Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Why Google needs Orkut:
“Then, one day down the road, they quietly decide to “better integrate” Orkut with Google and start redirecting all Orkut requests to orkut.google.com.
Bingo!
Suddenly they’re able to set a *.google.com cookie that contains a bit of identifying data (such as your Orkut id) and that would greatly enhance their ability to mine useful and profitable data from the combination of your profile and daily searches.”
This is no conspiracy theory: I think he may be close to the truth of it.
Of course, dropping your stored cookies would be enough to break this, so it’s not clear it’s all that invasive or predatory.
[Posted with ecto]