Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch

siliconvalley.com

102 pointsJerry214 comments

Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20243473 (on the original Washington Post article).

If you are wondering (like I was) what exactly are the claims against Chrome that the article makes (instead of having just a flashy title):

- Chrome doesn't, by default, block cookie based tracking, nowhere near as much as default Firefox install it seems

- Chrome auto-logs you in the "Chrome Sign in" feature when you happen to login on Gmail. Really? I don't seem to be logged in in my Chrome but then again, I always use incognito mode

- mobile Chrome sends your location on every search and if you disable location sharing sends less accurate positioning information. I'd like to get a confirmation of this is true since if I disable location on my phone then no app can get it, Chrome or otherwise, I think. Also again this needs to be tested in incognito mode. And when the article says it still sends data but "less accurate", is that more accurate than your IP address allows to find your location? Because your IP address is always sent, inherently, in a web request so if it's not more accurate than the IP address then it doesn't really matter

In general I find this whole new awareness to privacy in browsers to be both welcome and frustrating. It is welcome because I'm happy people are finally waking up to it. It is frustrating because I've been using "private" mode browsing (with extensions and whatever was available, even had extension to remove the special Flash cookies) for the past 15+ years, never performed any Google or Youtube search while logged in, never logged in to more than 2 sites at once in the same browser session, using Tor for almost all browsing and I've been laughed at for doing so. Glad to see I wasn't totally crazy then, although a bit too late for that.

I moved to brave a while ago. Works great both in desktop and mobile, and you still get chromium under the hood.

The metrics it shows about the amount of ads and trackers blocked is astonishing...

Is Brave 100% open source? I don't trust them at all because I feel that the underlying business model is shady (replacing website ads with their own ads).

> Is Brave 100% open source?

They have the project on github so I guess the answer is yes...

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

The business model is also quite smart, since the users get paid BAT tokens for viewing ads.

Their business model is quite unethical, removing the page's monetization and replacing it with their own.

Arguably but arguably so is the business model of Chrome from a user perspective. So from that POV it’s not worse than Chrome but does benefit the user, whereas Chrome benefits Google, ad industry and sellers.

Is it though? As long the person running the browser understands the tradeoffs? I mean, the browser is supposed to be your user-agent after all.

To render and provide interactions as you deem fit...

One of the great ironies of the modern tech world is that people who hate Google on tribal^H^H^H privacy grounds generally don't care at all about open source purity.

Also Chromium is open source.

Open source or not, chromium is still fundamentally chrome and backed by Google, is it not? It can be used vanilla or built on top of (e.g., chromium and brave), but where Google goes so goes chromium. This is as much a privacy concern as it is a browser mono-culture concern, which has been a popular topic lately.

Further, just because something is open-source doesn't automatically free it of corporate encumbrance - something Google knows quite well [0][1].

[0] https://boingboing.net/2019/05/29/hoarding-software-freedom.... [1]https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/i-hate-being-right-2.html

The issue at hand is that Chrome may or may not perform surveillance or support it. If that is the concern, with Chromium you get to see everything it does and you know the code you're running, like any other open source project. So I disagree that using Chromium is a privacy concern similar to using Chrome.

Browser monoculture has advantages and disadvantages and would be the topic of a separate discussion.

I never claimed that Chromium is free of "corporate encumbrance" nor do I think that's a problem. I don't think there's any realistic risk that if Google stops developing on Chromium we would be losing that browser, there's too many people outside of Google with invested interest in keeping Chromium going so a popular separately maintained fork seems likely. And even in the extremely unlikely case that Chromium disappears overnight and nobody wants to touch that code base ever again, there are other browsers out there.

Setting cookies is now Surveillance? Hyperbole seems to have become norm in "journalism" these days.

oh, the irony. clickbait w/ the reward being ad revenue.

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