Google's browser labelled a 'digital Trojan horse'

Perhaps the biggest threat to Google's increasing dominance of internet search and advertising is the rising fear, justified or not, that Google's broadening reach is giving it unchecked power. This scrutiny goes deeper than the skeptical eye that lawmakers and the US Justice Department have given to Google's proposed ad partnership with Yahoo. Many objections to that deal are financial, and surround whether Google and Yahoo could unfairly drive up online ad prices. A bigger long-term concern for Google could be criticisms over something less tangible - privacy. Increasingly, as Google burrows deeper into everyday computing, its product announcements are prompting questions about its ability to gather more potentially sensitive personal information from users.

Source:
www.watoday.com.au...

This is certainly a worry.

Full story at source.

Wondering what the computer experts think.

Cheers

Mungo

im no expert, i woudl say the new browser is ok, just changed the actual browser into the search engine. I would say its as private as any other google search tbh.

internet privacy is the responcibility of teh user, not the people who make teh sites or programs... Anyone can set up a site and ask for ANY bit of information, their no laws on asking people, their are just laws on sharing the data out, what im getting at is that if people dont want their personal info held on a server they shouldnt give the server /website the information in the first place,.

and lets not even start on facebook! thats a whole different can of worms!

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Picasso, Flickr....

Who needs chipping when we offer to do the tracking ourselves?

The only ones violating our privacy is ourselves.

I know at first the terms and conditions of the browser meant anything posted belonged to google.... but they changed that.

as for the browser, I've had it once and removed it. I didn't like it at all. People get used to a certain type of interface such as ie and firefox share the same basic interface.

but I wouldn't trust a search engine that provides users software, look at the google toolbar it installs services that run on your PC and do god knows what in the background. Indexing files etc no doubt. It would be very easy to convert that into a massive search engine of all users files. Build a browser around that and you've suddenly got the most powerful search engine.

reply to post by cogburn


- so, ok, let's use the internet without using the internet!

I would agree with the article. When I last used google chrome regularly all of my passwords and all of my saved data for websites I used were deleted. I don't believe what I did was a user-initiated action... because I had a problem with another program of mine at the time... but maybe that was just a coincidence. I didn't use CCleaner to clear my cookies out of my computer so I don't know how that happened if google chrome wasn't the cause of it. So yeah google chrome sucks when it comes to security but I don't think that means it's a trojan hoarse.