Wow. Google's Toolbar opt-in URL-tracking dialog has become more generic, indirect, and insistent over the years. It no longer includes the red 'yada yada' text Matt Cutts referred to last week.

On IE, it doesn't even offer a 'No' but rather an 'Ask Me Later', as if you'll have to agree eventually, so you might as well agree now. Kinda sneaky! (Do you think they A/B tested different wordings and went with the one yielding the most opt-ins?)

    On IE, it doesn't even offer a 'No' but rather an 'Ask Me Later', 

I freakin' hate shit like that. It's from the same play book as, "Are you still cheating on your wife?"

It's not just kinda sneaky, it's bullshit sneaky; it's not a yes/no option, it's yes/yes for two related, but different, things.

Facebook did the same with friend requests. Actually denying a friend request is a 15-minute-long affair that, I would bet, almost nobody actually does.

It works, though. "Not Now", most likely, has replaced "Deny Request" for good.

I pray for the day when technology has advanced to where we can be offered three choices.

Youtube has the same policy now. It really annoys me. "You can no longer use your youtube username password".

Matt Cutts' point assumes a very naive point of view, I believe. From his/Google's point of view, it is fairly disingenuous for Microsoft to use Suggested Sites data for Bing ranking - however, there's quite a few examples (from gmail's current "ads based on not just the current email" to how DoubleClick logs Google AdSense pages a user visits to better target ads to them), where the actual benefit to a company does not line up well with the user's understanding at that point. Clarifying all these points in red bold text would probably change our Internet browsing behavior a lot.

This is unfortunate. The google toolbar opt-in was one of the things that most impressed me about the company when I first joined.

It's still opt-in, is still fairly transparent about what enabling PageRank does, and still points to the full privacy policy.

Personally, I would have blown through the "Read this carefully" screen as another EULA. Even with the additional warning, and I'd bet other users do too. On the other hand, having it ask me, after being installed, about an incremental additional feature that could be enabled, but shares additional information in a quick easy to consume blurb of text... I'm much more likely to read it and ponder what clicking "yes" will do.