the most obvious answer to this question-even after reading the article-is that this is just a continuation of what's always made google wildly successful: inserting itself between open architectures and your personal data
that's not meant as a criticism per se, but it's the core of their business model: serving jquery for free in exchange for tracking your users persistently via Google Analytics, building a browser to slowly but surely make it harder to opt out of Google's SSL-based tracking.
like all of its successful products, Inbox aims to create value for users while subtly moving more of your activities to a level of abstraction that Google controls and/or monitors.
> serving jquery for free in exchange for tracking your users persistently via Google Analytics
jQuery on their CDN has nothing to do with Google Analytics, and it's served without a cookie and with long cache expire times, so it's not a very good tracking target.
> building a browser to slowly but surely make it harder to opt out of Google's SSL-based tracking
I have no idea what you're referring to here, but it doesn't sound like it makes much sense.
> jQuery on their CDN has nothing to do with Google Analytics
most production servers i encounter that serve google's copies of jQuery also serve GA. i know this because i have to manually allow those requests using RequestPolicy. yes, they're technically different products. but that wasn't my point.
> most production servers i encounter that serve google's copies of jQuery also serve GA. i know this because i have to manually allow those requests using RequestPolicy. yes, they're technically different products. but that wasn't my point.
so...when you said "in exchange for" you meant that some sites also use Google Analytics?
that's not meant as a criticism per se, but it's the core of their business model: serving jquery for free in exchange for tracking your users persistently via Google Analytics, building a browser to slowly but surely make it harder to opt out of Google's SSL-based tracking.
like all of its successful products, Inbox aims to create value for users while subtly moving more of your activities to a level of abstraction that Google controls and/or monitors.