Google Web Accelerator is back.
37Signals
37 Signals again
So let’s recap. Google…
tracks all your TCP/IP packages
reads all your email
follows all your surfing
owns all your cookies
knows your postings to usenet from 1981
keeps the drafts for future blog postings
Oh, and btw, they’re an advertising company.
Easy solution: Don’t use it.
You don’t have a choice in using it. GWA comes knocking regardless and in this incarnation there was no way to identify and block it because they removed the header … hence the whole WTF?!
Someone took a stupid pill at Google on this.
I don’t understand GWA’s negative consequences, except that somehow Google will own all our data? How can that be? According to the GWA FAQ
It sounds like it only stores information on people’s computers, not in the Google database. It also sounds like the saved cookies are each individual GWA user’s cookies, not everybody-in-the-world’s cookies saved at Big Brother Google. Is the FAQ false?
And the GWA Webmaster FAQ still says something about the header…
This FAQ says GWA won’t fetch pages with Javascript or query parameters, so doesn’t that include our blog admin interface? How can they therefore access our blog draft posts?
About the e-mail: can Google read my e-mail if I don’t use Google Mail?
I have no idea why the TCP/IP packages are important, or what they do, so I don’t understand why tracking them all is bad.
In my defense, think of me as one of the unwashed masses, the people you want to alert to Google’s activities, but who don’t understand what you’re talking about!
(So use small words. Talk re-e-e-al slow.)
(Mark, remove the links to Google if it violates your policy here.)
Bonnie, unless you’re developing web apps it’s probably not too much of a concern.