Yoz Grahame's Cheerleader: At last, I understand the dangers of Google AutoLink!

February 27, 2005

At last, I understand the dangers of Google AutoLink!

Like many others, I had written off Dave Winer's recent obsession with the new Google toolbar. That was until I actually downloaded and installed the thing, and realised - oh my god! There are some really important points he's raised, and everyone needs to hear them right now!

"The issue for authors and publishers is whether readers know they're reading text that's been modified." And it's so ambiguous! Admittedly, in order for the web page to be altered by the Google toolbar, an "AutoLink" button needs to be pressed every time (it doesn't do it automatically), and the first time you press it this pop-up window appears which explains everything. Personally, I don't think that's nearly enough! A large claxon should sound, the screen should flash, and the user should get a phone call from a Google employee explaining the incredibly ambiguous and possibly-accidental button press. After all, the user might not realise that they had altered the content of the page if they were incredibly forgetful or stupid.
"What happens when Google isn't satisfied to add links to our sites, suppose they were to change the actual words? I haven't heard Google say they would never do that, have you?" This is an incredibly good point! Just because the Google Toolbar does something that is only helpful at the moment, there's nothing stopping them from making a later version do it automatically. They could also redirect all links on a page to go through Google. They could leverage their total domination of the search-engine market to provide completely false information about how big Larry Page's penis is. And then, they could use all the cash from their recent IPO to build an army of attack robots and mount an invasion of Belgium. The fact that in the previous seven years of market dominance they have done nothing that would even approach this kind of non-consensual content modification has no bearing on the argument! Sure, it would utterly destroy their credibility and popularity and decimate their userbase, but such a move from Google's decision makers would be quite possible if they were incredibly forgetful or stupid.
"It invites Microsoft, with it's [sic] virtual monopoly in browser [sic], to do the same, to the detriment of the market, and even Google itself." Gaah, Dave, as blindingly insightful as you are, I wish you hadn't said that out loud! I bet that the noise has attracted the IE7 team and they're now thinking, "Whoah, he's right! We control the horizontal and the vertical too! Why can't we just use our awesome monopoly power to, say, erase all mention of "Linux" (spit!) from the web?" Sure, they could have thought of this from the very beginning, but not if they were incredibly forgetful or stupid.
"At minimum it should provide an opt-out as described above, but we really want AutoLink to be opt-in." Dave speaks for all of us web creators when he says that the content of a web page should only be viewed in exactly the way its author intended, even if the user (by pressing the AutoLink button) requests otherwise. Even though the earliest web browsers included such content-altering features as "Turn Off Image Downloading", and that modern screen-reading browsers have to change the way text is rendered to disabled users, not to mention the approximately 10 billion other ways in which dynamic content alteration has become a vital part of web usage, (such as Google Cache search) all this behaviour is clearly wrong. After all, if a web author had to specifically opt-in to have their web page altered for any of the above purposes, the web would be much, much more valuable and have better integrity. It's worth disagreeing with those who decreed that the specific rendering of a web page should be ultimately left to the end user's preferences - such as the entire W3C, for example - because they might not have thought of these potential violations if they were incredibly forgetful or stupid.

So, there you go, folks! I'm not the only one who feels this way: hundreds of others agree! And the only way they could all be wrong is... um... nope, can't think of anything.

UPDATE: Dave responds, and I counter-respond.

Posted by Yoz at February 27, 2005 04:34 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Thanks for writing this. So much better than the post I never got around to writing, which would take the text, but replace "autolink" with "pop-up blocking". Imagine if Microsoft used it's virtual monopoly to include pop-up blocking in IE! It's a slippery slope, my friend.

Posted by: Rod on February 27, 2005 07:17 AM

I think somebody is replaying "The Best of Dave Winer" on scripting.com; just look at articles from '99ish in this search: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22third+voice%22+site:scripting.com

and replace 'Third Voice' with 'Google Toolbar'.

