As much as I am quite concerned about Google's practices in the privacy and data ownership areas (remember when they wanted to 'own' anything that you looked at using their browser?), there is a chance that this may be more benign than it looks.
Just because it displayed a list of objects to *you* that does not necessarily mean that the program does (or can) send the same information back to Google. Have you checked the network traffic to see if any of this information has been transmitted up the network? I would be interested to know what mechanism that they are using to display this list. Even if it isn't sending data back to Google *now*, it certainly would bother me if it used a mechanism that *could* send that data in the future. To Google, or anyone else! While I do use GoogleEarth (and Google Maps on my phone), I avoid other Google applications just because of my privacy concerns. Even with these two apps, it's possible that I've gone too far... Of course, they're not the only elephant in the room when it comes to privacy concerns! (M$oft 'Genuine Advantage' anyone?:-) - Richard Edward Ned Harvey wrote: >> Not so scary if you're installed the application yourself, and you >> trust >> them... Do you trust google? :) >> > > It's certainly getting to be less and less. > > Since they're detecting things like Adobe, Picasa, Google Earth, Skype, > RealPlayer, Google Desktop ... > Some of which, I know, have browser plugins (which I habitually disable) ... > and some of which have no browser plugins... > > Since they're detecting some things that have no browser plugin, it stands > to reason, they're making a call to a client-side application that I must > have installed with some previous installer (such as Chrome, Picasa, or > Google Earth.) It just doesn't feel right, makes my skin crawl to know > they're habitually and without asking, checking to see what I've got in my > computer. They could look for anything they want, get any information they > want, out of me, with or without letting me know they got it. > > Well ... Maybe they did ask, in one of the 40-page long EULA's that I > accepted in some previous application install. > > It's not much of a stretch to start calling this spyware. > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lopsa.org > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
