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Google Toolbar Tracks Your Browsing, Even When Off

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yeah-that-was-like-a-bug-or-something dept.

garg0yle writes "Google's Toolbar is supposed to allow the user to disable it. However, it was discovered by a researcher that it was still sending information even when disabled. A patch is now available, and Google claims this was just a bug, not a feature."

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. found a search engine with privacy: ixquick.com by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've switched to using

    It's a meta search engine that focusses on privacy by not logging your IP address and your searches. On the technical side, it's nearly as good as the big name search engine I used previously.

    Here's a plugin for GNU IceCat / IceWeasel / Firefox: Ixquick, or the https version (which I haven't tried, but I guess is the same to users).

    One hiccup: their ads system uses Google ads. Maybe they've implemented this in an anonymous way. I hope they have, but either way, at least with ixquick there a hope of privacy, unlike Google.

    --
    Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
  2. Re:Say it ain't so by WraithCube · · Score: 4, Informative

    While I do agree with most of what you said and 99.9% of toolbars are nothing but useless spyware, there are a few actual useful ones. Just because so many companies have built useless toolbars doesn't mean that there can't be a legitimately useful one amoung the clutter. The Web Developer toolbar is a favorite I usually have installed in firefox as it has a lot of useful tools/shortcuts. Then again I also usually even disable the bookmarks toolbar as the dropdown menu works quite well and i don't like giving up screen space.

    Also, a lot of those users with 4-6 toolbars usually manage to hide at least a few of them in the browser window without uninstalling them. Pulling up add-remove programs while removing something else and seeing a list of toolbars is alway an unwelcome surprise. Especially when they need to be convinced that they really don't need all 6 toolbars...