Last year I wrote about Matthew Green’s post on why he was giving up the Chrome browser despite being a user for many years. The TL;DR was that Google’s decision to surreptitiously log the browser into Google when you used another Google app was the final straw for him. He said he could no longer trust Google to respect his privacy.
Of course, Green is a cryptographer who is knowledgeable about these matters and you might expect that he would be more sensitive to such things than a normal user. Now, though, The Washington Post has an article, Goodbye, Chrome: Google’s web browser has become spy software, that brings Green’s concerns to the rest of us.
Geoffrey Fowler writes that he monitored Chrome’s use of tracking cookies and discovered that after a week of browsing there were 11,189 requests for tracker cookies that Chrome would have passed on and installed on his machine. He recommends switching to Firefox (or Safari if you’re an Apple user). You’ll still get the same requests to set cookies, of course, since that’s controlled by the Web sites but Firefox and Safari are much more selective on which cookies they allow. Both browsers try to identify tracker cookies and block them.
You might think it doesn’t really matter because the worst that will happen is that you’ll get some annoying ads. But as Fowler says, it’s much worse than that. Even sites with no ads—such as Aetna insurance—also set tracker cookies. Google and the other data aggregators use those cookies to determine what sites you visit and to build up a profile of your habits, likes, and dislikes. Even worse, this data is being used not just to predict your behavior but to shape it as well. If you don’t mind being spied on and manipulated like that, then by all means continue to use Chrome. If you do mind, you should take Fowler’s advice and switch to Firefox or Safari. I mind so I’ve long since deleted Chrome from my machines and rely on Safari.