With the launch of another service from a company like google, it is only natural that a whole bunch of internet have-it-alls jump into the bandwagon soon enough. Google’s Accelerator service provides users with webpage caching that supposedly speeds up their browsing because all content comes from Google’s servers. If only it was that simple.

What google actually does is start caching pages you visit and crawl through them and all their links, saving new pages and updated chunks on old pages. This gives you not one but two lousy problems:

The first, updated blocks may be private to a sole user, but with the accelerator, they’re not. Lets say you have a private message in a forum that you’re reading. That’s an updated block, but google has no way to know that’s your block alone. So when caching pages for someone else, it gives them the page WITH that block. Instant privacy issue. Just add water.

The second is, by crawling each of your links, google will end up stumbling across your “delete my account” or “destroy the worldwideweb” buttons which you don’t want to be clicking now, do you? Tough luck, google did that for you.

There are ways developers can prevent this sort of thing from happening (sending a 403 when a request packs a HTTP_X_MOZ prefetch header), but shouldn’t google be a little smarter? It might have been a good idea, but it shouldn’t have come to public with this sort of issue still present. I would have thought the people at Google Labs would have considered this sort of problem. They didn’t. Suckers.

Oh, and there are loads of users out there who think they’re anonymous when browsing with the accelerator on. Tough luck, kids, you’re not. Google forwards your original ip through the headers. Go back to Tor.