This is going to be a bit technical.

When you click on a Google search result link you may not notice it but your browser goes back to Google, where a server will tell your browser where to go for the contents you are looking for and then you will contact the destination server. This mechanism is called redirection and is used because Google wants to know what result was the best for your search criteria. So the next time somebody looks for the same information the clicked result will be displayed at a higher position since it is more likely to be the answer that other person is looking for. This process and data collection is done for all Google searches. In fact it is done by Yahoo, MSN, Vivisimo, most likely every search engine available and most of the biggest media sites. Whether this is a privacy violation or not, whether it should be notified to the user or not is subject to each one’s own concerns and knowledge.

The fact is that because it adds a roundtrip between the browser and the server, redirection is an inefficient way of tracking a visitor’s link path.

WhatWG (Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group) has designed a mechanism to avoid this based on a new tag (called ping) the web site operator may add to certain links. When a user clicks on this tagged links you will be directed to the target site plus the browser will contact the origin server to let it know what you clicked. The user will not have to wait for a roundtrip to go to the desired web site.

Last Tuesday, Mozilla developer, Darin Fisher announced that this feature has been added to development versions of Firefox, raising doubts among some media on Mozilla commitment to a safer, better, private web experience.

First it is necessary to delimit the scope of this feature. As explained before the ping tag will allow to do nothing that is not being done today. It will allow to do it in a more efficient way from both, the user and the web site operator point of view. It is a change to Gecko, Firefox web page rendering component so it affects Firefox, Thunderbird (though it will be disabled here by default), Camino, SeaMonkey, and other applications. It is limited to the browser: it can’t be used to install spyware, viruses or adware on a user PC. It is not implemented yet and when it is done it will have a preference to disable it at user’s will. Plus, ideas for notifying the user that following a tagged link will issue a ping, limitting the number of sites that may receive the ping and constraining the ping to the origin web server only are already on the table.

This is a feature that was known to raise eyebrows from the beginning but its potential benefits as an alternative to redirection and other inefficient techniques should make it worth the trouble for Mozilla developers.

Personally, Mozilla record to date makes me confident that privacy and user trust are priorities and this feature will look to enhance the user experience while, at least, not raising privacy violation risks.

To learn more on both sides of the discussion, check slashdot.org, mozillaZine and Darin’s blog post.