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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

How is prefetching taking the imperative away about what you see? You can click or not click. As for "tracking", the website could already ping as many servers as it wanted in the background, it's not like it can do anything new here.

I honestly don't see how the server gets any more "power" than it already did.

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If I go to foo.com, I generally expect that bar.com, baz.com, and qux.com are not also loading.

We already have enough issues with tracking pixels, but now we'll have to worry about multiple sites worth of trackers (which I'm sure google will do their absolute best to obfuscate behind the background network call and other sandboxing shenanigans)? No thanks.

But the Portal element won't exacerbate this issue vs what sites are already doing with iFrames and custom JS.

As you mention, foo.com could just as well have pixel trackers/scripts from bar.com, baz.com and qux.com. Nothing about portals makes it any more or less of an issue than it already is.

Its completely different because now baz.com gets control over foo.com in an invisible way just by virtue of "linking" with a portal.

(and you can be sure that anyone that dosen't allow google to "portal" their pages will be damnatio memoriae'd into oblivion on results pages)

baz.com doesn't take control over foo.com, and it's not invisible. You click on a link and the domain changes, it's as old as the internet itself. The only difference is that the new page will be embedded into the old one, instead of there being a clear cut transition.

Everyone seems to have just jumped into the 'Google is evil' bandwagon without even putting thought into it.

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