Android Question Is this website safe?

[Beja]

Hi All,

While searching for ways to parse lat/lon, I came across this website, but googling for the site itself
I read it is not safe.. but it used by many people..

The site name is: googleapis.com
Thanks in advance

// Example of using the code to parse Latitude and Longitude from a Google Geocoding call.
//
Dim address As String
address = "98052"

Dim URL As String
URL = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=" & address & "&sensor=false"

'Create Http object
Dim http As Object
Set http = CreateObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1")

'Send request To URL
http.Open "GET", URL

http.send
'Get response data As a string

response = http.responseText

' Tokenize the response '
Dim tokens As Object
Dim tokenized As String
tokenized = tokenizer.JsonTokenize(response, tokens)

' Search for latitude and longitude '
Dim dictA As Object
Set dictA = tokenizer.JsonDictionary(tokenized, tokens)

Dim listB As Object
Set listB = tokenizer.JsonList(dictA.Item("results"), tokens)

Dim dictC As Object
Set dictC = tokenizer.JsonDictionary(listB.Item("0"), tokens)

Dim dictD As Object
Set dictD = tokenizer.JsonDictionary(dictC.Item("geometry"), tokens)

Dim dictE As Object
Set dictE = tokenizer.JsonDictionary(dictD.Item("location"), tokens)

Dim lat As Double
lat = tokenizer.JsonDouble(dictE.Item("lat"), tokens)

Dim lng As Double
lng = tokenizer.JsonDouble(dictE.Item("lng"), tokens)

 

[TomA]

After doing some researching, I would guess that googleapis.com is as safe as any google site. One site I ran across contained the following info about it:

googleapis.com is a domain used by Google APIs which is an widget company that is part of a network of sites, cookies, and other technologies used to track you, what you do and what you click on, as you go from site to site, surfing the Web. Over time, sites like googleapis.com can help make an online profile of you usually including the sites you visit, your searches, purchases, and other behavior. Your profile can then be exchanged and sold between various companies like googleapis.com as well as being sold to other advertisers and marketers.

However, this was a site selling privacy software (see http://www.donottrackplus.com/trackers/googleapis.com.php), so from their point of view, it is not a safe site but if you try to go to http://googleapis.com, it just brings up a the google search page (actually, the request returns a 'HTTP/1.0 302 Found' response with a redirect to the search page - my free program WebBug - downloadable from http://www.cyberspyder.com/webbug.html - will safely show you the response details). I would expect that it is as safe as any site because any site (including other google sites) may include tracking functions - while some of us may be very concerned with privacy issues, it is hard to avoid this tracking so, personally, I just ignore the issue and don't do any surfing on my personal computer that I would not want anyone to know about. And I use Vipre anti-virus software (http://vipreantivirus.com/) that lets me easily delete (daily) any tracking cookies I may have picked up.

 

[Beja]

Hi TomA, and thanks for the valuable input..

Google said it has nothing to do with this site and has no more comment.

 

[TomA]

Hi TomA, and thanks for the valuable input..

Google said it has nothing to do with this site and has no more comment.

I don't know why they would say that!
Check https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide (part of the developer site) - this is the page for "Google Hosted - Developer's Guide". Part way down that page is a section "Libraries" which contains an example of how to load a hosted library. The sample shown is for jQuery and calls for embedding <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"></script> in your page. It goes on to list more libraries with similar instructions. The related libraries are apparently hosted on a number of different sites.