Comments on: Google Toolbar Awesomeness! http://blog.ryanparman.com/2006/06/20/google-toolbar-awesomeness/ Too much straw, not enough camel Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:33:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Bruce http://blog.ryanparman.com/2006/06/20/google-toolbar-awesomeness/comment-page-1/#comment-842 Bruce Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:37:08 +0000 http://blog.skyzyx.com/2006/06/20/google-toolbar-awesomeness/#comment-842 There is a catch. AFAIK when you install the Google Toolbar you have to enable PageRank in order to get the Enhanced Safe Browsing feature i.e. send the URLs and "information about the site content" of pages you visit to Google. I suspect this might put of a number of folk, who choose to disable the feature and thus fail to benefit from the Toolbars anti-phishing aspect. A shame that Google feel they have to make this conditional, but as it's free we can choose to use it or not. I'm not especially paranoid, but as a rule tend to "opt out" whenever I'm presented with such a choice. I guess I do this from a position of being confident (hopefully not overly so) that I won't get conned in this way. However, for the less "aware" folk the theoretical risk of a privacy breech is likely exceed by the real benefit of anti-phising protection. There is a catch. AFAIK when you install the Google Toolbar you have to enable PageRank in order to get the Enhanced Safe Browsing feature i.e. send the URLs and “information about the site content” of pages you visit to Google. I suspect this might put of a number of folk, who choose to disable the feature and thus fail to benefit from the Toolbars anti-phishing aspect. A shame that Google feel they have to make this conditional, but as it’s free we can choose to use it or not. I’m not especially paranoid, but as a rule tend to “opt out” whenever I’m presented with such a choice. I guess I do this from a position of being confident (hopefully not overly so) that I won’t get conned in this way. However, for the less “aware” folk the theoretical risk of a privacy breech is likely exceed by the real benefit of anti-phising protection.

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