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> My anonymous source claimed that way back in 2005, Google wanted the full clickstream of billions of Internet users, and with Chrome, they’ve now got it. The API documents suggest Google calculates several types of metrics that can be called using Chrome views related to both individual pages and entire domains. What answer do the engineers at google working on this have for this violation of privacy?
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Any user, not just developers
Developers just replaced IE as the only thing they develop for with chrome, users then _have_ to use chrome because of web developers who only develop for chrome and consider any behaviour other than "it works in chrome" as a bug in other browsers, just as they did with IE. Then there's the relentless parade of "alternative browsers" that are just chrome skins - a period IE also went through - that intentionally try…
What you call chrome skins isn’t a thing, people are building softwares on top of Blink, the rendering engine used by Chrome. The issue here is the risk of ending with a single rendering engine for the majority of the browser market, a diversity of engine ensure a good respect of web standards, that has nothing to do with privacy or security.
When you say “they just replaced IE”, that was >10 years ago…
Java, is that you?!
I've directly seen people who have successfully manipulated search rankings by having logged-in chrome users search for a term, and then click on a given page. Works like a charm (though may not stick once the manipulation is done, unless organic users also prefer it).
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Personal (not work related opinion): This basically can’t happen with things like DMA and GDPR. DMA in particular means you can’t share data across “products” without explicit consent. So you could for example collect websites that don’t work for the purposes of improving Chrome, but not then share that with the Ads/Search orgs for personalisation or targeting, as far as I understand the legislation. Personal opinion…
The thing is that preventing "sharing" isn't sufficient. People who are concerned about privacy don't want any such data collected or stored in the first place, ever. The implicit "sharing" of my data with Google (or whatever company) is a problem in itself. Regardless of how "seriously" Google (or whatever company) takes it, for a lot of the data I don't want them to ever have it in the first place.
Seriously considering switching back to Firefox after all these years.
What's stopping you? I use both browsers and I see no reason why someone would pick Chrome over Firefox at this point in time.
Sure it isn't frequent, but it is frequent enough that once a day or so I have to open chrome to do something.
If anyone is surprised about chrome sending urls to Google, you can turn the “feature” off by unchecking “Make searches and browsing better” in the sync section of Google chrome settings. Creepy.