Thanks, Robert. Presently I have it blocked by her Kerio 4 firewall. She 
DOES use
IE, alas, I can't get her to convert to Mozilla stuff.

--Bob

Robert Rolf wrote:
> Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>   
>> Bob Axtell wrote:
>>
>>
>>     
>>> I caught my wife's computer trying to phone home yesterday. It turned out
>>> to be her GOOGLE TOOLBAR. What does the google toolbar need to be
>>> phoning home for?
>>>       
>
> It's looking for updates.
> Also trying to connect to g-mail profile, if you have one, but you can stop it
> from trying by going to the configuration menu.
>
>   
>> I don't know why, but I would expect it to do this. It's a marketing tool,
>> after all.
>>     
>
> Of course.
> http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
> "
> 6.   Google's toolbar is spyware:
> With the advanced features enabled, Google's free toolbar for Explorer phones home with every page you surf, and yes, it reads your cookie too. Their privacy policy confesses this, but that's only because Alexa lost a class-action lawsuit when their 
> toolbar did the same thing, and their privacy policy failed to explain this. Worse yet, Google's toolbar updates to new versions quietly, and without asking. This means that if you have the toolbar installed, Google essentially has complete access to your 
> hard disk every time you connect to Google (which is many times a day). Most software vendors, and even Microsoft, ask if you'd like an updated version. But not Google. Any software that updates automatically presents a massive security risk.
> "
>
> I used to just block it using zonealarm. With the latest upgrade, I had to
> remove it because it caused IE to fail with 'unable to save page', and there
> was no rollback provision.
> This is a well documented bug with GTB discussed on various user forums.
>
> Robert
>
>   

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