a browser open, and, as far as I know, I have the PageRank and other stuff turned off. So what’s it doing?
I’m thinking I’ll remove this thing.
First bold: For one, I don’t have to click “ctrl-f.” A very minor, but nice alternative. Secondly, it allows me to quickly seek words/terms in a document that I just performed a Google search on, saving me from retyping them in the “ctrl-f” box. Thirdly, you can type more then one word at a time (as many as you like, actually) and search for any of those independently – again, as opposed to the “ctrl-f” boxes of all or just one.
As for the bookmarks; I have both a computer at home and at work, so having universally accessible bookmarks is a godsend. Furthermore, virtually all of my friends use Google’s toolbar, and thus it’s no big deal to login on their comps.
Along the same lines of ‘The only way a webmaster can avoid having his site cached on Google is to put a “noarchive” meta in the header of every page on his site. […] The cache copy should be “opt-in” for webmasters, not “opt-out.”’
For one thing, this is factually wrong. Even if including a robot exclusion tag in the header of every page could somehow be considered an unreasonable burden, a single robots.txt file placed in the root directory could be used to exclude every page - or pages meeting certain conditions.
Beyond that, the “opt-out” convention was in place for years before Google existed - because it’s what was most practical in terms of developing the web. If a search engine had to have specific permission before it could index a single page, looking for something online would be a very disatisfying experience.
Unless Google is stopped, “we will be uploading our websites to Google’s servers [and it would be] the end of the web as we know it.”
Either the author is hitting the crack-pipe a bit too hard, or he’s really hoping that that the Yahoo stock he bought in 1996 is going to return to its former value (in which case he’s probably hitting the crack-pipe a bit too hard.)
That being said, I usually remove all Browser Helper Objects (including Google Toolbar) as part of my semi-annual housekeeping of friends’ mysteriously slow computers.
Nay.
Nay to ALL toolbars, and unneccessary software.
I can’t tell you the number of problems I’ve had on work computers, and on friends’ personal computers, that have been caused by all those damn toolbars. For example, not being able to access some site data - the pop-up blockers in the Google toolbar were conflicting with the Yahoo toolbar and the AskSearch toolbar. Couldn’t get ANYTHING to open. Removed all the toolbars, and poof, everything is working great.
If you don’t need it, don’t install it.
While that may be true for a lot of toolbars (in fact, I know it is), I haven’t had any (nor have I heard of any) problems with Google’s. Most toolbars are pretty malicious in how they get installed; Google’s seems rather benign, or at least, passive. I have not noticed it taking up any significant resources, even on older comps.
Is anything in this discussion relevant to the Google Desktop Search?
I love Google, but Google Desktop is a terrible resource-sucker.
Because of some ridiculous requirements of a legacy database application that we use (only for a few more months, thanks be to whatever) all the users at work have to run with full local administrator privileges.
Nearly all the complaints I’ve had from users of unusably slow workstations were resolved by removing their installations of Google Desktop. Several complaints of frequent OS crashes were also resolved this way. Eventually, I set a policy to block the subdomain dl.google.com, to prevent any downloads from Google and save myself some time. (We don’t even block game or porn sites, or time-sucking message boards like this one.)