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Wow, I didn't think sensationalist headlines were allowed on HN. I'm guessing mods are asleep or just don't care anymore. Edit: If the mods are listening, I've come up with an alternative title for you: "The Evil GOOGLE Has Installed a MALICIOUS BACKDOOR On All Chrome Users Machines To Sell PERSONAL DATA to RUSSIAN HACKERS on the DARK WEB". This will surely get the clicks now. You can thank me later.
If you really want to help, suggesting an accurate and neutral title, preferably using representative language from the article itself, is a great way to do that. We don't know enough to get it right in every case, even when awake.
According to this source code [0], it looks like this is in Chromium as well. Does that mean this affects Electron applications? [0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
I’ve taken to using FF for browsing With noscript etc and chrome for when I need something to work well and can accept some tracking
Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim" level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine monoculture?
Don't forget Electron! Like Atom, VS Code etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't be evil... Until we are deployed enough that users don't have a choice... Now that Google has cornered the market for Internet browsing, they're using that foothold to change how it works to suit their dominance. This is why they are not concerned about per-site tracking that Google Analytics does, as long as THEY as a company have direct browser-based tracking, they no longer need to provide tracking services…
Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't be evil"? It's not been applicable for half a decade now, and even in 2015 when it was officially removed from the last company documents, it was already a dead phrase. Google had already cornered the market back in 2012, when it surpassed every other browser, with an absolute majority dominance (>50% market share) achieved way back in 2015. Google has been in…
Historical? It's not like it was 50 years ago.
Just ask: why does an advertising company make a browser?
In terms of strategic reasons, as a company that depends on people browsing on their websites other reasons are obvious: avoid lock in that could be pushed by third-party browser makers/competitors (say IE becomes the most popular and it implements proprietary extensions that work only on their websites[1]), ensure there exists a fast secure browser so that people can keep browsing even if everyone else stops making good browsers out there.
[1] Now before you go ahead and point out how Google proposes HTML/HTTP features that get implemented in their browsers and on the server side, all such features have public specification and source code, so anyone else could implement them too. This is very different from the IE days of yore, where MS was extending IE through ActiveX. ActiveX was developed in house and they were releasing binary plugins/SDKs to develop ActiveX plugins, effectively maintaining full control over it (one would have to develop ActiveX compatible technology from scratch if they wanted it open source, with Chrome all they have to do is fork the source code).
I must be dense but I never see the `x-client-data` header in the request headers of the network tab in developer tools.