The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘toolbar’

A month ago, Jason Calacanis went on a rant about why everyone should boycott comScore. He felt they were using sketchy tactics to bully people into their pay-to-play model for measuring web analytics. He also noted that their free competitors like Quantcast, Google, and Compete would soon eat their lunch. Both Quantcast and Google (Analytics) offer direct counting of pageviews (but even these methods can be abused). But you may wonder how exactly Compete gets its numbers? It appears, that some sketchy tactics are (or at least were) employed, as well.

We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman:

As shown in the “host:” header of each of the preceding communications, transmissions flow to the consumerinput.com domain. Whois reports that this domain is registered to Boston, MA traffic-monitoring service Compete, Inc. Compete’s site promises clients access to “detailed behavioral data,” and Compete says more than 2 million U.S. Internet users “have given [Compete] permission to analyze the web pages they visit.”

He continues:

Upromise’s installation sequence does not obtain users’ permission for this detailed and intrusive tracking. Quite the contrary: Numerous Upromise screens discuss privacy, and they all fail to mention the detailed information Upromise actually transmits.

The Upromise toolbar installation page touts the toolbar’s purported benefits at length, but mentions no privacy implications whatsoever.

If a user clicks the prominent button to begin the toolbar installation, the next screen presents a 1,354-word license agreement that fills 22 on-screen pages and offers no mechanism to enlarge, maximize, print, save, or search the lengthy text. But even if a user did read the license, the user would receive no notice of detailed tracking. Meanwhile, the lower on-screen box describes a “Personalized Offers” feature, which is labeled as causing “information about [a user's] online activity [to be] collected and used to provide college savings opportunities” But that screen nowhere admits collecting users’ email addresses or credit card numbers. Nor would a user rightly expect that “information about … online activity” means a full log of every search and every page-view across the entire web.

Shortly after Edelman’s post (and a follow-up PCMag.com post), Upromise changed their privacy policy to alert their users that this data is being sent out. But the company declined to state how long the issue had been going on.

Privacy implications aside, it’s interesting that this is one of the ways Compete was gathering data. And it would be good to know where else they get it from. On their site, they only vaguely note that they have “developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.” They also claim to have over two million members — but apparently, at least some of them (such as the Upromise toolbar users), don’t know they’re members.

I’ve sent a message to Compete asking them what other means (other toolbars, etc) they use to gather their data. In light of this Upromise fiasco, it seems wise that they should disclose that kind of information. I’ll update if and when I hear back.

On Tuesday we posted an internal MySpace product document presenting detailed recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform. Included in that post was an embed of the document hosted on Scribd. MySpace has chosen to send a DMCA notice to Scribd to have that document removed, and Scribd complied. MySpace didn’t copy us on the notice, or send any other notice to us about the content.

So we’re putting it on our own servers. You can download it in all its glory here.

If you want to fight this, MySpace, you have to come through our lawyers. Now I’m all riled up.

Ever since I upgraded my beloved Chrome browser to version 5 on my (Windows) computer, I’ve been wanting to get something off my chest about a new feature that was baked into it, one that annoys me to no end.

With the update to the most recent version of the program came an integration with Google Translate, a feature that makes a custom toolbar appear under the bookmarks bar whenever I visit a Web page that contains text in a language other than English. Basically, Google Chrome supposes that I don’t understand any other languages besides English by default and enables me to translate Web pages in say, Spanish or Dutch, with one click.

Thanks for the help, Google, but how about you let me turn that damn toolbar off?

You see, unlike, the Google Translate extension for Chrome, this particular feature found its way to my most-used browser without asking for permission and no desire to leave any time soon. And while I’m sure a lot of people will think it’s a useful add-on, I just want to get rid of this intrusive little bugger as quickly as possible.

Right now, the toolbar asks me to confirm or decline if I would like to translate Web pages. When I click ‘Nope’, the toolbar disappears, only to reappear every time I jump to another Web page on the same website. Ah, but let’s see, there’s an Options button on the right hand side of the toolbar (which you can see on the larger image that you can view when you click through on the image embedded above).

There are the options:

- Never translate Spanish
- Never translate this site
- About Google Translate

The third option leads to a Chrome Help page with nothing on it, and the actual settings presented are insufficient: I don’t want to have to indicate for every language on the planet that I never want to see the toolbar pop up again, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna do it for all the non-English Web pages on the Internet I visit from this point forward.

