208851 - Information on visited sites is transmitted to alexa.com without expressed notification of the user

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 208734

(SeaMonkey :: Sidebar, defect)

Description

[Carsten Klein]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

I don't like this, and others won't and don't do either.

chrome/comm.jar/content/communcatior/related/related-panel.js contains code
which informs the commercial alexa service of the any visited site on the
following events, to which this xul component is being registered:

a) StartDocumentLoad
b) EndDocumentLoad
c) FailDocumentLoad

I understand that this information is merely gathered to supply the user with a
more "sophisticated" related - links panel, but I do also understand that this
alexa service is making lots of money with my bandwidth, my time and my darn
surfing likes and dislikes.

Would you stop including that son-of-a-bitch bit of code in your browser?

I have commented the portions of code out for the time being and consider using
a different browser, which is not so keen on my likes and dislikes.

I would have thought that the mozilla browser suite is more or less free from
this "spy-ware" type of thing. But, alas, it is not.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start browser
2. Start surfing
3. Be spyed upon.

Actual Results:  
Some multi-millionaires get more money in their already overful picked-pockets.
 

Expected Results:  
Stop spying on the community, stop feeding multi-millionaires more money, stop that.

More reactions regarding this behaviour of mozilla can be found here:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read=1&msg_id=3580899&forum_id=43471&showthread=1

and this is were I initially heard of such dis-behaviour being exposed by mozilla.

Comment 1

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Duplicate of bug 208734?

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 208734 ***

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Not security sensitive. Removing flag.

Comment 4

[benc]

VERIFIED
->sidebar 

If you have a patch that fixes the behavior, please submit a patch to bug 208734.