r/privacy • u/Cultural_Car3974 • Oct 02 '23
data breach Google Chrome Lovingly Spies On Your Browser History and It Would Like a Word With You
https://www.orwell.org/google-chrome-lovingly-spies-on-your-browser-history-and-it-would-like-a-word-with-you/294
u/adrawrjdet Oct 02 '23
Can you all switch to Firefox already?
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u/emooon Oct 03 '23
Can you all switch to Firefox already?
For that to happen people would first need to care about their online privacy. So many value their offline privacy immensely but online they share everything without even considering any consequences.
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u/trustedoctopus Oct 03 '23
It took me getting doxxed with what i thought was minimal information and being sent some fucked up threats to take my online privacy more seriously.
I don’t have a linkedin now, no facebook, i keep my usernames diverse and separate, often i search not just my name but my immediate family and remove any ‘public’ address information that is just freely listed. It’s insanely scary how much information is freely and easily accessible about so many americans.
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u/Alan976 Oct 04 '23
Also, for this to happen, Chromedevs will have to make certain that all of their website work 100% across all browsers and do not play any dirty trick like browser lockout or Chrome's only 'standard' of the FileSystem API.
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Oct 02 '23
[deleted]
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u/Corentinrobin29 Oct 03 '23 edited Oct 03 '23
Edit: thanks everyone for the insights. I'm pleasantly surprised that my question hasn't devolved into a browser gang war. I tried the latest Firefox tonight, and I quite like the UI, more so than Brave. I'll read up on some updated privacy studies and give it a shot.
Not a Brave fanboy, but I do use Brave on all my devices.
I made my choice a few years ago after reading several serious privacy studies comparing browsers; and back then the consensus was that Brave was much more private out of the box than Firefox. And as far as I can tell, that hasn't changed? Firefox still takes quite a bit of setting up and hardening, plus extensions to match Brave's ad blocking and privacy experience.
Apart from using a non chromium based engine, why would you recommend Firefox over Brave since the latter is better out of the box?
Genuinely asking.
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u/soliwray Oct 03 '23
Out of the box, yes, Brave is likely more secure but FF can be configured to be even better. It's also worth noting that Brave is built on a engine created by a company that doesn't give shit about your privacy.
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u/repocin Oct 03 '23
Brave is an ad company.
They were caught red-handed replacing ads on sites with their own, and run some weird cryptocurrency scheme.
That's enough for me to not use it, but you do you.
Firefox with the built-in tracking protection and uBlock Origin with a few of the optional filter lists enabled is more than enough for most people and I'm honestly not sure if Brave does anything better than that combo other than offering a slightly more out of the box experience.
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u/simonasj Oct 03 '23
Brave may be more private out of the box, but with a toggle or two - Firefox is better. I believe the blocking mode is on normal by default, not strict (I've really never had any pages break due to it), and if you tweak it, use arkenfox user.js or librewolf then it's not even a competition. https://privacytests.org/
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u/saltyjohnson Oct 03 '23
Non-chromium is a big one. Google's stranglehold on web technologies would be diminished if half of the chromium-based alternatives switched to Gecko.
And define "better". The Brave browser may be less fingerprintable out of the box. Is that even still true? But the company who maintains the browser are a privately-owned for-profit advertising firm and they've been caught doing some shady shit on multiple occasions, including tampering with URLs to inject their own affiliate codes. I don't think they deserve anyone's trust. Bare minimum thing they could do is convert to non-profit or B Corp and accept the tiny bit of mandatory disclosure and public accountability which would come with that. Until then, they don't even have public shareholders to answer to, let alone users. Only the (unknown) owners.
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u/trustedoctopus Oct 03 '23
I don’t know if they’re still reliablely private but I personally use duckduckgo for my mobile browser and firefox for pc.
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u/lukekibs Oct 03 '23
Brave is the way if your into earning a bit of extra crypto on the side while browsing
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u/Cultural_Car3974 Oct 02 '23
Duck Duck Go is also a good one
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u/they_have_no_bullets Oct 02 '23
DDG for mobile is alright but the desktop client sucks, Librewolf is 100x faster and has better privacy
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/Kaniel_Outiss Oct 03 '23
Interesting site thx
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u/TheCakeBaker Oct 03 '23
ran by a Brave employee, just be mindful
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u/iceblade69 Oct 03 '23
why is that bad?
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u/lo________________ol Oct 03 '23
It's a conflict of interest.
The "privacy tests" are selected by somebody who is employed by a company that produces one of the products. His paycheck is written by that company. If they do poorly in the public eye, that paycheck could go down.
