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Comment by natmaster | Hacker News Reader

I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out.

For instance, in Android, Google tracks with GPS accuracy your whereabouts constantly. This isn't just what IP your desktop is attached to. Furthermore, there is no prompt telling you this happens with a very easy way of undoing. In fact even if you knew about this it is very hard to find a way to disable.

Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged. Again, this is not explained in some easy opt-out screen and in fact the only way to get around this is to use SRWare Iron, where they removed that code.

But Microsoft makes it easy for you to choose the privacy options even telling you about them on install.

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> I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies, and yet are so concerned about an easy opt out.

For me it's because I control my interaction with Google. I don't use their search for things I don't want them recording, I don't use gmail for conversations I expect to be private. Once your talking about the private files I store on my hard drive and access with the OS, the keystrokes I enter on my keyboard for every application, then the reach is far greater. Having a company like Google say "You can use these services, but we're going to spy on you" is not the same as MS saying "we will be watching and have access to everything on your computer, oh and you can't disable all of this spying without an enterprise license."

And MS made it hard to change operating systems. On linux, you get live oses, and easy multi-os with a boot menu. With msft making it hard/impossible to change oses with secureboot, it's just not possible to suspend disbelief that your interests have any reasonable parity with msft's own interests.

This is completely false. For one thing, SRWare Iron is a scam:

http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-...

For another thing, Chrome doesn't log every website you visit. The closest thing they do is suggest autocompletions for searches/URLs you type in the URL, which is a straightforwardly-explained checkbox in Chrome's privacy settings.

The Google updater is the main reason that I don't install Picasa or Chrome... that's a good thing if Iron doesn't use it.

> Chrome doesn't log every website you visit

But it does. If you get a new android phone and log in with a google account then it updates your browser history on chrome. Which could only be done if your non-incognito history is stored in google's servers.

Oh, I forgot about that - that feature wasn't available when Chrome was launched.

To be fair, that feature also isn't very hidden; the sync settings let you turn off history sync or use a sync passphrase which prevents Google from seeing your browsing history.

Microsoft was caught with their pants down returning google search results to microsoft via internet explorer. They call it "a signal" for bing. The difference between google and microsoft is microsoft isn't as forthcoming regarding what information they retrieve. No dashboard to browse everything microsoft tracks... You just have to trust microsoft. Good luck with that.

>I find it shocking how people readily accept Google's far worse policies

I find it shocking how hypocritical Microsoft was towards Google all these years only to find out their even worse than Google because they baked these privacy "violations" into their browser.

>Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged

Utter bullshit. I don't login to Chrome when I use it and none of my URL's are sent to Google.

> Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged. Again, this is not explained in some easy opt-out screen and in fact the only way to get around this is to use SRWare Iron, where they removed that code.

Citation?

My experience:

A while back I put together a Linode server for a small project. Because I was lazy I made a private page of web links for the site logs and made the URL something long and obscure with plenty of backslashes that couldn't be spidered or guessed. The main site had no Google analytics and barely any traffic.

When I checked the logs a couple of days later my private log page had been accessed externally. The visitor's IP address was in one of the ranges that belongs to Google.

So... I changed the URL, looked at the new URL in Chrome, and checked again a day later.

Same thing. Someone - or something - from Google was accessing my private URL, based on my Chrome history.

I changed the URL again and switched to Safari.

Nothing.

Clearly, Chrome phones home and Google feels entitled to check new URLs that it can't spider. Safari doesn't phone home. (Or if it does, no one at Apple cares enough to check weird URLs).

I don't think any other conclusion is possible.

I prefer Safari because I always thought it weird to let a company who's primary revenue is targeted advertising control my browser.

So instead you use a browser from a company whose goal is to control all your purchasing?

Yesterday one of my friends bought a mac. He needed a credit card before he could install vim... vim needs brew, which needs xcode, which needs the istore, which needs an appleid, which needs (well, wants) a credit card on file.

Hmm, I don't think you need a credit card on file. You can select "None" as your payment method. This should allow you to download anything that's free (they'll still ask you for a credit card if you try to download something paid, of course). You installed XCode dev tools and you're set.

You're probably quite right - I'm just going off my friend's report.

Have you tried Chromium? Just curious because this is my go to browser instead of Chrome and I am under the impression that it should not do this. Although I could be mislead. easy download through the following: http://chromium.woolyss.com/

> Google's far worse policies

While I don't disagree that Google does consume a lot of user data, I'm pretty sure most of these are opt in or at least explained fairly up-front, and that their resultant policies are no worse than Microsoft's.

Can you give an example of where their policies are clearly worse?