Lauren Weinstein‘s posting today on Dave Farber’s IP list argues that Google’s recent decision to pre-fetch the top search results for visitors using Mozilla-derived browsers has a number of unintended and (to his mind) undesirable consequences:
- It will distort the economics for advertisers on the pre-fetched sites, creating “page views” that may never actually be seen by any user;
- It will distort the browser statistics for Firefox and other Mozilla browsers, making them appear more heavily used than they actually are;
- More seriously, it exposes users to the cookies for all of the pre-fetched sites, whether or not they were visited.
Lauren goes on to explain how to disable the prefetch behavior in Firefox and other Mozilla browsers, and takes Google to task for not thinking through the privacy implications of their new feature. I’m not as much of a privacy worrier as Lauren, but I’m glad he’s bringing attention to the issue. I’d be interested to hear what Google has to say in response.