Fausty's Libertarian Blog: Google Chrome privacy issues

Friday, 2 April 2010

Google Chrome privacy issues

Google is not known for protecting your privacy and can practically be relied on to leach as much information from you as possible.

Not quite known for its probity, Microsnot, of all companies, found Chrome to be leaching your privacy, with every character you type.

The meat starts at about 1:50 minutes.

Be careful of things that are 'free'. They frequently have a hefty price tag that you can't see.

Oh, and Mandelsnake has not given up trying to block your internet connection.

Related:

Why do we let this creepy company called Google spy on our emails?

8 comments:

Jayce Kay said...: An interesting video and post, to say the least.

As a Chrome user myself I thought I would have a bit of a delve and download the Fiddler application just to see what is going on.

It would appear that for each keypress in the search bar is sent off to "clients1.google.co.uk" presumably as part of a search, reducing down to the item you are searching for, via each keypress.

I don't believe at the moment, that there is anything more sinister going on than just a different method of browsing the internet via their own software.

A bit of a read through of the privacy notice Google Chrome seems to uphold this.

"When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters that you type are sent to Google so that the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs that you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature, as explained here."

Of course if your not happy with this, it can be disabled and if that's not enough there's always IE8 or FF.

Still its good to have rational scepticism about these things.; 2 April 2010 10:50
Fausty said...: A very interesting take, Jayce. While I agree that there's probably nothing sinister going on, I believe we should be vigilant of corporations and boycott them.; 2 April 2010 12:25
John said...: Interesting indeed. If ie8 worked better with things like Flash Video and blogger, then Chrome probably would not have near as many users!

Of course, blogger is a google product so it may be something that forces the user to steer away from ie8. But Flash Video is used in some of the web's most popular games like Farmville, which is on both Facebook and through MSN.

The Flash Video software games work much better in Chrome than ie8!

And as long as you aren't doing anything illegal, is it really such a big deal that google is collecting so much data in Chrome?

People use what works best for them and surely realize that data is always collected. What isn't clearly stated though is exactly what is being done with that data.

One thing is for sure. All that collected data makes google a fantastic up to the minute search engine!

I also think it is a bit misleading by both ie8 and Chrome with their "in privacy" browsing. It says right on there that really the only thing happening is that the pages you visited aren't going to show up on the history.

Also, it's possible that if ie8 didn't take up about 1/4 of the top of the display, people wouldn't migrate to other browsers!

Just make Internet Explorer the best browser for ALL applications and you wouldn't have to make these videos trying to make one browser out to be--ewwww invading your privacy LOL!; 2 April 2010 12:27
Fausty said...: I'm fairly schitso with browsers, John. Just recently Firefox has been playing up (won't display pages properly), so I've abandoned it - for now.

Chrome has always been flakey with Flash (on my system). I don't know why, and I can't be @rsed to find out. If it doesn't work, bye bye! Life is too short! :)

Certainly, I'm not one of those who thinks that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Our government has proved time and again that if they don't like you, they'll have you. I don't want them knowing what I'm doing, regardless of the task's inanity. It's none of their business.

I so agree with your last para, but won't hold my breath.

To this day, notepad still has the same bug it had in the days of NT4! I.e., a bug that's 15 years old!; 2 April 2010 17:27
microdave said...: Fausty - were you aware of Firefox PORTABLE? I was told about it by my computer savvy nephew, and I've been running the latest v3.6.2 using it for a few days. I was reluctant to make the change with the installed version as I had some AddOn's which supposedly weren't compatible. However this has allowed me to try it out "without obligation", and without touching my current version.

I'm actually quite impressed, It runs very well from a pendrive, although I've moved it to My Documents just to free up a USB port. It would be a great way to show others an alternative to IE, without having to do anything other than plug it in. You can copy your "Bookmarks JSON" file over from the main installation. The only (minor) downside is that it doesn't seem to remember cookies, but I only have a couple normally allowed to stay anyway.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable; 2 April 2010 18:41
Fausty said...: Thanks for the tip, microdave. I'll definitely look into it.

Best regards; 2 April 2010 20:37
bridge design said...: Google has entered into browser war with its launch of Google Chrome - the open source browser from Google. Though there had been lots of rumors in the market about Google developing a browser but they guarded it almost as a top secret project.; 5 April 2010 10:20
Abi said...: When distributed by commercial interests 'free' (as in lunch) software does in deed often come at a cost, that of lost privacy. A very coherent and compelling talk about the risks of surrendering your data given by Eben Moglen can be watched here.
The thing to bare in mind is that free (as in lunch) or even Open Source is not the same as free (as in speech). I urge you to take back your online identity and choose free as in speech not as in lunch. There really is no such thing as a free lunch, but we can take our identities back and make them free as long as we pay attention to whom we give, and how we leak our data.; 23 January 2011 10:44