How to know if a toolbar (like Google's) is tracking you when it's disabled

A recent tip suggested that even when disabled the Google Toolbar sends data to Google without the user knowing. After doing some digging I've found this is only the case if, while using IE8 the user fails to restart the browser after disabling the toolbar from the "Manage Add-ons" window.

This is certainly possible, but the browser does warn the user to restart immediately after saving the changes. In fact, going to the add-ons screen is the slow way to disable the toolbar -- the easiest way is to click Tools>Toolbars then uncheck the Google toolbar. This stops it from sending the information back to Google immediately.

So, while I don't believe Google is being nefarious, after the news of their recent hacking and some of the reasons it was possible, it's a good time to talk about how to monitor what sort of information is being sent through tools like the Google Toolbar.


First let's remind ourselves how Google, or any ad powered web service, makes money; relevant information. You use Google because the information it returns is relevant to what you want to find. Google's ability to serve ads relevant to your current browsing accounts for the majority of its $22 billion in 2009 revenue.

Their ability to know as much about you as possible increases their ability to be relevant to you and therefore make more money by increasing the chance you'll pay attention to the information someone is paying them to serve. The price you pay for all the great "free" tools -- Google, Facebook, etc. -- is every bit of personal data that can be mined from the content and activities coming in and out of those tools.

This is all great stuff as long as you understand the following three things:

• What information you're sharing.
• The safety of the information you're sharing.
• Who has access to your information internally and externally to the organization.

I'll cover two tools you can use to find out information about the first bullet point. The second and third bullets are different for every organization with which you choose to share your information, so be sure to read the privacy policies (even though I know you won't).

The most popular tool for viewing network traffic to and from your computer is Wireshark. Wireshark is cross platform (Linux, OS X and Windows), open source, and free. It's also very robust and subsequently not particularly easy to use. It can capture a tremendous amount of useful data and while that information can be filtered and sorted it's not something the novice will readily understand. It can be downloaded here.


Cleanersoft Free HTTP Sniffer simply shows you the full URL including parameters, source IP, destination IP, source port and destination port. This is useful when you want to see what sort of data is sent behind the scenes over HTTP traffic by plugins like the Google Toolbar. This app isn't very powerful and you can't dig as deeply as you can with Wireshark, but it's great for a quick look to see if there's unexpected HTTP traffic to and from your machine.

If you care about your privacy or are just curious about what sort of traffic comes in and out of your computer I would highly recommend adding one or both of the above tools to your arsenal.

Tags: cleanersoft, google toolbar, GoogleToolbar, privacy, security, wireshark