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Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s
web browser has become spy software

Original Article

Posted By: Pluperfect, 6/22/2019 12:59:12 PM

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 gets up to

Comments:

Note: Outline altered the original Post headline. The headline here is the WaPo version.

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Reply 1 - Posted by: Cherrybark 6/22/2019 1:08:02 PM (No. 104147)
I switched from Chrome to Brave a couple of weeks ago. Brave comes configured with privacy settings enabled and this morning's report states: 2,227 Trackers Blocked, 45,854 Ads Blocked, 2,591 HTTPS Upgrades. The switch was painless. For more information watch the video on their home page https://brave.com/
8 people like this.

Reply 2 - Posted by: hooter 6/22/2019 1:49:34 PM (No. 104168)
Duckduckgo doesn't store your searches
5 people like this.

Reply 3 - Posted by: JHHolliday 6/22/2019 1:58:57 PM (No. 104170)
I dropped Chrome years ago and switched to Firefox then added StartPage and DuckDuckGo. The final straw was when I looked at a couple of propane heaters on a website then got bombarded with ads for heaters everywhere I went. I don't mind an ad or so that are site based if they aren't too intrusive but if a website makes it difficult to see content then it gets dropped. Not protecting yourself is like giving telemarketers your cell number.
9 people like this.

Reply 4 - Posted by: DVC 6/22/2019 2:10:34 PM (No. 104182)
Google is evil. Always has been, always will be. Never us Google if you can help it.
15 people like this.

Reply 5 - Posted by: Hermit_Crab 6/22/2019 3:48:27 PM (No. 104235)
Yep, #4 has it right, Chrome didn't BECOME spyware. It was written that way from the inception.; that was its main reason for Google producing it and pushing it out there 'for free'. And also be aware that about 1/3 of the mainstream 'alternative' browsers are actually Chrome, but with different window dressing. That is just one example of how pervasive Google is. (~90% of all of the websites in the world contain Google Java spy bots as well, and they must be disabled if you want even a smidgen of privacy). But since this article is being promoted by Bezos' WaPo, I gotta wonder when Amazon is going to promote their own browser that spies on your every move. Alexa and the Amazon java spy bots are not pervasive enough to achieve Bezos' goals which are similar to and just as evil as Google's,
7 people like this.

Reply 6 - Posted by: starboard 6/22/2019 4:18:52 PM (No. 104254)
I use Opera.
2 people like this.

Reply 7 - Posted by: klezmer 6/22/2019 5:25:44 PM (No. 104281)
#1, I just installed Brave and taking a look. So far, so good - thanks for the tip!
0 people like this.

Reply 8 - Posted by: Ken M. 6/22/2019 5:35:49 PM (No. 104291)
EVERYONE: Download and install ccleaner: http://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner And run it daily -- maybe several times in a day, depending on where you've been.
4 people like this.

Reply 9 - Posted by: RenoVet68 6/22/2019 7:15:22 PM (No. 104366)
Before I log out for the day, I always run ccleaner. Gets rid off the tracks and website junk. Highly recommended.
0 people like this.

Reply 10 - Posted by: Calico Al 6/22/2019 7:35:40 PM (No. 104380)
Before I started to use DuckDuckGo I used Google Chrome. I kept getting PUA (potentially unwanted programs) popups that I couldn't get rid of. I have no problem with them on DuckDuckgo. The only Google I use now is Google Maps because they give street views. Even Google m Maps have the PUAs when I open them, but I can live with that. Two clicks and their gone. When I'm done with the maps it's back to DuckDuckGo.
0 people like this.

Reply 11 - Posted by: anniebc 6/22/2019 7:38:14 PM (No. 104382)
Many school districts use Google Docs as their shared networks. Google is sinister and most evil.
3 people like this.

Reply 12 - Posted by: judy 6/22/2019 9:29:03 PM (No. 104432)
Nothing new, WP it’s been like this for years.
0 people like this.

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