JaBbA's Hut

People sometimes ask me why I bother with Mozilla Firefox. "I jut downloaded the Google toolbar, and it does all the things Firefox does. Why bother?".

Well, there's a difference between Open Source (as in Firefox) and Free (As in Google).


Don't misunderstand me. I like Google, I like the company, and I'm looking to invest in them. But they're a company. As such, they are looking to make a profit. So when they put effort into something, there's a reason for it. In the case of the Google toolbar, we may have just found the reason.

From a letter on John Battelle's site:

One day he had a firewall issue when trying to retrieve a file,
and the person who was hosting it offered to put it on a "private" (i.e.,
unlinked) page for him to grab over HTTP. He accepted, downloaded the
document, and promptly forgot about it - until this document, which had
extremely personal information on it (personal to the person hosting it,
not the person retrieving it) showed up on Google a short time later. You
see, the toolbar had seen him go to a web page that Google did not have,
and so they indexed it right away.

Without meaning to, the user of the toolbar had helped Google to
violate the privacy of the person who went out of his way to keep this
document private. This person knew nothing of the toolbar, and had no
agreement with Google, yet he became the unwilling participant in Google's
web cache.

Remember, when you are installing software, think to yourself "Why is this software being made available to me? What is the real cost? Who is creating it". You'll avoid some nasty surprises with just a little thinking.