Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

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  > I know you work for Google, so you must have the
  > technical competency to see the nuance; can you say with
  > a straight face that this was "copying"?

My personal belief is that it was copying, yes. There is no other legitimate reason to phone home which results a user clicked on in a competing search engine.

  > Is it any different from the tracking Google of Facebook
  > do across the web via their various products?

When I go to a site with Analytics on it, the site operator chose to put that code on their page and they're the ones using the resulting data. In my opinion, tracking scripts are morally no different from analyzing server logs.

In contrast, the toolbar in question appears to record the user's behavior across the entire web, then send it back to the toolbar's developer. The purpose appears to be distributed scraping of search results across various search engines (it's not just Google being copied from, here).

If Chrome reported which links people clicked on to Google, there would be an uproar (and rightly so). In terms of malicious behavior, tracking a user's clicks on web sites and sending them to a third party is only one step above a keylogger.

> My personal belief is that it was copying, yes. There is no other legitimate reason to phone home which results a user clicked on in a competing search engine.

It phones home with all the links a user clicks, not just on a competing search engine. The legitimate reason is that users have chosen to do so in order to "enhance their surfing experience". The reason may be BS but users are given an option. Suggested Sites is explicitly opt-in and IIRC (can't verify, on a Mac), the toolbar installer defaults the checkboxes to opt-in but presents a screen to opt-out during installation. So at least users are given a choice. Websites that use Google Analytics and similar products don't even do that. (Except if you're in the UK and have to obey the "cookie" law.)

I would argue that a website operator has less of a right to say what happens to the data about users' behavior than the users themselves. So, in my opinion it's fair game for Bing to use that data.

You could argue users are technically clueless and don't know what they're opting in to, but again, even giving them an option is more than what website operators and Google (and Facebook and Bing itself) does all over the Internet.

>If Chrome reported which links people clicked on to Google, there would be an uproar (and rightly so). In terms of malicious behavior, tracking a user's clicks on web sites and sending them to a third party is only one step above a keylogger.

Google itself tracks which of the links on its search results users click, so that they can use it in their search rankings. And, of course, Google also tracks users across the entire web so that targeted ads can follow users across sites. Just because it's the web page itself that does the tracking rather than the browser does not mean you are not tracking them. Why is one "just a step above malicious" and the other perfectly alright even when the end result is exactly the same?

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