Of course they gather the information in order to sell it, I'm rather split here.
They don't use it to sell it. The only thing they use it *for sure*, is to measure the quality of their own results. If you click on the sixth result only, it might be that the first five are crap. They might use it also to improve the sponsored ads you are shown, but: 1) it's all done by automatic programs; 2) even if this helps them making money by providing a better service to the advertisers, it does not mean they sell your browsing history.
I might agree that if the info was stolen it would be very bad -- but OTOH, again, Google does *not* sell this info.
As to the way Javascript is injected, I concur with other people. Injecting an event into each "A" element using a loop takes fewer bytes than adding an HTML attribute like `onclick="return func(this)"' on every such element. Also, it is not the case here, but the same technique is also used by many scripts to provide so-called "graceful degradation" when the browser does not support Javascript. Using an older technique, whose disadvantages are now clear, in the name of transparency does not seem a great idea to me.
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Paranoia.
Of course they gather the information in order to sell it, I'm rather split here.
They don't use it to sell it. The only thing they use it *for sure*, is to measure the quality of their own results. If you click on the sixth result only, it might be that the first five are crap. They might use it also to improve the sponsored ads you are shown, but: 1) it's all done by automatic programs; 2) even if this helps them making money by providing a better service to the advertisers, it does not mean they sell your browsing history. I might agree that if the info was stolen it would be very bad -- but OTOH, again, Google does *not* sell this info. As to the way Javascript is injected, I concur with other people. Injecting an event into each "A" element using a loop takes fewer bytes than adding an HTML attribute like `onclick="return func(this)"' on every such element. Also, it is not the case here, but the same technique is also used by many scripts to provide so-called "graceful degradation" when the browser does not support Javascript. Using an older technique, whose disadvantages are now clear, in the name of transparency does not seem a great idea to me.
I love capitalism but I also love my privacy.
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