Posted by: Bdoga on February 27, 2005 08:51 AM

Thank You. This is just more proof that Dave Winer is clueless. He claims that a template for a website will change the world ,but complains when someone really does somthing that makes the internet a better place. I hope he continues to complain because he is only hurting his own credibility.

Posted by: Molland on February 27, 2005 06:19 PM

$100 to the first person to release a GPL-licensed Firefox plugin that transforms scripting.com into valid, accessible XHTML.

Posted by: Mark on February 28, 2005 02:27 AM

"$100 to the first person to release a GPL-licensed Firefox plugin that transforms scripting.com into valid, accessible XHTML."

And a tenner to the first person to do likewise, except that it turns every instance of 'Dave Winer' into a link to a Canadian pharmacy that supplies Xanax.

Posted by: nick on February 28, 2005 01:58 PM

Thank for the idea, Nick. No canadian v1@gr@ spam, but... http://groovymother.com/archives/2005/02/28/dave_winers_wor.html

Posted by: Rod on February 28, 2005 06:57 PM

What people should really get upset about is that Google will translate your page into another language without your consent, and there's no way to opt out of that. I didn't spend forty-three seconds carefully wording the English on my page just to have Germans mock the mangled translation that Google provides. Why aren't people outraged?

Posted by: Felix on February 28, 2005 07:40 PM

You should be flattered that people try to read your page in another language. In case you didn't know, not everybody speak english, yeah I know this planet is a scary place for people who find pride in speaking only english.

Posted by: Marika on March 1, 2005 04:42 PM

"$100 to the first person to release a GPL-licensed Firefox plugin that transforms scripting.com into valid, accessible XHTML."

It used to be that people who had nothing substantial to offer would simply correct the spelling/grammar of the original writer.

Today that person criticizes the validity of their code.

It's pitiful.

Bob

Posted by: Bob on March 1, 2005 08:17 PM

Bwahahahaha. Thanks, Bob, that's the best laugh I've had all day. There's a long history here, one that touches on licensing, openness, standards, discrimination, and general sociopathology. But I guess that all went over your head.

Anyway, my offer still stands.

Posted by: Mark on March 2, 2005 02:31 AM

In reference to your comment found here:

http://cubanlinks.org/blog/post/2005/03/01/Hyper-Text--Dead-.html#comments

I have only the following retort: technology giveth and technology taketh away. What I mean by that, is that people/geeks/users are being empowered by personal computers to manipulate content (like you did with your text editor) in ways that simply could not be (or could not be done easily) before.

So, yes. You can also take a newspaper and cut out all the ads and replace them with leftover Christmas wrapping. You can record American Idol off of TV, transfer it to your PC and use iMovie to replace all the ads with screensaver clips.

But if you do these things, and then republish them, uh oh. No sir. If you edit my page in vi, and then publish your new version, you've violated my copyrights as a publisher. Lucky for you, I'm using a Attribution-ShareAlike license, so you'd just have to give me some credit, but good luck with someone using a more restrictive license, or better yet, no license at all (just plain old copyright).

You see, I'm not sure that it matters that the Google Toolbar is on your desktop. You could easily get the same effect if Google simply provided a public, external HTTP proxy that you could configure your browser to use.

I feel that there is a different between modifying the presentation of information (fonts, divs, layout, images, etc) to increase its accessibility and modifying its content.

Posted by: Carter Rabasa on March 2, 2005 03:05 AM

I must confess, Carter, you've completely confused me. You appear to be agreeing with everything I'm saying, then the last line of your message bears absolutely no relevance to what you said previously. (You also seem to think that I say republishing is fine, whereas I said the exact opposite.)

It's possible that you haven't read my two blog posts after this one. Please do so.

Posted by: Yoz on March 2, 2005 03:14 AM

Mark,
Would a greasemonkey user script do? ;)

Posted by: Jeremy Dunck on March 3, 2005 12:36 AM

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