1–10 of 24 posts
"Google Alarm" Firefox addon alerts you when you're sending data to Google
fffff.at
But it's an interesting project to make people aware of the amount of data they send to Google. I just dont think that people that do not know this will install a plugin like this.. Or use FireFox at all.
>Didn’t show any alerts when I hit google.co.uk
Which probably means it's just looking for links to "google.com" in the page. In which case I'd doubt it'd catch connections in flash files, and it probably false-positives if you have blockers in place. (edit: checked the JS file, that's exactly what it does. Looks for URLs of: google, gmail.com, youtube.com, blogspot.com)
Anyone else experience this?
Considering the amount of websites that use Google Analytics this will result in an almost constant sound. At least the websites I browse often. But it's an interesting project to make people aware of the amount of data they send to Google. I just dont think that people that do not know this will install a plugin like this.. Or use FireFox at all.
Hope you win your emmy!
An alternate presentation idea: a toolbar with both indicators for the current page, and a timeline of recent connections to Google's servers. It would make a small ring on each new connection -- but more like an IM notification than an airhorn, and able to be turned off.
The timeline could be logarithmic, with the past to the right, so the last 5 minutes or so of hits to Google AdSense/Analytics/CDN/etc. is in high-resolution over about 1/3 the width of the screen, while the next hour takes the next 1/3, and the last day the last 1/3 -- altogether showing a total of the background hits to Google servers in the last 24 hours or so. Like so...
[AX__A___X_____XC____AX____X_X__A__XA__X_A__AXC__X__XAAXCA] 121 hits