Google's New Misstep

I'm still a fan of Google, but the company has some blind spots. On privacy, for example, Google folks say all the right things, but "Trust us" is not enough for me.

The latest uproar -- a justified one, I believe -- is over the new "Accelerator" product. As CNet reports, there are issues galore on this.

As if the privacy concerns weren't enough, there are suggestions that the tool also can cause trouble with Web-based applications.

Perhaps Google needs to think a little longer and harder before unleashing its latest ideas on the Web.

And perhaps the rest of us need to be much more cautious about giving our trust to the company. Flush your Google cookies often, folks. Or anonymize them.

Comments

[Danny Nyquist]

What's the big fuss about Google's Accelerator, though? Unlike with most spyware, you won't be tricked into installing it - you know exactly what you're getting. The bugs that it still seems to suffer from are a problem, yes, but as far as privacy is concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if it's similar to GMail - when it was announced, everyone cried bloody murder about your emails being parsed to display relevant (hopefully) advertising, but nowadays, noone cares anymore. And that's good, too - after all, nobody's FORCED to use it, and if someone decides that it's worth it, then that's their choice. Isn't it?

[Jim M]

It does depend on how much you know about computers and the web. A lot of people don't know what this sort of thing does and how it works, and it's unreasonable to expect them to know how, just as it's unreasonable to expect them to know how an ATM or a washing machine works. They know how to use them and expect that their use is being set up correctly by the experts who designed them.

The business of web applications shows definitively that Google didn't test this thing out well at all, which is not something you want demonstrated, is it? Google has depended on good will and trust, and putting out something that wasn't tested to find out if it would destroy data by indiscriminately clicking on every button doesn't help that rep at all.

[joann]

Does Yahoo or MSN do the same thing, that is, use a GUID to track users?

thx

[Luca]

Google web accelerator is the most advanced step in google's idea of the web. With the search engine you searched google's representation of the web instead of the real web... now you directly browse google's web. Maybe that's not a privacy issue is something related to the way we get knowledge.