Hacker News Reader

Comment by afsina | Hacker News Reader

A spyware? Come on. To my experience it was the clear advantage on the design, security and speed (launch and JS speed). It was way ahead of Firefox or IE. I often asked people why they use Chrome they say it feels faster and not cluttered. Sure commercials helped but IMO, it was the word of mouth made it that popular.

View on HN

Again: When you bundle it as a unwanted drive-by install and steal users' data, it's hard to not call something spyware.

According to wikipedia Google Chrome bundles:

    Randomly generated token included in installer. Used to measure success rate of Google Chrome once at installation.[99]

    Encoded string, according to Google, contains non-identifying information about where Chrome was downloaded from and its installation week, and is used to measure promotional campaigns.[99] Google provides the source code to decode this string.[95] On Google search query On first launch and first use of address bar[99] Optional.

    Unique identifier along with user preferences, logs of usage metrics and crashes. default disabled

    Text typed into the address bar. Optional

    Information about how often Chrome is used, details about the OS and Chrome version. used on update

None of these things are "Stealing users data". From what I can see, you have to go out of your way to even send usage metrics and crashes to Google. All of these tracking metrics are similar, if not identical, to what other major browsers are currently doing.

I think you misunderstand me.

See comment thread here for classification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631843

>'steal users data'

Please. Aren't we all tired of this?

If you download and install App A because you want App A, but unasked App B also gets installed as a paid-for drive-by installation which sets itself as your new default browser, which upon first launch (because its now default) imports all your data, history, bookmarks and passwords from your actual preferred browser and then proceeds to send all this data to App B's vendor without making it clear to you what just happened...

How is that not stealing? How is that different from what we usually call spyware?

There is nothing legitimate about how Chrome has hijacked a multitude of users' PCs and their data. There's no way to defend this behaviour.

> which upon first launch (because its now default) imports all your data, history, bookmarks and passwords from your actual preferred browser

Any source showing that it is put as default browser and imports everything without asking?

"proceeds to send all this data to App B's vendor"

Proof?

It's called "sync" and you can bet everyone who has a Gmail account who gets asked to "log into Google" when Chrome is opened (as their new default browser) will enter their username and password without giving a second thought to it or realizing what they just authorized.

That's ofcourse if they even noticed that their browser now looks slightly different at all.

Voila. Data stolen. Or are you going to argue that this represents completely concentfull and legitimately syncing?

Are you talking about Chrome browser?

If you say synchronized data in Chrome is being sold to 3rd parties by Google, I would really love to see a proof for this claim.

I'm not saying Google is selling the data.

I'm saying Google shouldn't have the Firefox/MSIE data in the first place, because lots of users never intended to install chrome, but got it as a drive-by installation.

They are the illegitimate third party "stealing" the data.

> They are the illegitimate third party "stealing" the data.

And you still didn't provide any proof of that

Chrome can do client side encryption of your data, which isn't something you can say about the new Firefox Sync.

Source?

Are you perhaps thinking of the currently unused "class-A data"?

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/04/30/firefox-syncs-n...

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...

https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/wiki/onepw-protoc...

Edit:

From what I can see, client side encryption in Google Chrome appears to be opt-in?

It is entirely optional, and don't fit normal definitions of "spyware".

You mistakenly assume this feature which by default requests your google login for sync will be understood by users as this, when they open their browser and see "Log into google". Much more likely is that your casual user will think they're logging into Gmail.

This is a dark UX anti-pattern, using the same technique as a regular scammer or phishing site.

Google is absolutely, horrifyingly into evil territory here.

I think what Win8.1 does with pushing you to use MS accounts during OOBE is a much worse dark pattern than this.

"I think hanging someone is worse than just giving them poison."

I don't particularly care about this spyware debate but I can't see how something bad being better than something else bad bears any relevance unless we are talking about choosing between two bad options.

The vast majority of "spyware" and "malware" these days has a big long page of EULA legalise that makes the tracking totally optional too.

People clicking the "I agree" button on a EULA is not consent.

I am tired of them stealing user data, yes.

> speed (launch and JS speed). It was way ahead of Firefox or IE.

By the time V8 shipped, SpiderMonkey's TraceMonkey (and not long thereafter JaegerMonkey) was pretty competitive. There were differences between the engines—TraceMonkey fell off fast paths more often while V8 sans Crankshaft had fewer optimizations for tight loops—but they weren't night and day differences.

This is all history, of course. Nowadays, V8 and SpiderMonkey have essentially the same architecture (although as I understand things SpiderMonkey is more unified with the IonMonkey JIT core powering both Baseline and Ion, whereas Crankshaft and non-Crankshaft V8 are more divergent).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com