Google in bed with Yahoo?

OK, so I had a Pearl Jam song playing on the Yahoo Music Engine (I have a subscription to Yahoo Music UnLtd) and at the same time I pulled up a web page on reference.com and voila, I saw google adsense ads for Pearl Jam.

The web page on reference.com had absolutely nothing even remotely related to pearl jam.

 

Hmmm, that's very interesting .... Have you got Google Toolbar installed?

 

Yes! gfhjtfyit

 

i also notice this only happens if i have the toolbar. my office has no toolbar and my home has. and this anomaly happens at home only.

 

sooooooooo... the toolbar is gathering information from the user to serve ads? not what I signed up for when I installed it.

 

i remember signing a certain User Agreement Privacy Policy thingy...that says they will occasionally collect surfing habits...but i can't remember where i've seen that.

 

Voila! It must be the toolbar snooping around. It says something similar to this when you choose "Advanced features" in Google Desktop .... there might be a similar "disclaimer" for the toolbar too.

 

Makes sense regarding the toolbar. But how does the toolbar get information from the Yahoo Music Engine? Unless, the YME browser is based on IE. (Don't think so but I could be wrong!)

 

As you surf the web the Google Toolbar picks-up the HTML that shows on your screen and then stores it (or a part of it) in a cache.

Last week I was looking at Nikon digital cameras on various sites. Yesterday I was developing a new website with adsense. Google AdWords had not been shown one of the pages before yesterday so Google had not scanned the page and assigned a theme for AdWords yet. Typically when this happens you will receive a boatload of Amazon.com ads until after Adwords have been shown on the page a few times. After four or five clicks or refreshes on a new page you will begin getting Google ads related to the actual page content. The difference this time was I did not get the usual default Amazon.com ads. I got a whole collumn of Nikon digital camera ads.

 

The Google toolbar is not considered spyware because it comes from Google. But from a privacy standpoint it is one of the worst pieces of spyware. Most people install it voluntarily and do not even think about what might be transmitted to Google that way.

Christoph