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> I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these social n
by abraham 15y ago
> I thought the advantage of having the +1 button in the browser is that you can then block all of those damn sharing widgets on websites so that these social networks don't know every website you visit because of the beacons.
The advantage of of having the +1 button in the browser is so you can +1/share sites that don't include the +1 button themselves.
> But the +1 button extension will send every page you visit back to Google, with your unique user id as part of the information sent back
There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique id with. A button that doesn't tell you if you have +1'd something isn't very useful and you will continually be +1'ing pages over and over again.
> This is just insane. There is absolutely no reason for this information to be sent back, and it is completely identifiable and all in plain text. The installer says that it can access all your website data, not that it does access it and sends it back to Google.
If an extension has permissions to access "your data on all websites" there is no way to prevent it from also sending your data to all websites. HTTP is request and response and not very useful with only one or the other.
The Chrome Web Store says
"THIS ISN’T THE USUAL YADA YADA!
In addition to the practices described in the Google +1 Button Privacy Policy, by installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information."
The install page linked to from the blog post should be more clear about what the +1 button sends to Google.
None of your data is sent in plain text however. It is all over SSL to https://clients6.google.com/rpc https://clients6.google.com/rpc.
> I removed the extension immediately.
Good for you. No one is forcing you to use it.
- nikcub 15y ago> There is now way to know if you have +1'd a page without sending your unique id with. localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back to google on ever. single. page. load. I found the disclosure about all website visiting being sent to Google only after looking for it and clicking through some pages. 95% of users will never find that since being alerted to it isn't part of the standard install flow.
- abraham 15y ago> localStorage or asking which URLs have been plus 1'd, not the other way around. There are plenty of ways of doing it without sending a request back to google on ever. single. page. load. This introduces all kinds of issues with complexity of having to support multiple storage locations, and inconsistency/sync lag caused +1'ing pages on multiple computers or buttons from the page rather then the extension. If I have two computers and +1 a few pages with one then switch to the other it would either have to download a list of all pages I +1'd. Which could get up into the thousands or tens of thousands or some sort of complex pagination, diff, merge feature. It just isn't worth it.
- vilhelm_s 15y agoChrome already does all that for bookmark syncing. The list of +1'ed websites will never grow _very_ large, because it is created one manual click at a time by a single user. 10,000 urls is only about a megabyte, and if you send diffs you'd rarely have to download more than a small fraction of them.
- gcl2 15y agoI don't think you've ever designed a scalable webapp that requires synchronized user data to be available across browsers, platforms, sessions, etc. It's a basic fundamental tradeoff decision that all app developers have to make - store client-side or server-side and if you want any kind of sanity for the user, it's usually better to store server-side.