Even if you’re a bit cynical about Google’s protestations of respecting your privacy, you’ll probably be shocked at the extent to which the Google Chrome browser is indistinguishable from malware. If I told you that some app captured all your keystrokes—including passwords and other sensitive information—regardless of whether you actually submitted them or not, you’d say, “Yup, that’s keylogger malware.” and delete it from your system or phone.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening when you use the Chrome browser. Scott McCloud has a longish comic that explains how Chrome invades your privacy and spies on you. Spend a few minutes to read the comic and find out what Chrome is doing. If afterwards you still don’t delete Chrome, I don’t know what to say or how to help you.
If you’ve been paying attention to Google, none of this will come as a surprise. Everything Google does it does in service of collecting your information and selling it to others. At first, these sales were to advertisers to support Google’s advertising platform. However, according the McCloud’s comic, lately these sales have been to other, even less savory enterprises such as political operations. Given Google’s belief in their own virtue and consequent right to censor what the rest of us can see, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision this information making its way to officials who want to keep tabs on those who deviate from approved beliefs.
If you keep using Chrome and other “free” Google products, you’re enabling the possibility of this dystopian outcome. Please stop. You owe it to yourself and to the rest of us.