14 DAY TRIAL // There's no doubt that Google is very serious about Google+ and the +1 button, which, while it seemed rather out of place at first, is becoming an important bit of Google's social strategy.
The company obviously wants as many websites to use the button as possible. It's been expanding its functionality in order to make it more enticing to website owners and more useful to Google+ users.
Now, Google is going one step further and has released a +1 extension for Chrome which enables users to +1 any page on the web, regardless of whether it has a +1 button or not.
It's easy to understand why Google would love to get people to install the extension. While it may be able to convince websites to use the +1 button, since Google+ is getting fairly big, and especially with the promise that it may become a ranking factor in the future, not all pages on the web are going to do it.
This is where the extension comes in. It works exactly like the button. There's a counter of how many people +1'd the page and the icon turns blue if you have already clicked on it.
Google hasn't made much fuss about it, but Chrome VP Sundar Pichai posted a link to it on Google+.
There's been some talk about the privacy implications of using the extension, but there's not much to worry about.
"By installing this extension, all of the pages and URLs you visit will be sent to Google in order to retrieve +1 information. Examples of this information include whether you’ve previously +1’d the page and how many people have already +1’d the page," Google explained.
However, Google has said that it does not store this information for more than two weeks and it only does it for debugging purposes, it's not used in any way by the company or shared with anyone.
That said, if you don't feel comfortable with the idea of Google having even a temporary list of all of the sites you've visited, it's probably best not to install the extension.
That said, the +1 button does the very same thing on any page that has it, the fact that you visited the page is sent to Google, regardless of whether you click on the +1 button or not.
For that matter, the Facebook Like button also does this and it's gotten Facebook in trouble with a German data protection official.