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Blinkx and You Won't Miss It
WebfishUK writes "The Guardian is running this story about Blinkx a a kind of "search companion" which aims to bring internet searches in closer contact to what you are working on. Its total search approach (including email attachments, blogs and local files) seems to have some parallels to Googles Gmail engine. Could this be the first real technology threat for Google?"
Our Commitment To Your Privacy
Your privacy is important to us and blinkx makes every endeavor to ensure that all of our products protect your privacy.
Most importantly, BLINKX NEVER REMOVES, COPIES, FORWARDS, AMENDS OR OTHERWISE MOVES ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION from your COMPUTER (INCLUDING YOUR E-MAILS AND DOCUMENTS). YOUR INFORMATION STAYS ON YOUR COMPUTER.
blinkx works by comparing relevant information to deliver results, but never uses the original documents. The only actual hard information blinkx collects is your e-mail address when you decide to download the blinkx client.
We use the information you directly provide about yourself purely for this blinkx beta program. We do not share this information with outside parties and for no other commercial matters. When we receive email correspondence, we use return email addresses to reply with the information requested. Such addresses are not shared with outside parties.
Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please send us an email at feedback@blinkx.com
blinkx's Website
This policy only addresses our activities from our servers. Other websites (including those that we link to and third party websites or services that we co-brand) may have their own policies, which we do not control, and thus are not addressed by this policy.
This site recognizes the home server of visitors, but not their e-mail addresses. This site also uses "cookie" technology so that we can better understand how to improve the experience of visiting our website. Also, blinkx tracks the Internet address of the domains from which visitors are coming and uses this data for statistics and analysis on the levels of success of our web programs, but the name of the visitor remains anonymous.
The names and contact information of persons who request information about blinkx, its subsidiaries, its products and/or its services are added to our data base, so that they may be contacted in the future regarding blinkx's products, services or future opportunities. This contact may occur by e-mail, telephone or mail, as blinkx deems appropriate. We do not sell or rent any information about our visitors, and we have no plans to do so in the future.
We use industry-standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personally identifiable information, such as firewalls and secure socket layers where appropriate. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
You acknowledge that acceptance of this privacy policy, as updated from time to time at this location, is a condition to your use of our website and you agree to be bound by all of its terms and conditions.
If you have any questions regarding our policies please e-mail blinkx's webmaster at feedback@blinkx.com
blinkx home page
Unfortunately, Blinkx has an even worse track record than Google when it comes to protecting My Rights Online. I installed the beta version of their software onto my "dumping ground box," an old Athlon 700 running on a FIC AZ11 motherboard with Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2, Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock, and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 SFX edition.
During my usage of the software, I saw numerous pop-under banners being spawned by Internet Explorer, even when I was using Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock! It turns out that Blinkx actually creates a pseudo-proxy server and routes all traffic through it. Even historically secure browsers like Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock were foiled by it.
After one too many ads triggered from Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2 with Adblock and Flashblock, I re-imaged my dumping ground box. Please boycott Blinkx.
Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Watchdog and Privacy Advocate
Not affiliated with Seth Finkelstein, but still hates Michael Sims
The blinkx windows client automatically finds web pages, news articles and documents on your machine that are related to the content of your active window.
Or is it "The blinkx windows client automatically displays ads and questionable links based on spying what you do" ? Haha.
The BBC is also running a story on this.
The important point is *what happens to that data*. Spyware collates it and sends it to its master. Blinkx says that theres doesn't do this.
So its not spyware.
Mind the strap on that tinfoil hat.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
A good review of Blinkx with some discussion. I've also got a post about Blinkx that includes links to discussions of Linux version of something similar (Dashboard) and Microsoft's attempt (Implicit Query).
Well I'm pretty sure they're just referring to the back end of Google searching that powers Gmail. And speaking of my own use, it's one damn quick and easy search engine for email. I have like 500 emails in just one of my "labels" and I can search and fly through them with no problems. It's my "ebay" label, so I look for specific items or that "one thing" that I bought a while ago and forgot to leave feedback or something like that... but it's quick, efficient, and well... it's Google.
You do realize that the guy who runs google-watch hates Google for personal reasons, and has a major conflict of interest? Also, why do you sign your post "Seth Finklestein", then say at the bottom "Not affiliated with [SF]"?
"Seth Finklestein," a fictional character, is not affiliated with Seth Finkelstein.
How much clearer do you need me to make it?
The key is more than that Blinkx doesn't use it for spying... The USP is that it uses the local information as a context for the search (and potentially the ads as well). Google cannot know what you're working on, so it guesses from the keywords. Spyware doesn't care, it mostly only feeds you ads. Blinkx (claims to) use the information to improve the quality of your search results.
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I tried finding porn with this.. "free porn" nor "free porn pictures" gave any really free porn picture sites, galleries.