Google Chrome has become surveillance software.

Discussion in 'Networking and Security' started by themickey, Jun 22, 2019.

  1. KeLo

    KeLo

    The latest release wants you to sign-in with an account to access your bookmarks, etc.
    More data harvesting, like cell phones...
    It seems much worse for tracking in Win 10 than in Win7 also.
     
    #11     Jun 23, 2019
  2. zdave83

    zdave83

    What effect does Chrome's Incognito mode, not logged in, have on tracking & privacy ?
     
    #12     Jun 23, 2019
  3. themickey

    themickey

    Not very good from my experience, not as good as firefox.
    There was once on AFR.COM you could view all articles in incognito mode but it wouldn't work with Chrome.
     
    #13     Jun 23, 2019
  4. themickey

    themickey

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/27/help-desk-how-fight-spies-your-chrome-browser/
    Is your Web browser spying on you? My recent column about the stark privacy differences between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox generated a lot of conversation — and questions from readers about what you can do to avoid surveillance while you surf.

    The main lesson: If Google is a data vampire, Chrome is its fangs. For most people, not using a browser made by an advertising company is the simplest way to protect your data from thousands of tracking firms, including Google itself. I recommend switching to the nonprofit Firefox, which has privacy-focused default settings that automatically block tracking cookies from ad and data companies, including Google itself. Apple’s Safari and Brave (which has an ad blocker built in) are also fine choices.

    But I understand some people just can’t quit Chrome. Barbara Karpel of Lauderhill, Fla., writes that her dental office uses software that asks for the Google browser. “When we submit a claim online, we are told that the insurance company’s platform only accepts Chrome,” she says.

    Some people have invested in Chromebook laptops built around Google’s browser — or just think Chrome is faster than the alternatives.

    There are ways to defang Chrome, if you don’t just use the default settings. Making Chrome better respect privacy requires messing around under the hood and installing privacy software, or extensions, into the browser.

    Here’s what I recommend to fight the advertising surveillance machine. Bonus: Some of these steps will also make websites load faster. Privacy for the win!
    Don’t count on Incognito mode to protect your privacy. Or a VPN.

    First, a warning: The “private” browsing mode in Chrome probably doesn’t do what you think it does. Incognito is the privacy equivalent of using an umbrella in a hurricane. It keeps information from being saved on your computer’s search and browsing history, which is only useful if you want to hide your activity from other people who share your browser. It does not stop websites, search engines and Internet service providers from tracking what you do.

    “Does using a VPN solve the privacy issues you spoke about on Google Chrome?” asks reader Dan Harmon. Unfortunately, no. A VPN, or virtual private network, can obscure what you do online from your Internet service provider, including your work, school or someone spying locally on your network. But if you’re logged into Google or Facebook, a VPN won’t stop the tech giants and their partners from tracking your searches and other things you do in Chrome.
    Tell Google to collect less personal information.

    A great place to start is by telling Google itself to stop some of the tracking of your online activity that it associates with your Google account. I suggest checking two spots:

    Log in to Google’s advertising settings (adssettings.google.com), and make sure “ad personalization” is set to “off.” Doing this will make Google stop targeting ads to you on sites such as YouTube, though it alone won’t stop Google from collecting data about you.

    Then head over to your Activity controls (myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols) and turn off — or set to “pause,” in Google’s strange lingo — your “Web & App Activity.” This tells Google not to record your searches, ads you click on, apps you use and other data about how you use its services. The downside, as Google will remind you, is that some of its services might not work as well. While you’re in this menu, go ahead and also pause “Location History” as well as “Voice and Audio Activity.”

    Check the circle in the top right corner of Chrome to see if you're logged in — and make sure you don't have "sync" turned on. (Geoffrey Fowler/The Washington Post)
    Make sure you’re not using Chrome Sync.

    In your Chrome browser, tap the circular icon in the top right corner to make sure you’re not signed in with your Google account and using the Sync function. This would allow Chrome to pass your browsing history to Google. (The data would be private if you also set a passphrase in Chrome, but most people haven’t done that.)

    And while you’re at it, tell Chrome not to automatically log in the browser to your Google account whenever you sign in to Gmail. To do that, tap the three dots in the upper right corner of Chrome to find your way to Settings. There, search “Gmail,” and you’ll find a setting for “Allow Chrome sign-in.” Set that to “off.”

    There is one Chrome setting that privacy advocates disagree on: sending a “Do Not Track” request with your browsing traffic. Once upon a time, this was a good idea — but the industry hasn’t taken action on it, and now some data companies actually use it as one more way to track people. The argument for turning it on: You’re telling sites you specifically do not consent to them tracking you.
    Add a privacy extension.

    You can download software to add to Chrome that works behind the scenes to automatically block tracking cookies and other snooping techniques used by an armada of ad and data companies.

    These free programs work as extensions (also known as plug-ins) for the desktop version of Chrome. I have long used Privacy Badger, which works with minimal hassle and is backed by a nonprofit that is squarely on our side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other good choices include DuckDuckGo and Disconnect, as well as Ghostery and uBlock, which block both trackers and ads.

