CDD Privacy Concerns, Says Chrome Browser a “state-art surveillance program”
September 2008 by admin
In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Jeffrey Chester, the executive director for “The Center for Digital Democracy ” described Chrome as a “state-of-the-art surveillance program” because of the unique ID Chrome creates for you when installed.
Think of this unique id as a “digital finger print” which can reportedly be used by Google to uniquely identify you by correlating it with other information Google collects about you such as you IP addresses, cookies, and your use of YouTube or Gmail.
Chrome’s project manager, Brian Rakowski, says that users can opt out of this when they first install Chrome by not checking the box that says “help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.”
True, they can opt out of sending the information, but the unique tracking id is always created and even recreated by Chrome if you delete it.
Clearly, some people consider this unique id a major breach of their privacy, and thus Ablesoft from Germany offers a simple app “unchrome” to zero out this unique identifier.
More info about “unchrome” is available here.
Read the full article by in the San Jose Mercury News here.
it’s funny, the more i use Chrome (for windows), the more unstable it seems to get… crashes a lot more, can’t handle sites with flash, hangs every time i close a tab… all that to say, i’m switching back to Firefox
Are you using the public beta release or the developer channel release?