Slashdot Mirror
Google's Software Principles
Nick writes "Google has just posted a new set of "Software Principles" at their site on how they feel about spyware and the like. It is interesting to see the company whose motto is "Do no evil" trying to get the rest of the internet world to follow, with proposed principles dealing with upfront installation, clear behavior, simple removal, and keeping good company. The question is, though - why would a company who makes spyware (whose very nature is to be secretive and hard to remove) want to follow Google's principles?"
That's what I love about the Google Deskbar should I ever decide to remove it. Making it disappear will be three clicks away.
http://www.google-watch.org/
"who's moto..."
/. and no one proofreads anything. my post is a case in point... here i come "Submit" button. no "preview" for you this time!
at first i wondered why i said "moto" in my head, instead of "motto", then i realized this is
now i just realized they said "who's" as well. doesn't this mean, "who is moto..."?
-i'm trolling, i'm trolling!
-keep trolling bob.
It really depends on what your idea of what spyware is. If you say, are beta testing a game (the new matrix for example), they will install software that will monitor your pc and report errors, pc information, and I would guess usage of the game etc. ISP's (like bellsouth) install spyware to help their customer service determin problems customers will have with their PC's. Im sure it does more then that though.
TruePunk | Games
When you install it, the toolbar gives you the option to install with or without "Advanced Features".
I'd certainly call the toolbar benign though. As you said, it tells you upfront what it's going to do when you enable the "Advanced Features".
If you want to get this info from the source instead of waiting for /. to post it you can always just visit the Google Blog.
is this BBC article:3 2475.stm
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/37
10 things the Google ethics committee could discuss
It's reported that Google, whose motto is Do No Evil, has an ethics committee to debate its impact on the world - something that will doubtless grow as the company floats. So what sort of things might it discuss?
1. From being a stripped-down search engine, Google is now a major player in advertising. Its webmail system, Gmail, runs on inserting adverts into people's e-mails. "How far should this go?" asks Danny Sullivan, editor of Internet Search Engine Watch. "Is it ethical to put ads on absolutely everything they do, almost like a supermarket floor?"
2. How much personal data should it collect? The company is going to understand more and more about what people are doing online, says Sullivan. But does that mean our information is fair game?
3. How much permission should it seek when it wants to "mine" public data for new facts, asks Danny O'Brien, co-editor of technology newsletter NTK. "Say Google designed a system that could scan photographs online, and tell you where they'd been taken. Would it be OK to collect all the snapshots uploaded on the net and index them, even when people could find out where you lived from your photo album? Is it OK to use public information to uncover facts that might have been private?"
4. How much should the company intervene in search results? The "ethics committee", which the company says is an informal discussion between interested managers and staff, debates changes to the algorithms which order search results. Spammers who try to skew the results are one target of adjustments, according to software engineer Eran Gabber. But any alteration will change the way people see the web, so should they be undertaken lightly?
5. Does it have a role in taste and decency? Sullivan says the company will remove search results for legal considerations - but what about other cases? What about links that showed, for instance, video of American Nick Berg being beheaded?
6. As a big company, Google has business relationships with lots of other companies - it's no longer a matter of just doing search. And business is business, so what if the company wanted to introduce "favoured status" within its results?
7. Google has become something of a standard bearer for ethics - who, for instance, would know if Yahoo had a similar committee, asks Sullivan. So should Google even be bothered about ethics now, or was that something for when it was a small affair?
8. For many people , Google is the internet. They use it as the front end and trust it to give them what they need - the Google deskbar makes this even more apparent. Does Google have any feeling for how it filters the net, do many of its users even know that they get a filtered view of cyberspace or how much filtering is going on?
9. Google is not a monopoly; there's plenty of competition. But should it strive to become one? What effect might that have?
10. Do they feel lucky? Sitting on billions of dollars, what is the best way to share their luck?
Sorry, wrong URL; but they do have a page specifically aimed at people who encounter popups and blame it on Google.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Here's a newsflash, it's easy to have a non-permanent cookie that secretly logs your information permanently. Google doesn't do so secretly, the cookie itself says it never expires. Secretly would be to apply a trivial transformation on short lived cookies so that a chain of cookies can be traced to a single user.
Another newsflash, Google divulges that it does not track your searches except in aggregate.
I think you misunderstand.
Google does data mining. It is most obviously visible in their search engine, but also applies equally to blogs, news, Word and PDF documents, email, catalogs, and social networking. They are in the business of cataloging, sorting, and hashing data.
GPL Deconstructed
*cough* Firefox Opera *cough*
... wow ...
I haven't seen a popup ad in
Required reading for internet skeptics
Doesn't google track EVERY search I do (via cookies) and doesn't the google toolbar report my browsing history back to them?