    Blocking trackers is more of an art than a science, so don’t be afraid to try a few of them to see which work best on the sites you use most often.

    In addition to protecting your privacy, the extensions could help sites load faster because they scrape tracking code out of pages.
    Protect Chromebooks, too.

    “I downloaded Firefox,” writes Eva Hashemi from Boca Raton, Fla. “Then my son reminded me that his new laptop is a Chromebook. Yikes! Any advice on this? It’s too late to return it.”

    All hope is not lost. If your Chromebook isn’t locked down (say, by school administrators) and you can still add extensions, you could install the privacy software I recommended above.

    Or another idea: If the version of Chrome OS you’re using supports the installation of Android apps, then you could also install the Android version of Firefox via the Google Play store.
    Stop using Google for searches.

    Asks John Peterson from Atlanta: “If I use DuckDuckGo as my default, is my privacy maintained when using my Mac installed with Chrome?”

    Using a privacy-first search engine such as DuckDuckGo won’t stop websites you visit from tracking you.

    But changing your search engine to DuckDuckGo will definitely send less of your data to Google. Our searches are perhaps the most valuable personal information we share with Google — they convey not only what’s on our minds, but also what we’re looking to buy.

    Chrome lets you switch your default search engine away from Google. Go to Settings, and then search for “search engine” and change the address bar setting.

    DuckDuckGo is among the most well-known in the niche world of Google search alternatives. It promises not to track your searches or build a profile of you. It makes money through advertising around the context of what you search, rather than by tracking you.

    Is it as good as Google? No. But it keeps getting better — and now claims over 41 million searches per day, up from 12 million in 2016. Clearly, interest in privacy is on the rise.
     
    #14     Jun 28, 2019
  5. themickey

    themickey

    Privacy-first browsers look to take the shine off Google’s Chrome
    Key Points

    Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months.
    “If you look at anybody who’s in a position to strike back and gain market share, it would be Microsoft,” said David Smith, a vice president at the market analysis firm Gartner.
    The nonprofit Mozilla, which has been biting at the heels of leading browsers for most of its existence, is introducing more aggressive privacy settings to try to stand out and take advantage of the privacy stumbles by Google and other tech giants.

    Before Google, Facebook and Amazon, tech dominance was known by a single name: Microsoft.

    And no product was more dominant than Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer. The company’s browser was the gateway to the internet for about 95 percent of users in the early 2000s, which helped land Microsoft at the center of a major government effort to break up the company.

    Almost two decades later, Google’s Chrome now reigns as the biggest browser on the block, and the company is facing challenges similar to Microsoft’s from competitors, as well as government scrutiny.

    But Google faces a new wrinkle — a growing realization among consumers that their every digital move is tracked.

    “I think Cambridge Analytica acted as a catalyst to get people aware that their data could be used in ways they didn’t expect,” said Peter Dolanjski, the product lead for Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, referring to the scandal in which a political consulting firm obtained data on millions of Facebook users and their friends.

    And in something of a poetic role reversal, Microsoft is positioning itself to pick up the slack from people who may be fed up with Google’s Chrome browser and its questionable privacy practices. Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months.

    “If you look at anybody who’s in a position to strike back and gain market share, it would be Microsoft,” said David Smith, a vice president at the market analysis firm Gartner.

    Microsoft is just one of a number of companies and organizations looking to take a piece out of Google — some using the company’s own open-source software. One name that might be familiar to most consumers — Mozilla’s Firefox browser — is also a veteran of the “browser wars ” of two decades ago. The nonprofit Mozilla, which has been biting at the heels of leading browsers for most of its existence, is introducing more aggressive privacy settings to try to stand out and take advantage of the privacy stumbles by Google and other tech giants.

    The early browser wars took place on desktop computers, before the introduction of smartphones, but the latest fight is more complicated, involving both desktop and mobile applications, and there are a lot of players.

    Web browsers, being the primary way the vast majority of people experience the internet, are a crucial choke point in the digital ecosystem. While the browsers are free to users, the companies that operate them can have an outsized impact on how the internet works — especially if they gain a dominant market position. For a company like Google, which makes most of its money from online advertising, that has meant being able to liberally collect user data.For a nonprofit like Mozilla, more users means the chance to convince developers and other tech companies to adopt their privacy-focused standards.

    Smaller browsers like Opera, Brave and Vivaldi have devoted followings, in part because of privacy promises but also because they have a lot in common with Chrome. Google released most of the code behind Chrome as a free, open-source resource called Chromium, a foundation others can use to make browsers with similar functionality.

    Last year, Microsoft decided to join the club, saying it would rebuild its Edge browser from the same, open-source Chromium engine, and even make a desktop version for the Mac. Early versions are available for preview.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has talked up the future of the browser, saying at the company’s annual developer conference in May that he wanted it to be the “one browser” for people to use “across their work and life” — on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones.

    How Microsoft will approach the privacy question is unclear, however. Nadella said he wanted to “push the envelope” by making it transparent to users which cookies are being used to track them — a position far short of what Firefox promises, for example — but the company also says it’s in the “early stages of exploring how best to empower users” on the browser.