It would be like trusting a video game developer to rate the video game they produced alongside other video games from competing studios.
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u/hardcore_truthseeker Oct 03 '23
Ddg spies on you. Remember the Russia issue?
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u/they_have_no_bullets Oct 03 '23
what are you referring to?
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u/g-nice4liief Oct 03 '23
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disinformation-downranking.html
don't shoot the messenger plss
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u/they_have_no_bullets Oct 03 '23
Thanks for sharing this. However, this is about down ranking the russian disinformation - it does not describe spying on users like you originally said.
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u/g-nice4liief Oct 03 '23
My Reaction was specifically to the russian issue. i needed to clarify that in my comment. My bad :(
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Oct 03 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ParaStudent Oct 03 '23
Are there any decent uncensored search engines out there?
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u/mojeek_search_engine Oct 03 '23
censorship will happen at the source, so look for the independent indexes
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u/jj4379 Oct 03 '23
Last time I checked Gibiru.com doesn't censor AFAIK but I am slightly retarded so, unless someone knows otherwise it should be alright
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u/Toroknos_07 Oct 03 '23
startpage itself doesnt, but it is a proxy for google search and bing from what i understand to suppliment its own responces
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u/ParaStudent Oct 03 '23
I haven't thought about startpage for ages now, ill have to give it a go and see how the results hold up.
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Oct 03 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ParaStudent Oct 03 '23
Yandex is constantly interfered with by the Russian government, for uncensored results I would put it pretty far down the list of consideration.
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u/Waterglassonwood Oct 03 '23
Thats what I hate about neo-leftists. They arent real ones.
It's almost as if they people who you're calling leftists (most likely Dems, Bernie Bros and AOC fans) aren't actually leftists.
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u/Desert_Concoction Oct 03 '23
I didn’t even know there were leftists like that
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Oct 03 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Desert_Concoction Oct 04 '23
So, what do you call someone who has left ideals and values but isn't going to jail for shit?
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u/kontra5 Oct 03 '23 edited Oct 03 '23
DDG is not a good engine (google is much better with all its flaws) nor is it un-compromised as many people seem to think.
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u/Oda_Krell Oct 03 '23
FF user here, but I use Chrome for some (isolated) activities where memory management is key. So, using both, I can say I don't feel I miss out on much by foregoing Chrome, and conversely, gain a lot by using FF (privacy related obviously, but also a much better add-on landscape).
That said: I can't for the life of it seriously recommmend Duck Duck Go. In terms of pure search results, it's so much behind Google, I get frustrated every damn time I try it.
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u/mistermithras Oct 02 '23
I cheated and went with ungoogled chromium :)
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u/Randomidiot55 Oct 03 '23
Cheated? Rus? Tech uses you like wet toilet paper. Nothing you do to defend yourself is cheating. Tech is not your owner
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u/xusflas Oct 03 '23
Did you manage to install Widevine?
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u/mistermithras Oct 03 '23
No, couldn't figure out how to do that. But then I realized I'm not using anything DRM'd so backburnered it until I can figure it out.
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u/lo________________ol Oct 03 '23
I was gonna say "how about Thorium" but it looks like they might have just disabled it last week lol
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u/mistermithras Oct 04 '23
That's a shame. I heard it was pretty fast.
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u/lo________________ol Oct 04 '23
Keep your eyes peeled. It's in the official list of features but a GitHub commit suggests it might have been disabled recently.
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u/wiriux Oct 02 '23
Firefox is pissing me off because I’m seeing ads on YouTube again so I switched to Brave.
When Brave breaks I don’t know what I’ll do :(
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u/uwu420696969 Oct 02 '23
You can use a different front end like Invidious or Piped, they're far better in terms of usability and privacy.
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Oct 03 '23
What's your adblocking system? I have NextDNS running on the router and all my devices, and Ublock Origin with a lot of extra lists. I don't even see embedded ads when the YT creator starts reading off a sponsor thanks to Sponsor Block.
If you're seeing ads you might just need to adjust some settings.
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u/wiriux Oct 03 '23
I haven’t tweaked anything. Maybe that’s the problem. I just have uorigin installed and that’s all.
I’ll look into it
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Oct 02 '23
[deleted]
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u/xusflas Oct 03 '23
I have tried almost all browsers, I can tell you Brave is the best option if you don't like the slowness of Firefox. My main is Firefox just because the music sounds better.
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u/DelightMine Oct 03 '23
Do they have profiles yet? If not, then no. I've been waiting for Firefox to add profiles for almost a decade now; I'll switch in a heartbeat when they finally do, but until then I'm not going to bother with containers.
