3 replies to this topic

[YungCEO]

I used to have the Alexa toolbar on my PC before learning of the spyware it embedded. It is my understanding that one can check their popularity ranking with Google's toolbar but I am leery of installing it for the aforementioned reasons. Is it worth it?

[MCP]

google toolbar is great, and you can set the option to not report back personal browsing habits.

spyware in some facets is unaviodable. Look in your cookies and you will see a fastclick, cydoor, adserver, adrevolver, adlick, clksrv, etc etc. These in a sense are a type of spyware too, tracking your click habits.

Network banner serving software has permeated very deep into the web, and remote invisible pixels that report back to the server and drop cookies on your machine are all over the place. Some of them track your clicks, soe of them leak junk into your system (like cydoor and gator). To tell you the truth, there is no true privacy on the web if you browse the web in a normal browser.

[anthonyparsons.com]

Mate, the difference is:

Spyware is something a person installs and kind off forgets to mention it too you at any stage during the process, Google toolbar does not contain spyware, though it does give you the option to have certain information report back to google if you activate advance features.

See, you make a choice against not getting to make the choice. Big Difference!

[Mike Thies]

The Alexa Toolbar has been installed on my machine for months now, its 'spyware' is limited to cookies, its never caused a pop-up window and my computer has never been 'affected' in any negative way by Alexa's Toolbar.

Trust me I run Spybot like its a religious act. Alexa's been a useful tool for me, they're backlinks tool shows much more than Googles does, so between the two I usually get a good idea of how my links really are.