Dear Google: Do No Evil, Remember?
As Joe notes, Google seems to be doing some undercover tracking when clicking on search results. I’ve noticed this sort of behavior in the past but it only seemed to occur for a few hours and it was obvious because if I placed my mouse over the link it would show the redirect process from Google. That didn’t bother me too much because I knew what they were doing and had the choice to use a different service if I so desired. But what I noticed last night was a bit more disturbing…
Google seems to be tracking me all the time now and they’re hiding that fact by using javascript to show the ultimate destination URL instead of the URL they’re actually sending me through, their redirection process. I only found this because normally if I click on a link where the destination has a different hostname from my current location my browser will open that link in a new tab (tabbed browsing rules!). It suddenly stopped happening yesterday when clicking on Google search results. I finally looked under the hood (View->Source) and found the Javascript action.
I’m not sure how I feel about being tracked at all but I’m pretty sure I don’t like the tracking mechanism being hid from me. Using that method has the nasty result of making me wonder why and only bad things come to mind as potential reasons.
Some may say that by using javascript to show the ultimate destination it is easier on the end user, making their ‘mouseover’ more useful. I don’t subscribe to that reasoning, if only because they print the URL at the bottom of each result. But the main reason is, I want to know where I’m going when I click on a link. I don’t like NOT knowing where I’m going to end up eventually.
I wonder if it is just a select few that are being tracked or if it is happening to all users now? I wonder what happened to the Google mantra of, “Do no evil”?
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