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u/ProbablePenguin Oct 03 '23
They've had profiles since before Chrome ever existed as far as I know.
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u/DelightMine Oct 04 '23
The problem is that they "have profiles" but those profiles are inconvenient to use. They are an afterthought, and it's pretty clear they have no plans to make profiles easier to use.
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u/the_void_tiger Oct 03 '23
Yes. You can even run multiple browser instances each logged in to a different profile via a command line switch.
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u/DelightMine Oct 03 '23
Yeah, I'm not going to fuck around in command line just to use a browser.
I did find an extension that seems to make profiles work exactly how they do in chrome, so I'll give that a shot.
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u/the_void_tiger Oct 03 '23
You realize you can add command line switches to desktop shortcuts, right?
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u/Frainian Oct 03 '23
Not the guy you're responding to but how do you do it? I'd love to do it on my computer.
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u/Alan976 Oct 04 '23
The easiest solution to get profiles is often the overlooked on that is
about:profiles.1
u/DelightMine Oct 04 '23
I've started using that, coupled with the "Profile Switcher for Firefox" add-on. I'm going to give it an honest shot, and try to make it work for me again, but so far it's feeling annoyingly hacky. I also haven't found a good way to keep profile groups separate on the taskbar, which is pretty important to me and my workflow.
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u/No-Explanation2174 Oct 03 '23 edited Oct 03 '23
yeah as if firefox is any better than chrome lmao
edit: try to prove me wrong instead of mindlessly downvoting
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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Oct 05 '23
Never say never, just keep as backup browser, just in case firefox not working, i prob run it just once every a few months
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u/Jazzlike-Attorney729 Oct 03 '23
Why do people still use this crap? It's not like Chrome offers any shining features to the users. Chrome lacks customizations, every browser is free to use, and even Edge has a built-in AI copilot that can summerize even PDFs for you. What reason are there for people to use Chrome?
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Oct 02 '23 edited Oct 03 '23
Just use Ungoogled Chromium, if you need DRM you can get the Widevine file in the folder. Or use Brave and toggle all the crap out.
I use both for browser isolation. Ungoogled Chromium for all big tech google account stuff with vanilla uBock origin, and Brave for regular browsing and everything else.
Edit: To clarify, this isn't some more "just use x". Browsers started blocking 3rd party cookies and use cookies isolation by default, and more people use content blocking (uBlock Origin) so Google just rolled their new cookieless global surveillance program to BILLIONS of Chrome installs calling it "enhanced ad privacy". They literally control Web Technology and what is the web. Chrome is spyware, the fact that it's a browser is secondary and almost accidental.
On Ungoogled Chromium it was never shipped, and you can't even turn it on because it's not in the settings (and probably not even in the code).
You can also do your friends and family a favor and ask for their phone next time you are with them and on Chrome under "privacy and security" there's "ad privacy", toggle 3 things off and also make sure all third party cookies is blocked.
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u/Desidiosus_ Oct 03 '23
You do understand by using anything Chromium based you still give Google power to change the web as a whole to suit its needs, right? It doesn't matter whether you use Brave or Ungoogled Chromium as it's still giving Google the power to dictate what web technologies are being used.
Chrome/Chromium is the Internet Explorer of modern times and some websites don't necessarily work on Firefox because they rely on a non-standardized (meaning not accepted by W3C) feature that Google has implemented, thus forcing Firefox to implement the same feature in the same way as Google has for the website to work and eventually have W3C accept the feature into the standard in the form Google wanted it.
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Oct 02 '23 edited Dec 07 '23
[deleted]
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u/RaspberryAlienJedi Oct 03 '23
Same here. I wish I could give Firefox a chance again but too many things that bothered me and couldn’t get to work the way I wanted. Maybe in the future I’ll try again.
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/RaspberryAlienJedi Oct 03 '23
I am aware but I don’t like Librewolf, it messes up with the clock and sets it to UTC which is a killer for me, and a major pain to set back to normal, not to mention some other preconfigured settings that I also found annoying, and not always easy to revert back to vanilla Firefox’s config for some specific things.
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/lindberghbaby41 Oct 03 '23
Isn’t that specifically to fuck with browser fingerprinting?
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u/sadrealityclown Oct 03 '23
Correct...
Why DA FAQ does it need to ping creep sandar pichai everytime for a font...
Clown
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Oct 03 '23
Just use firefox or librewolf if you don't like firefox.
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u/Mukir Oct 03 '23
if someone doesn't like firefox, they won't like librewolf either
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Oct 03 '23
No lol.
There's people that don"t like firefox because it has telemetry on by default, or because they were money injected by google.