    Meanwhile, Google is facing a deluge of complaints about its size and power — much as Microsoft did two decades ago. The Justice Department is preparing an antitrust investigation of Google, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the company has become a top political target for both Democrats and Republicans.

    Chrome, with more than 60 percent market share worldwide, is yet another source of complaints about Google’s power, after its search engine and advertisement businesses. Last year, Chrome changed the system for logging in to the browser, a move that one researcher said could allow Google to collect data much more easily.

    Firefox trails Microsoft in corporate size and influence, but it is pressing other browsers on privacy and playing up its status as a nonprofit. Last month, Firefox changed the initial settings for new users so that third-party tracking “cookies” such as those used for ad purposes are blocked — meaning the default is no tracking.

    Ads don’t go away with the change. Instead, they become less personalized and, the thinking goes, less creepy.

    Firefox plans to roll out the change to existing users of the browser in the coming months, making it more difficult for advertisers to follow its users around the web. The company is a distant third in the browser market at 5 percent, according to StatCounter.

    A technology columnist at the Post wrote in a scathing review last month that he was switching from Chrome to Firefox, calling Google’s product “a lot like surveillance software.” In a week of desktop websurfing, the columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, wrote that he discovered 11,189 requests for tracker cookies that were blocked by Firefox but would have been allowed by Chrome.

    Apple’s Safari web browser has used similar cookie-blocking technology since 2017, and it regularly updates the browser to try to stay ahead of Facebook and Google’s tracking systems.

    Chrome is planning updates of its own in an effort to give users more reasons to stick with the browser and reassure them about privacy. In May, Google said it would require third-party developers to better label their cookies in a way that Chrome will be able to read and classify, so that users can decide which ones to block.

    The browser fight has become heated enough to worry the advertising and media industries. Advertisers have become used to filling up websites with sometimes dozens of “cookies” and other forms of online tracking, and they fear a wider backlash against personalized, data-driven ads.

    Last year, the IAB Tech Lab, which works on behalf of the industry to try to set standards for online ads, set up a working group and stepped up direct talks with the makers of web browsers.

    “We’re working on collaborating with browsers to find solutions that put consumers at the center,” Sam Tingleff, the IAB Tech Lab’s chief technology officer, said. “We think there’s a reasonable middle ground to do so and enable better overall user experiences.”

    For now, there are few signs that Google’s browser dominance will end anytime soon, but the tech industry is riddled with examples of companies that appeared to be invincible just before their fall, including with web browsers.

    “It wasn’t clear that there was going to be anything that took down Internet Explorer,” Smith, of Gartner, said. “But it happened.”
    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/pri...ook-to-take-the-shine-off-googles-chrome.html
     
    #15     Jul 6, 2019
  6. themickey

    themickey

    Google still keeps a list of everything you ever bought using Gmail, even if you delete all your emails
    Google and other tech companies have been under fire recently for a variety of issues, including failing to protect user data, failing to disclose how data is collected and used and failing to police the content posted to their services.

    Companies such as Google have embedded themselves in our lives with useful services including Gmail, Google Maps and Google Search, as well as smart products such as the Google Assistant which can answer our questions on a whim. The benefits of these tools come at the cost of our privacy, however, because while Google says that privacy should not be a “luxury good, ” it’s still going to great lengths to collect as much detail as possible about its users and making it more difficult than necessary for users to track what’s collected about them and delete it.

    Here’s the latest case in point.

    In May, I wrote up something weird I spotted on Google’s account management page. I noticed that Google uses Gmail to store a list of everything you’ve purchased, if you used Gmail or your Gmail address in any part of the transaction.

    If you have a confirmation for a prescription you picked up at a pharmacy that went into your Gmail account, Google logs it. If you have a receipt from Macy’s, Google keeps it. If you bought food for delivery and the receipt went to your Gmail, Google stores that, too.

    You get the idea, and you can see your own purchase history by going to Google’s Purchases page.

    Google says it does this so you can use Google Assistant to track packages or reorder things, even if that’s not an option for some purchases that aren’t mailed or wouldn’t be reordered, like something you bought a store.

    At the time of my original story, Google said users can delete everything by tapping into a purchase and removing the Gmail. It seemed to work if you did this for each purchase, one by one. This isn’t easy — for years worth of purchases, this would take hours or even days of time.

    So, since Google doesn’t let you bulk-delete this purchases list, I decided to delete everything in my Gmail inbox. That meant removing every last message I’ve sent or received since I opened my Gmail account more than a decade ago.

    Despite Google’s assurances, it didn’t work.
    Like a horror movie villain that just won’t die

    On Friday, three weeks after I deleted every Gmail, I checked my purchases list.

    I still see receipts for things I bought years ago. Prescriptions, food deliveries, books I bought on Amazon, music I purchased from iTunes, a subscription to Xbox Live I bought from Microsoft -- it’s all there.
    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/google-gmail-purchase-history-cant-be-deleted.html
     
    #16     Jul 6, 2019