I thought Chrome being an extension of Google was fairly obvious.

The thing I don't understand is why duck duck go and Firefox are free.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Peter Reutemann <fracpete@waikato.ac.nz>
Date: 23/06/2019 10:49 (GMT+12:00)
To: wlug List <wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz>
Subject: [wlug] 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?" warns Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A.
Fowler:

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...

My tests of Chrome vs. Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of
absurd proportions. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I
discovered 11,189 requests for tracker "cookies" that Chrome would
have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by
Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including
Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build
profiles of your interests, income and personality... And that's not
the half of it. Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser.
See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you're logged in to the
browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target
ads. Don't recall signing in? I didn't, either. Chrome recently
started doing that automatically when you use Gmail.

Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome
sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you
turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just
with less accuracy.)

The columnist concludes that "having the world's biggest advertising
company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as
letting kids run a candy shop," and argues that through its
Doubleclick and other ad businesses, Google "is the No. 1 cookie maker
-- the Mrs. Fields of the web."

He also reports that Firefox is now working on ways to block browser
"fingerprintin'

-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/06/21/1922233

Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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