Roughly the TRUTH

Google Browser Sync is a new extension, released today, for use with the Firefox web browser.

Here’s what it does:

“continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions”

This strikes me as some hefty competition for a number of existing extensions and online services that have been spawned as a result of Firefox’s extensible open source software platform. Ex the social networking aspect, this little app looks like a god-send for those of us who can do without sharing all of our ‘private’ information with online world…or does it?

Rather than leaving your online footprint with one of the many popular sharing sites (Delicious; furl; et. al.), now you can leave it with Google. Although, after the recent subpoenas from the US Justice Department, all of you gay-marriage enthusiasts may want to think twice. Here’s what Google has to say in their privacy notice:

• Google will store the Firefox browser settings that you select in association with your Google account and use them to synchronize settings for Firefox browsers on other computers. You can choose to encrypt Google’s stored copies of your settings. When you update or delete your browser settings, the copy stored with your Google Account will be updated or deleted as well.

• Any user of your browser can see its history and other settings. Google Browser Sync synchronizes these settings among every browser on which you install Browser Sync. This means that anyone who uses one of those browsers can see browser settings created on the others. In addition, by using the browser anyone can create new settings, such as browsing history, that will be synchronized.

I’ve just installed it, so I can’t comment on the specifics, but it looks like it could be quite useful…