BoydCreative

Google have just announced the release of 2 new Firefox entensions - Blogger Web Comments and Google Safe Browsing.

Blogger Web Comments is an extension designed to make it easy for users of Blogger to comment on a blog and see what other bloggers are saying about a post. (Darren doesn’t like it anyway.)

“Blogger Web Comments for Firefox is an extension that makes it easy to see what bloggers are saying about a page you’re viewing in Firefox and even make your own blog post about it, all without leaving the page you’re on.”

Google Safe Browsing is currently in beta (really? how surprising!) and is supposed to alert you to websites phishing for data. I thought that Firefox was alreay pretty advanced in this respect, but seemingly not. From Google:

“Google Safe Browsing is an extension to Firefox that alerts you if a web page that you visit appears to be asking for your personal or financial information under false pretences. This type of attack, known as phishing or spoofing, is becoming more sophisticated, widespread and dangerous. That’s why it’s important to browse safely with Google Safe Browsing. By combining advanced algorithms with reports about misleading pages from a number of sources, Safe Browsing is often able to automatically warn you when you encounter a page that’s trying to trick you into disclosing personal information.”

I am not in any way involved with Blogger, but I think that the Safe Browsing extension may be worthy of using. But wait, what’s this? Privacy concerns with Google software?

“If you enable Enhanced Protection, the Google Safe Browsing Extension will provide more up-to date protection by sending the URLs of sites that you visit and limited information about the site content to Google for evaluation.”

and …

“When enabled, the URL of the site that you’re visiting will be sent to Google for evaluation. In addition, a very condensed version of the page’s content is sent to compare similarities between authentic and forged pages. For example, if the condensed ‘fingerprint’ of the page you are visiting matches the ‘fingerprint’ of a popular bank’s site but the page’s URL is different, that’s a good sign that the page you are on is designed to mislead users.

If you disable Enhanced Protection, no information about the pages you visit will be sent to Google unless you visit a page Google Safe Browsing identifies as potentially unsafe. In this case, we will only send the action you choose to take to help refine our anti-phishing algorithms. Please note that enabling Enhanced Protection gives the Google Safe Browsing extension access to the most up-to-date fraud information about each page you visit.”

So Google are comparing and contrasting what sites you visit with those in it’s cache. I suppose it’s one way of spotting a rogue trying to fool you into updating your bank records. But when combined with Web Accelerator, the Google Toolbar and Google Analytics, you’ve got to wonder just how much they have you. If you are happy with what you are doing being stored in a database then go ahead. I think I’ll just take my chances though.