If you recall back to March when we first published Part 1 of this series, we were concerned with Google heavily advertising Google Web Accelerator at the bottom of Google search results pages. The problem is that Google Web Accelerator poses serious privacy concerns. Google is continuing their promotion of Google Web Accelerator despite the fact that these same security issues that we reported three months ago still exist.

Here are the problems with Google Web Accelerator:

• Google Web Accelerator prefetches the content of the links of the page you’re viewing. The problem is that Google Web Accelerator clicks on essentiallly every link, including links that can change settings on various websites. If you’re on a website that has links such as “delete” or “cancel,” Google Web Accelerator goes ahead and prefetches these links, ignores any Javascript confirmations such as “Are you sure you want to do this?” and performs the action anyway. This has the potential to log you out of websites, or even worse: delete your account or change critical settings.
• Google tracks all of your requests for HTTP pages, along with the date and time of the request, your IP address, and computer and connection information. Information entered into forms that is personally identifiable is sent through Google. Cookies with browsing or prefetching page requests are cached on Google’s servers.

Google receives essentially the same information when you use Google Web Accelerator as your ISP would receive. To me, this is a serious security breach and a major concern. Google Web Accelerator users need to be more aware of the information they are sending to Google. I believe that Google is not doing a good service by collecting all of this information without notifying users in an upfront and straight-forward fashion. On behalf of the staff of Google Search blog, I am recommending that you do not use Google Web Accelerator until Google addresses these concerns. Google has been silent on these issues for months and it’s time that web users start taking a stand.

On almost every Google search I make, on my computer and on other people’s computers, and on computers elsewhere around the USC campus, at the bottom of the results page, I see the ad for GWA:

Google is heavily promoting Google Web Accelerator now. Although the program has been around for a year, they have never promoted it this heavily. It appears with virtually every Google search (every Google search I’ve seen, anyway). They don’t even bother to check if you already have GWA: I still see it all the time, despite the fact that I’ve been using GWA for almost a week.

With all of this promotion, there must be millions of users installing GWA now. It works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox – that covers nearly the entire web population. Further, you might think that the program is more mature now. It’s not. I’m having major problems with websites I use, particularly ones with private accounts and sign in info. GWA can delete your account. It’s true – I’ve seen it firsthand – and I’m very worried.
They are also tracking almost every click in results pages (redirecting them through google.com). This is a major concern to me. It is a huge breach of privacy. I am very, very surprised that people are letting Google get away with this. If I saw some kind of “Stop GWA” campaign, I would probably support it. If anyone is with me on this, please, start something. We should speak up.