Right now there is quite some activity on various blogs about this interesting idea, a web accelerator, from google, not to mention unpleasant side effects.
There are two statements in the Privacy Policy which to my mind do ring alarm bells, and that you should be made well aware of:
“It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.”
.. and:
“To enhance Google Web Accelerator’s performance, Google temporarily caches cookies from third party sites that are used in your Web requests.”
While I don’t use the google cache (my ISP has one already), it does appear to speed up browsing. This of course is done by loading links in the background, giving the impression of faster loading times (it still takes as long as normal), there is no real magic here, the only difference is that loading time occurs in the background due to some pretty spiffy pre-emptive caching rules.
Personally? I am not keen to view the intarweb through google’s eyes. They get to log what I do, where I go and how long I do so. Since google is in the business of selling search technology as well as targeted advertising, how smart is it, honestly, to provide them with the online habits of millions of people?
The backlash has been swift - I have yet to see any real comment from google stating all is well, that the statistics gained from millions of internet users won’t be sold, leased or used in targeted advertising, yet privacy issues are becoming more apparent nearly every day.
Some have go so far as to block and suggest how to block the smart cache IP address ranges.
If you use the google web accelerator the first thing you should consider doing is excluding anything that requires account information without HTTPS, good examples are forums, private news groups and if you use wordpress, or indeed any other blog software the login page. The second thing would be to ask yourself is saving a few minutes a day really worth someone being able to use your forum account, weblog, or indeed any other not HTTPS ’secured’ web interface?
I prefer to see the internet as it is, not google’s version vision.
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of No Tags.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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May 7th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Even just having my ISP cache things is annoying at times! But what I want to know is how google’s system differs from the other programs out there that speed up your browsing.
My ISP, TelkomSA, offers some application to do just what google does. Actually a number of South African ISP’s offer it. Wonder if there are any privacy issues and stale sites that get thrown back at the user when they make use of that software.
So they don’t cache SSL sites but what happens if your work Outlook email access was over a non secured link and someone else could view your info?
May 7th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
It spiders the page your viewing and proceeds to cache linked content. The difference between a proxy server - and a content cache like googles, is the proxy server only caches what you’ve viewing - it doesn’t pre-load links and data in the background. The applications that one can use that speed things up, do the same thing - the only difference is that occurs locally on your pc, not on some centralised cache farm.
Google isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart. The goal will be to use it to track peoples online habits.. There is zero profit in them doing this ‘for the ell of it’.
Having access to statistics and data on several million ‘download, shopping and browsing’ habits is going to be worth a mint to any company who craves such data..