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Is Google watching you? New plugin aims to answer that for you

Posted Jul 27th, 2010 at 7:58 PM and seen
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Thanks to a new plugin called Google Alarm, you can be alerted every time your personal information is sent to Google’s servers. The plugin, which launches this week and is compatible with Firefox and Chrome, works like this:

“It inspects each page you visit for Google-related URLs: googleanalytics.com/ga.js for Google Analytics, doubleclick.net/googlesyndication.com URLs for AdSense, youtube.com/v/ for YouTube embeds, and many more. Each service triggers an individual visual and audible alert to help you become more aware of when you’re transmitting data to Google.”

The point, according to creator Jamie Wilkinson (who also developed Know Your Meme and Mag.ma), is to make users aware of how much information the search engine giant actually collects on any one individual.

Check out a video test run of the plugin in action:

Full story at Mashable.

Total Google coverage (minus the foghorns).

 Catherine Faas

Comments (7)

Jul 27, 2010
moondustwriter said...
Thanks for the heads up on this plug in
Jul 27, 2010
stillmind liked this post.
Jul 28, 2010
taozen said...
"(...) you can be alerted every time your personal information(...)"

well... if this was to be true, it could make headlines, however Google Analytics does not use any _personal_ information.

interested in the Facebook version of this plug-in though...

Jul 28, 2010
gurifunu said...
What, no vuvuzelas? That's a much better deterrent ;-)
Jul 28, 2010
Scott said...
I can only imagine what an office environment will sound like if many people install this. I think the number of web sites that do *NOT* use Google Analytics is smaller than the number that do.
Jul 28, 2010
Willtech101 said...
Google alarm - mostly goes off on at least every other page visited?
Jul 28, 2010
ciki said...
how cool is that ;)

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