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Comment by Manishearth | Hacker News Reader

Does Google actually track web activity when logged out whilst logged in to Chrome? By this I mean connecting e.g. searches done on google maps with your account, not just storing the history.

Google of course has all the information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that (you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect Google to use browser fingerprinting to track you when logged out in a different browser, but I'm not sure about web activity in Chrome. Sounds plausible either way.

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The use case for this is that you want to leave your gmail/youtube/etc all logged in, but not let Google track you all over the internet. My primary use for this feature is this specific use case. I created a "Google Spyware" container and configured Google-related things to open in there. If I go to google.com outside of that container, I'm a non-logged-in user. If I open it in the container I AM logged in, so I get all the convenience of staying logged in without the downside of all the surveillance. Of course there are other means to track me, but this is a big step in the right direction.

I know. I've been using containers ever since it was an experiment :)

My question is independent of container tabs, it's a question of whether we know the level of tracking Google does on a signed-in chrome where your google account is not signed in in the session (is this even possible?)

You can find pretty much all the data that Google has on you - they allow you to examine the history of it. As far as I know they don't track your entire web browsing history but they do record all uses of their sites with your account.

But personally I certainly don't need to be logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than having to go about deleting it (or not because there's so many other things to get distracted by)

> don't track your entire web browsing history

Entire or not, does Google analytics apply here?

Yeah, I think this is where things start to get fairly pointless with avoiding being tracked. I'm imagining that even at a basic level they can match up any Google searches / GMail you use to your IP address and then follow that via Google Analytics.

I'm happily using DDG as a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need to stop using GMail.

I've been a happy customer of https://www.fastmail.com/ for some years now (and used Gmail before). I highly recommend them for anyone considering leaving Gmail. You pay them with money instead of data.

ProtonMail or Tutanota are great replacements.

Why wouldn't they? Judging from the RLZ related files I had to clean off of my Mac, Google is bundling RLZ (Google's tracking library) with Chrome on all OSes. I'd be shocked if they're deploying but not using something like that.

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