Google Toolbar Continues Tracking Browsing Even When Users "Disable" the Toolbar via Its "X" Button
Ben Edelman, Harvard privacy researcher and guru found that Google toolbar is continuing to transmit users browsing information even it is disabled. Not only does it track a user’s Google searches, but it also phones home information about searches done in other search engines. Internet Explorer users who enabled Google Toolbar’s enhanced feature including Google PageRank and SideWiki are affected by this bug.
Ben Edelman conclusions about what Google should do:
When a user disables Google Toolbar, all Enhanced Features transmissions need to stop, immediately and without exception. This change must be deployed to all Google Toolbar users straightaway.
Google also needs to clean up the results of its nonconsensual data collection. In particular, Google has collected browsing data from users who specifically declined to allow such data to be collected.
But these records never should have been sent to Google in the first place. So Google should find a way to let concerned users request that Google fully and irreversibly delete their entire Toolbar histories.
The current Toolbar installation sequence suffers inconsistent statements of privacy consequences, with poor presentation of the full Toolbar Privacy Statement. Toolbar puts a button on users’ Taskbar unrequested. And as my videos show, once Google puts its code on a user’s computer, there’s nothing to stop Google from tracking users even after users specifically decline. I’ve run Google Toolbar for nearly a decade, but this week I uninstalled Google Toolbar from all my PCs. I encourage others to do the same.
Google said it will publish a download update today that will truly disable the monitoring when a user tries to do it. According to PCWorld
A Google spokesperson said Monday night.
Google confirmed the bug and said that only a tiny number of toolbar users are impacted. a fix for the toolbar would be pushed out Tuesday and the software would automatically update. Google declined to say how many toolbar users use IE8 and would only estimate the number of all its toolbar users as hundreds of millions.A fix that doesn’t require a browser restart will be available in an automatic update to Google Toolbar that we are pushing tomorrow.
