Covert channels in business models

I'm waiting until the usual privacy issues are protested and resolved before doing anything with Chrome. But the recent Information Week article describing Chrome's loading of popups even though it does not display them got me thinking about what conflicts of interest Google faces because web browsers are products that are nominally orthogonal to its business.

That is, while Mozilla makes a great Firefox browser because it is in the business of providing a web browser, and Apple makes very attractive and pleasing computers and electronics devices because it wants to lock people into its software, Google's business is in making and selling ads. Every (wonderful) service that Google has put out is motivated by a nexus with collecting information from web users to better target them with ads. A web browser does not directly promote this aim. This is similar to covert channels in information theory - where a communication is nominally conveying one form of information, but is actually a red herring concealing a second, critical piece of information. Chrome is ostensibly a web browser, but only exists as a way to funnel information on web users to Google's massive data farms.

As the Information Week article notes, features like hidden popup loading hurt Google's competitors because it makes their popup ads less effective. Since Google doesn't sell popups, it both doesn't have to sacrifice anything, and it can claim adherence to its "do not evil" mantra since most web users hate popups anyway.

The first CNET article to discuss Chrome pointed out an onerous copyright assigment clause, which thankfully has since been recanted [1]. But others, like storing all the information input into the browser, even when privacy-guarding Incognito mode is activated, are too close to Google's business model to be retracted. That is the golden egg that Chrome lays, and it's unfortunate: companies that use covert channels to derive revenue from services provided to customers generally have an unsavory character. Whenever a profit motive is tucked away, it makes it seem like the company is trying to get away with something that the consumer would not want to permit if we knew about it upfront. It certainly isn't the kind of thing that the customer would actively want, since if it was then it would be a selling point rather than buried in the fine print.

To truly be in the clear with this, Google should make the Incognito function fully anonymizing - that is, not store any information submitted to Google at all when this mode is active - or provide a user option to install plug-ins that perform this function for the user.

[1] Fun legal question: how can someone that already accepted the burdensome terms of use retroactively accept the newer terms of use, given that they already gave Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license" to use that content?