Google itself has started doing a similar thing if you use its toolbar for IE. Google's toolbar will phone home to google so that it can report the "Page rank" value of every website you visit. (This is the value that Google generates to determine how important a given web page is, based on the number of links to it and some manual tweaking.)
What's different about this, however, is that the toolbar download is interrupted by a big warning screen telling the user that this potential privacy breaching feature is going to be enabled, and giving them a simple one-click way to make sure it isn't. Also, Google's snooping is necessary to provide this additional feature. Users can evaluate how important that feature is to them vs. how important their privacy is. (This list spends a lot of time criticizing companies for having bad privacy policies. I'd ike to hold up this as an example of things done better.) Caveat: I haven't put a sniffer on my net yet to see if the toolbar really does stop phoning home when you turn off the page rank option. -MW- On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Bill Scannell wrote: > AOL Time Warner's [NTSE:AOL] Netscape unit is snooping on searches performed > by users of its latest Navigator browser at Google and other search sites. > > According to a network traffic analysis performed by Newsbytes, Netscape is > capturing Navigator 6 users' search terms, along with their Internet > protocol (IP) address, the date Navigator was installed and a unique > identification number. > > http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175035.html > > > 777 --- 777 777 --- 777 > "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety > deserve neither liberty nor safety." > - Benjamin Franklin
