Toolbars & Privacy
My thoughts on toolbars and privacy:
Call me paranoid, but I refuse to install any toolbar into the browser that I use on an everyday basis (Firefox). There’s too much room for privacy abuse. Depending on how the toolbar was developed and configured, the toolbar creator can have access to every webpage I visit…and every search I perform. In essence, toolbars can potentially track 100% of your website usage.
Not cool.
Here’s the good news, though. Firefox offers an extension for almost every possible “Toolbar” offered. For example, if you need Alexa data - instead of installing the Alexa toolbar, you can use the SEO Open extension. The SEO Open extension provides access to Alexa data, backlinks, indexed pages, PR, WhoIs data, and more.
I feel much more comfortable installing an extension from Mozilla than I do installing a toolbar (spyware?) from a marketing company such as Alexa or StumbleUpon.
Google Toolbar
Do you want to see the PR for every website you visit, but you don’t want to install the Google toolbar?
Just install the Live PR extension for Firefox.
StumbleUpon Toolbar
What about StumbleUpon?
In order to use StumbleUpon, I was asked to download a toolbar. I decided to install the toolbar into Opera, since I don’t use Opera as my main browser. [I have Opera installed to test webpage design. 99% of the time Opera renders HTML just like Firefox, since they are both standards compliant. IE is another story.]
Problem is, StumbleUpon doesn’t offer a toolbar for Opera.
Fortunately, there’s a group of developers who created a toolbar for Opera. It’s called OperaStumbler and offers the same features as the toolbar for IE and FF. (Thank you Kyle.)
So, if you feel uncomfortable installing the StumbleUpon toolbar into your main browser, you can always use Opera and OperaStumbler.