OK, si I admit it, I tried out Google Chrome. The rumors of a fast, mostly-crash-proof browser caught my interest. Oh yeah, and the ‘secure’ (PORN) mode that prevents anyone from “tracking you”….
Anyway, it turns out that chrome not only is a bit faster, and handles crashes fairly well, it also sends every single damn keystroke you make to the mother ship in google land. Of course, they’re only keeping the stuff taht matters to them, the rest ends up in the bit bucket. But exactly WHAT matters to them? After a bit of poking around, it seems they store any passwords, details of any secure accounts you log into (this means that if you pay a bill on line, Google will not only know your bank, account number, etc. they’ll also know the balance. And store it. As far as I can tell, porn mode does the same thing….
Now comes the interesting bit. After deciding that my surfing habits and personal information aren’t really Googles business, I uninstalled chrome. Being a suspicious little bastard, I then proceeded to take a cruise through the behind-the-scenes bits of my PC. Guess what? Even after uninstalling their spy-browser, there was this little turd left behind called Google Reporter.
I’ll admit that I’m not entirely sure what this little bit of code was DOING, but I did notice that it periodically fired up a ‘net connection and sent a bunch of stuff out into the ether. You guess where it went – I was too busy yanking my ‘net connection.
After spending some hours digging through the registry and file systems, I’m pretty sure I’ve ripped out google’s little phone home routine, so I hooked back up and surfed over the EFF to see what they thought about chrome. Turns out they’ve already got a slew of privacy warnings and such. Remember when Microsnot decided that they had every right to spy on their users, and the firestorm that followed? Apparently, Google either forgot or just doesn’t care….
So there ya go kiddies. The ‘do no evil’ company has decided that spting isn’t evil. ‘course, the fact that everything they store is freely available to any cop or fed that asks for it shouldn’t worry you. We all know that the cops are just as upright, honest, and trustworthy as Google, right?
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The Anonymous SoapBox 
HEY! You’re back! I’ve missed you!!
I use just plain old Google. I also work on a Mac, though I don’t know if that makes any difference (we are less susceptible to viruses; few people bother writing the code to infect a relatively small number of machines). Of course, that doesn’t mean that someone’s not tracking all of my keystrokes. Ugh.
as long as you don’t load chrome, google won’t track you (other than what you do through them, in which case they log every keystroke, and share with whatever “official” requests it…