Google scraping local webpages viewed in Chrome? | Hacker News Reader

Google scraping local webpages viewed in Chrome?

12 pointsjwoah126 comments

I've been developing a Javascript table component[1] for a little while, and a few weeks ago I was working on a demo page to show some examples. I picked a few stocks off the top of my head (AAPL, MSFT, GOOG, FB, JPM, C, VZ), and created a page that included a table with dummy data that changed every few seconds. The page is now viewable at http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable/demo.html#dynamicDataWorker, but at the time was only on my local machine. I was predominantly using Chrome to test the page. Later that day I happened to open up Google Now on my Galaxy Nexus, and noticed that there was a new card showing stock quotes.[2] Creepily, the stocks were all exactly the same as the ones I chose for my test page. I figure Chrome must have scraped the data and used it to show me the quotes in Google Now. Has anyone else seen behavior like this? I have to admit I don't like the idea of Google scraping local files I'm viewing.

[1] ATable - http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable

[2] http://jwoah12.github.io/aTable/gnow_stocks.jpg

A big point of Google Now is it scrapes what you view in browser and uses that (web history) to determine what it should show you as cards.

I'm not sure why you'd expect local pages to be treated any differently in terms of extracting signals to feed into the model of what is of interest to you to be shown in Now.

I don't know. Something about it just feels invasive. It probably doesn't help that the Now card was not useful at all to me. I noticed that they scraped my gmail for an OpenTable reservation confirmation a while back and notified me when it was time to leave. That also felt creepy, but I didn't mind as much because it was useful.

They do not "scrape" content on your local machine. They do incorporate stuff on their services including emails, as you mention (OpenTable, Amazon packages, etc).

You can also have this sort of stuff triggerd by desktop searches if you join this "field trial": https://www.google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial/

They don't scrape local pages, they analyse your search and browser history.

Been to Fedex to track a package? They'll note that and popup a card. Looked up a particular coffee shop on Google Maps? A card will popup with directions to said coffee shop.

I suppose I actually searched for all of those stock tickers while I was putting together the page. I was pretty sure I didn't, but it makes sense now because I had to get a decent approximation of the closing prices.

If you've Googled these stocks/companies then they will show up on a Google Now card. Chrome has nothing to do with it, except maybe that you are more likely to be signed in when using Chrome.

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