Google Toolbar Tracks Your Browsing, Even When Off 118
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."
found a search engine with privacy: ixquick.com (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 [mozilla.org], or the https version [mozilla.org] (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.
Re:Oops (Score:4, Informative)
Rephrasing from FTFA:
Google toolbar allowed two "modes" for disable. Users could either disable it permanently or for one specific window. In the latter case, for some versions of the toolbar it didn't disable. Browser restart or opening new windows after activating that mode did in fact disable the toolbar.
Now, even though it doesn't make sense for the "disable this window" to work after a browser restart, it does make it plausible that it was a bug.
Googlebar Lite (Score:1, Informative)
If you have Firefox, use Googlebar Lite [mozilla.org] instead. It has all the same goodies without the corporasity.
Re:Say it ain't so (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 [mozilla.org] 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...
I'm just going to leave this here (Score:1, Informative)
Tor Browser Bundle [torproject.org]
Re:found a search engine with privacy: ixquick.com (Score:1, Informative)