While its the same thing at the end, some people likes to use alternatives to ff instead of ff.
Its like using ungoogled chromium, you can not like chrome but you can like other chromium based browser.
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u/Alan976 Oct 04 '23
Have you even ventured into
about:telemetry? Cause the identifiable bits are way overblown.https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/index.html
money injected by google
Umm okay?
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Oct 02 '23
We all know this, why should it be posted 5x a day.
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/Jazzlike-Attorney729 Oct 03 '23
Well, the article mentioned a new "feature" of Chrome called “Enhanced ad privacy” as a new way to track users for the purposes of targeted ads.
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Oct 03 '23
[deleted]
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Oct 05 '23
If you login to your google account then i assume it read browser history, doesn't matter what browser you use, i always assume so, that's why anytime i am searching something i use private browser in firefox or incognito in chrome
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u/sillyxk Oct 02 '23
How to stop this? and please don’t tell me google
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u/lo________________ol Oct 02 '23
Firefox is one way. Or, if you prefer a slightly more private solution out of the box, LibreWolf.
Otherwise, the article has suggestions for how to disable this in the browser settings. Of course, it's still Chrome, but doing something is better than doing nothing.
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u/sillyxk Oct 02 '23
Thanks! what do you think of Chromium system like Brave?
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u/lo________________ol Oct 02 '23
Avoid when possible; AFAIK Google is pushing out this change to Chromium itself, which means that browsers at fork it will need to work even harder to remove these changes from their respective ecosystems. I do use a build of it, Thorium, as my daily driver, tack on uBlock Origin and you've got a "good enough" Chromelike browser free of built-in adware.
Of course, Google has also been waging war against ad blockers, so you really have to watch what they're up to and make sure they aren't succeeding and making the privacy landscape worse...
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u/themeadows94 Oct 02 '23
Whatever Brave gives with one hand, it takes with the other. It has its own inbuilt ad platform
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u/AbyssalRedemption Oct 02 '23
Brave is arguably the best you can squeeze out of the Chromium ecosystem privacy-wise, but it still has many faults. Just stick to Firefox/ gecko.
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u/grimsical Oct 03 '23
Not sure why this gets downvoted. Yes, their crappy crypto addons and all that stuff is annoying, but Brave scores the best in every browser privacy test I’ve done. Randomized fingerprint out of the box. Firefox’s remains unique, until you get the right extensions.
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u/xusflas Oct 03 '23
Sadly Firefox is slow asf, even though is my main browser
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u/lo________________ol Oct 03 '23
Firefox is definitely slower than Chrome in some (or many) circumstances, although to some point I also believe that's because I'll fill a used browser with more extensions than a barely used one.
There's a performance optimized one named Mercury that might be faster. It's still essentially Firefox (ESR), but I figured I'd throw that out there.
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Oct 05 '23
Don't login to your google account, or logout after you finished everytime, and use firefox private browsing to search something, or go to setting to delete history everyday/everytime you closed firefox. My guess is everytime you login to google, google will read browser history, see what you searching and send you appropriate ads that you interested in
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u/hardcore_truthseeker Oct 03 '23
Does anyone know fennec? Its a spoon I mean knife I mean fork of ff. Lol
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u/Im_Mefju Oct 03 '23
Android version of firefox isn’t recommended as gecko engine still lacks some security features like site isolation that are available in chromium engine.
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u/Randomidiot55 Oct 03 '23
Alphebet owns chrome firefox google safari and opera. There is no escape except to create a fake persona . How? When you buy a new phone, use a new email. There you use a fake name fake address fake everything. That disrupts algorithms from recognizing what particular person it is tracking. Google attaches and permeates the device but the device sends fake id. Wha lah
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u/JovialJem Oct 03 '23 edited Feb 20 '24
enjoy cats physical cautious party flag different label dependent quarrelsome
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Hollow602 Oct 03 '23
Looks like OP is owned by Alphabet too.
Jokes aside, in the browser segment, you can use Ungoogled Chromium and Firefox safely. They have a standard level of security and safety. Nothing extra tight or inconvenient to the average user who just wants to search some questions online.
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u/costafilh0 Oct 03 '23
Google every 30 seconds: "Please Login"
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Oct 05 '23
How dare you remove your cookies ? Give me your phone number. I want your phone number now or you will never see your gmail again.
Can you confirm where is the bus on that picture ?
We have detected strange activity with your account, like you trying to browse the web anonymously. Do you think you're smart ? Now take your phone and go to settings...
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u/Current-Direction-97 Oct 02 '23
EVERYTHING Google is this way. It’s their literal business model.