Google has entered the browser wars with Chrome available as a beta version for Windows – which explains why I haven’t been too excited about it. Chrome is a simple browser based on the same base code as Safari and, interestingly, it’s open source. It’s been receiving favourable reviews. But then I stumbled on something interesting. I noted a new “chrome blocker” listed in the directory of Joomla extensions.
For non-technical readers, Joomla is an open source CMS (content management system) application that makes it easy to build sophisticated web 2.0 web sites. Extensions are single-purpose plugins that add functionality to the site. So, for example, a Joomla-driven web site could incorporate a photo gallery extension or an mp3 player interface, or an enewsletter application. But in this case, the plugin is designed to keep people who use Chrome browsers from looking at your web site. Instead, it sends visitors a nasty message telling them to get lost. Now why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t the object of the game to get as many visitors to your website as possible?
According to these plugin developers, Chrome is just a glorified data-mining application. It allows Google to collect information. Like all search engines, Google has bots that index information posted on web sites. Bloggers who spill their guts or reveal painfully intimate personal details have long been vulnerable (but have no excuse to complain about invasion of privacy). But the habits and preferences of visitors to web sites is more challenging (and valuable) to track.
One assumes that, given Google’s corporate mission as a giant clearing house for advertising media, its data-mining would be aimed at tracking consumer preferences. The more precisely companies can target their ads, the more valuable those ads become. I suppose one could offer a critique that spoke to the utter banality of a system of social organization driven by the desire to buy stuff. But there’s a prior and darker critique doing the rounds, and it speaks to the looming need for a military presence to protect our right to pursue our banal desires.
Military incursions into private surveillance have long been a concern. For example, one technique is to monitor reading habits of university students through records of their library accounts. The same is possible through facebook applications ibook and Visual Bookshelf. Facebook itself has come under suspicion as a data-mining hotbed when it was revealed that startup capital came from sources with CIA connections.
Is the paranoia justified? First off, the privacy concerns have a valid basis. See Coderr for a demonstration and discussion of Chrome’s capability to harvest information about you [site removed]. But as a servant of military objectives? That’s a bit far-fetched. As Coderr points out, you can always turn off the offending features, and the coding is open source, so it’s not as if Google is trying to engage in covert practices.
That said, there is still one very good reason to avoid Chrome like the plague: the terms of its licensing agreement. Check out this provision:
“11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.”
Compare with the Firefox license agreement and Safari agreements for Windows and Mac which have no comparable provisions. I have two comments about the license terms:
1) While I am an advocate of a liberalized copyright regime, one which promotes the free exchange of ideas and their expression, I am motivated by a desire to create opportunities for the average creative person with limited resources; I am NOT interested in thwarting the creative commons philosophy for the continued enrichment of the world’s largest media company.
2) I’m not even sure what the provision means in practical terms.
a. As a web surfer, what content am I making available to Google? If I display a web site on Chrome, it’s not my web site, so I don’t have any rights to it anyways.
b. As a web designer I have no control over the browser a surfer uses when they visit my site. Can I be deemed to have granted rights to a party I have no relationship with?
c. The only material this might refer to is the stuff I type in chatrooms, the comments I post to blogs, the images I upload to Facebook. But who does that content belong to? What if a web site created in Sweden claims as a term of use that it has an exclusive and irrevocable right to all the content posted by its users who all happen to live in Russia? Does Google have a right to challenge its webmaster in a Swedish court for the right to content posted by Russian nationals?
d. What about porn? If Google asserts rights, then it should assume responsibilities too. What if I find my minor son downloading porn through a Chrome browser? Do I get to sue Google for aiding and abetting the commission of a criminal offense because it has an exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute videos of men doing sheep?
So many questions; so few answers. In the meantime, I’ll stick to Firefox.
UPDATE: Chrome has amended its end user license agreement to read:
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
Get it from the horse’s mouth.