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Comment by stevenleeg | Hacker News Reader

Erg, the idea of Google phoning home information about each page I visit at the browser level is a bit terrifying...

It does happen already - after all, you have shared browsing history between logged in devices using Chrome.

My idea doesn't require anything new except them measuring load times, which I'm guessing they're doing already for improving Chrome, and then using this data to influence search ranking. Everything else is already set up and working, and you opt into it if you're using Chrome and are logged in browser-wide.

How confident are you that that doesn't happen already?

It certainly does happen already if you are opted into it.

It certainly does happen already without having to opt-in for the many sites that collaborate with Google, reporting your interactions with their site to GA.

I was trying to avoid making a controversial statement. I didn't mean to imply that you were explicitly opting in, just that you are opted in.

It already happens with every site using Google Analytics, which is nearly every site you visit...

Unless you are running add-ons that block Google Analytics, which I would assume everyone here would already be doing.

Everyone here constitutes maybe 1% of total traffic on the internet; still plenty of data points to be had.

Last I knew, you couldn't disable Chrome's async DNS feature, which will bypass your system's configured DNS servers and use Google's own. So, while certainly not the same level of tracking that Google Analytics or even browser history can perform, many (all?) domains you visit are still sent back to Google in one form or another:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=432236

Well, I don't use Chrome. Do you know if this affects Firefox as well?

It shouldn't. I must've just gotten myself mixed up. I thought this thread was about Chrome phoning home. Sorry for propagating confusion.

Holy hell. So this is the dumb DNS crap Chrome is doing. I had occasional issues with Chrome suddenly not being able to load anything due to what looked like obvious DNS issues, except they didn't affect anything else and there was no way for me to do anything with it except wait it out. There were moments I thought I'm imagining things.

Yeap! And if you're on a private network you can leak internal domain names. Or, if you some hosts that are available publicly but resolve differently internally, you'll get the wrong IP. I think the only real solution is to kill Google's DNS IPs in your routing table.

UMatrix is a good way to get an easy visual of what's getting sent and loaded and from where.

If if was every page, that would be terrifying. But if it only measured the speed of pages directly linked from a Google search result, I would be fine with that. Google wouldn't be learning anything new there.

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