gHacks technology news » google updater http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Google Update Turns Open Source http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:39:09 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/13/google-update-turns-open-source/ googleGoogle Update is a background program by Google that gets installed if the user installs Google software like Google Pack on a computer system. The program has caused some concern – more so than other background updaters with the exception of ctfmon.exe – because of the frequency that it gets reinstalled and reactivated by Google software on the computer system. The annoyance of seeing the Google Update process appear running over and over again after killing and uninstalling it was not the only concern that many users shared.

It was not transparent which data was transferred to Google servers while running Google Updater; And as the software was running in the background all the time it was probably the major concern that was voiced by users and privacy advocates. Google would not be Google if they could not come up with a solution to those privacy concerns: Their solution was to make Google Updater Open Source so that anyone (well not really anyone but those with the skill and knowledge to do so) could analyse the source in detail to find out about the data connections of the application. Google Updater was released with the codename Omaha at Google Code where it can be publicly downloaded.

Users who are interested in removal instructions can take a look at our article about removing Google Update on the Windows operating system.

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