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Monday, June 24, 2019

Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.

You open your browser to look at the web. Do you know who is looking back at you?

Over a recent week of web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the web.

This was made possible by the web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really is up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most-popular web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.

It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla’s Firefox, which has default privacy protections. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine.

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[Google Chrome has been 'surveillance software' for a long time. --Editor]

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Get the browser that plants tree. It's called ecosia

Anonymous said...

I tried Chrome, and soon realized it just made my browser get slower and slower, until it would crash and I would have to re-boot. I guess it was all that surveillance. Explorer wasn't much better. FireFox is the most stable browser I have found.

Anonymous said...

Mozilla FireFox is not as bloated and advertising hungry. Google tracks and profiles your activity and sells the data. Google use to be able to boast security but not anymore. Their free scans only remove cookies that are not their clients. I can no longer even work from home using Google the IT dept has flagged them I have to use FireFox or move to the Linux segmented portion of my machine.

Anonymous said...

NSA is spying on ALL browsers , Fool !!!

Obama authorized it > Don't you remember that ???

Well , He DID !!!! All have to give it all up to NSA !!!

Anonymous said...

Ok, "Sweet One". BTW how's Jonestown 2.0 going?