GWA returns

4 thoughts on “GWA returns”

1. 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.

   Reply

2. 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

   In order to speed up the display of pages generally, Google Web Accelerator may store copies of web pages, including prefetched pages that you did not visit, in the Google Web Accelerator cache on your machine. This is separate from your browser’s cache, which only identifies pages that you actually visited.

   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…

   11. How can I ensure that prefetching doesn’t increase the load on my servers?

   The most important way to control the load to your site due to prefetching is by setting effective caching rules. You can also configure your server to refuse prefetch requests by returning a 403 HTTP response code for requests which include an “x-moz: prefetch” 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.)

   Reply
3. Pingback: One Fine Jay » Privacy choices

4. Bonnie, unless you’re developing web apps it’s probably not too much of a concern.

   Reply