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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

Why does this article keep resurfacing everywhere? I've seen it on /r/technology multiple times. I refuse to believe it. Chrome has to have the most telemetry: it is produced by an ad company after all. Of all organizations maintaining major browsers, Google is the most incentivized to collect data. Follow the money.

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I don't necessarily agree with your argument - I think it's a perfectly reasonable conclusion that either Microsoft and Google could have worse telemetry in their browser.

That said, I noticed the strange behavior around this article as well. I've seen it pop up multiple times in various content aggregators, and the /r/technology mods even removed the post that I happened to notice and comment in.

I'm not sure why, it seemed like a completely reasonable article on its face. But maybe there's something underhanded going on behind the scenes?

Google's primary business is telemetry: I'd be shocked if they were worse at it than Microsoft. But I'm willing to accept you might disagree with this point.

Regarding the second point: And I think we agree here, the article is odd. It definitely seems like there's an anti-Edge narrative trying to achieve mindshare.

I should have decoupled my original comment, and only discussed the circulation of the article, as that's more concerning.

Google’s primary business is telemetry? Explain!

A means to an end for serving relevant ads, their bread and butter.

Their bread and butter is search ads, my dude. They don't need telemetry for that. They have search keywords. Almost all of their revenue comes from there and the margin there is huge.

What source suggests Google’s AdWords ads distributed across the entire web (all the AdWords sites that aren’t SERPs) don’t leverage telemetry and don’t drive meaningful revenue?

My guess: Everyone uses their services anyways, so they have no need to put as much telemetry in the browser.

Google also only needs to put enough telemetry in their browser to correlate your browsing with the other data they already have.

Which is basically zero. They do that just fine without telemetry. GA is ubiquitous.

For pages visited, they likely get this for free for a good chunk of users who opt in to sync. What other interesting telemetry data is there?

I think chrome is a good browser as long as your careful about which settings you toggle and you can live with the vendor having a mild incentive for adding new settings with bad (from a privacy pov) defaults. In return, you arguably get the most secure browser.

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