Google Toolbar Insecure

Holy Backdoor Bungles, Batman! Apparently there’s a problem with the Google Toolbar that leaves its users vulnerable to hackers. It doesn’t seem like they could do things that would be exceptionally harmful – we’re not talking wiping the hard drive here – but it’s surprising to find such vulnerabilities in a product from the all-powerful Google. Fortunately the Google Toolbar has an auto-update function, so the fixed version is already available; when I checked to see if mine was 1.1.58 or lower (the vulnerable versions) I saw it had already been upgraded to 1.1.60 without my even knowing about it. (Of course if you use something like Zone Alarm, this presumably isn’t an issue.) One of the issues on the page about the exploits mentions that the PageRank and Category features have “privacy implications.” Um, how? I definitely don’t get that one.