Nosce te ipsum

It's always been evil. For starters, Google's toolbar phones home with every page you land on, and tattles to Google what you're looking at, while offering up your globally-unique Google cookie ID that expires in 2038.

As if that wasn't enough, the toolbar updates automatically, without asking. Once installed, this happens no matter how restrictive your Explorer security settings might be, and regardless of whether you have ZoneAlarm or some other firewall installed. Basically, this means that Google potentially can install anything at all on your hard drive, at any time that you connect to them. If you have broadband, it happens so fast that you won't even notice. One day you may see some new features on your toolbar, and then you'll realize that something happened.

The reason this has webmasters upset is because Google is essentially changing their pages by adding links where links did not exist before. These links take the toolbar user off of the page. Potentially they are a new source of revenue for Google, because the same technology can be used by Google to link to ads.