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Opera to Start Phoning Home?
An anonymous reader writes "Near the end of a story about Opera's determination to stay in the game: 'Earlier this week, Opera announced an addition that will keep it in step with its rivals. Johan Borg, a developer working on the browser, said Tuesday in a blog that the next edition, Opera 9.1, will include beefed up anti-phishing and anti-fraud features. Rather than simply indicate that a site is secure with a notation in the address bar, Opera 9.1 will also query Opera-owned servers for information on any site visited. Those that Opera has identifies as fraudulent will be automatically blocked by the browser.'"
As long as I can turn it off, or turn it off for certain types of sites, that's fine. I'm not sure what this does for me that, say, Netcraft Toolbar doesn't. Is the data stream encrypted back to Opera? Can others intercept that and use it as a spam-target tool somehow? All questions I'd want answered before I'd use it.
Well, anyone could easily say the traffic isn't being logged and the server is just processing requests, which could easily be true. But how easy would it be to log that data and no one be the wiser?
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Another thing mentioned in the blog posting is this: --- The requests go over HTTP, but the replies will be signed by the server to make sure they are genuine. We prefer to send information between the browser and ourselves in plain text, so our users can inspect the data we send "home". --- So it's not like they're sending everything back to opera without telling you what it is.
It might be better if Opera simply maintained an client-side blacklist of fradulent sites/domains, which was updated in the background while the browser is running. That way they wouldn't have to track your browsing at all. If these fraudlent sites are verified by hand by people at Opera, there could only number in the tens of thousands.