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Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

One problem is that Chrome is not open source - Chromium is. But 99% of people use Chrome, and there is no way to build Chrome from source to be sure what code is running.

We have to take Google's word for it that Chrome is identical to Chromium as regards privacy, and as others stated, Google's business interest is clearly to track user information, not to respect their privacy.

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I've already explained why this framing is incorrect: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034628

So, go ahead and check out a release branch, set the "Official" build flag yourself, wait anywhere from 2-8 hours for the binaries to get built, and verify it against the bits we ship.

Thanks for the information, I have never seen this stated officially anywhere.

So one can build Chromium with "Official", then add some DLLs (Flash, etc.), and get something 100% identical to Chrome?

Edit: And is there an official statement of this somewhere?

I went through it and there's still some ugly hackery involved on Windows. These are technical issues (e.g. how ffmpeg is compiled via MinGW), but they make it complicated to generate a non-branded, psuedo-official build. That said, all the pieces you need (minus the closed-source plugins) appear to be in the repository and can be built and compared against an official release. It could definitely be made easier, but would require some non-trivial engineering to do so.

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