What’s missing is an option to disable the toolbar completely, and I can only hope the next stable release of Chrome provides users like myself with a choice. Chrome’s a great, fast, free browser, but it’s those little things that can drive me insane. And I do realize this is a developer version, so consider this constructive feedback from an otherwise very happy user.

End rant.

It’s as though Google doesn’t want you to use its new Chrome browser. If you try to install the Google Toolbar on Chrome, it practically suggests that you switch browsers. Chrome users are greeted with this message:

We’re sorry, but Google Toolbar 5 is only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox

Of course, Chrome is like a giant Google Toolbar that takes up the whole screen, so you don’t really need it. (The Toolbar offers Google search, bookmarks, search suggestions, Web history, and shortcuts to Google apps). But still that’s not the message Google wants to be sending to curious Chrome users.

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Earlier today, Nokia announced that it was launching Nokia Money, a new payment service powered by Obopay that allows users to send money to friends, merchants, and service companies simply by using their phone numbers. The service will be showcased in early September at the Nokia World conference, with plans to roll it out to select markets in 2010.

As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree. From the release:

“Rural consumers will particularly benefit from money transfers and, for urban consumers used to online services, we are enabling services such as payment of utility bills, purchase of train and movie tickets, top-ups, all through their mobile phones. Nokia Money is simple to use, secure and available across different operator networks and on virtually any mobile phone. This means millions of new consumers will soon be able to manage all their financial needs from their mobile phone”

Nokia will hardly be the only player in these emerging markets — other competitors include mChek and Paymate. We’ve also seen some alternative payment models like Aryty, which allows users in the US to remotely charge up the mobile accounts of family and friends in India and the Philippines.

Stateside, the technology will also likely see some success, though it will be competing with a variety of other payment methods, and US users haven’t been nearly as quick at adopting mobile payments as customers in other regions have been. Nokia’s release notes that while the technology will be based on Obopay, it will be making a number of improvements and will allow the payment service to interoperate with competing services.

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Yahoo released a new browser toolbar today for IE and Firefox which lets you add icons for your favorite Yahoo apps and Websites. When you click on the icons, you get a drop-down preview of your favorite sites, mail, stock quotes, or news feeds without having to go to those sites directly. It is only real-time in that you can check for the latest updates without going to those sites. From the Yahoo blog.

Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you’re on.

The toolbar is completely customizable, so you add from a large Websites or apps you want to keep handy. But if it really wants to be real-time, Yahoo needs to make it easier for you to preview your personal activity stream across sites. Other add-ons such as Friendbar try the streaming ticker approach, which I find too distracting. But perhaps a drop-down stream preview or built-in notifications when new items appear in your stream (whether that is Twitter, Facebook, or something else) would be preferable.

Yahoo also made search faster from the toolbar, incorporating some search assist technology from its Inquisitor acquisition. It suggests refined queries as you begin typing and sites that you’ve clicked on in the past. (The Inquisitor app for the iPhone is also worth checking out).

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Notify.me, a service that delivers instant notifications on your favorite topics the way you would like to receive them (i.e. by SMS, e-mail, IM, desktop app or on the web), is adding a new feature next week that should make its die-hard users primarily very happy. The rest of the world will probably care much less.

It’s not that Notify.me at its core isn’t useful, albeit not very unique. For a lot of people, instant updates for anything that has an RSS feed (not only blogs or news sites, but also classifieds listings, for example) with the ability to filter incoming by keyword makes sense, particularly if they need a lot of control over how the updates get delivered based on what the source is. Yet I can’t help thinking that the latest feature the startup is releasing, a browser toolbar, has ‘overkill’ written all over.

What the toolbar does is bring Notify.me’s core functionalities to a persistent toolbar whenever you’re browsing the web. Users can set delivery methods and filter rules directly from the toolbar, and the company has also integrated Ping.fm (which it recently partnered with) and AddThis directly to the toolbar so you can easily share and bookmark websites you’re visiting on a wide variety of social networking services.

Personally, I wouldn’t use this service as I would find it incredibly annoying to constantly have a toolbar on my screen that’s not only persistent but also pings me with new notifications every so often. There’s an abundance of new toolbars launching nowadays, and somehow I don’t think that’s what the next web is all about (quite the contrary, actually). I would love to get your thoughts on this as well.

Similar services include Yotify and Notifixious.

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