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Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

This article give me a nervous twinge when I realized that if Google ever got Chrome to be a majority-share browser, they would really know everything there is to know about the web.

In effect, their algorithms/rankings could be peerless because they would actually know what every end user does and sees on the web.

The browser is wonderful but it's quite chatty about all of your Internet habits. I wonder if this message appears even if you turn off all the "send my history to Google" preferences.

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Chrome is open source, so in case something like this happen you can either investigate the source code, or create a more privacy compliant version. No such luck with I.E. or Safari.

While Chromium is open source, Chrome is not and could certainly "hide" away such features, but you're right to say that a more-private fork could / would be close behind.

Thanks, I didn't knew that, It seems to be like Android model, where they open source it few weeks after public disclosure of features.

I use the daily build of chromium on my ubuntu linux.

I'm pretty sure that it's the main line of development and I regularly receive new features, new bugs and new bug fixes as days passes. After some time all this goes to the chrome beta and finally in the chrome release.

I don't think that google adds tons of code 'behind' the back of the opensource repository which is then merged only a few weeks later, because I see a gradual change (aka. the phenotype of those changes) in the daily builds from the chromium repository.

Iron is one such browser built off the Chromium source.

For a list of some of differences between Chrome and Iron see: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron...

One of the Chrome devs posted an IRC transcript of when an Iron dev dropped by...

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...

...and it was less than flattering.

He's naive perhaps, but otherwise I don't see much wrong with his message. You shouldn't trust google, they're a big cooperation.

What's wrong here is that he's refusing to work with a willing upstream. It would be much better for everyone if he submitted patches to Google to allow everyone using Chrome to optionally turn off these tracking features.

Instead he's needlessly forking the project to "bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage". That's not being a good open source citizen.

He claims that in Germany he can make a lot of money at this. If he can then it means he's taking an open source project and doing something with it to make money. It doesn't even sound like he's closing the source of his fork (assuming he would even have this option). It's not the most efficient thing but if he really can make money with this I don't see much fault in it. It's risky because someone else could just push these changes back to Chrome killing his revenue stream.

Sure, it's just that the whole thing has a big "Google's all about stealing your data" vibe in its advertisements.

When in fact Google would be happy to take his patches, and most of those data-sharing features are improving the user experience (like type-ahead suggestions etc.).

That just rubs me the wrong way.

Right. You should trust the open source code which everyone has access to.

<Iron> the german people say: google is very evil <jamessan> yet you use google's adsense

Ouch :)

Here is one guys, early, take on Iron. Pretty much just comments stuff out.

http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam

What if they hook everyone on things like free calls on gmail and then make the plugin only work with they version of "crome"?

I know lots of ppl who would not see any problem.

Although it would be very non-google... but lately...

Safari is based on WebKit, which is definitely open source.

On the other hand, Microsoft has a majority-share browser, along with a search engine, advertising business etc. Are they doing all of this today?

Don't forget they have an OS as well, even if they were doing it today, how could we know? Who knows if they are doing it covertly under the guise of windows updates.

Disclaimer: I don't actually believe they do.

A savvy network admin with Ethereal could find out...

I would have assumed MS would use some encryption on the data they send, which would mean that nobody could ever know except Microsoft. That said, I don't know that any sort of encryption is used for Windows Updates. But they could do it...

Traffic analysis would let you know what kind of data is being sent, even without being able to decrypt the actual data.

> Are they doing all of this today?

No. Because they don't really care. They're not trying to understand your behavior to display ads you're more likely to click on. Google? it's their core business.

Don't be scared of that. Giving Google more information isn't the problem. They already have so much information that they can't use it all.

You should merely be scared of them working for another decade, in their current groove, because many wonders and horrors will be born.

Don't forget about Google Public DNS.

It checks against Google's own "it is down" app not against other users, which is the more practical approach.

But still, in asking Google's servers about the URL, you are telling Google what site you wanted to visit.

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