CDD Privacy Concerns, Says Chrome Browser a “state-art surveillance program”
September 20, 2008 by admin · 2 Comments
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.
Unchrome – Free Privacy App To Remove Unique ID Chrome Creates About You
To easily “zero out” the unique identifier Chrome, Google and others can use to identify you, Ablesoft in Germany has created the “unchrome” application.
It’s a simple application that looks like this.
After you download it, shut down Chrome, run “unchrome” and you’ll see a screen like this:
From here, simply click on “Remove unique ID now” (why isn’t this a button?).
After you do that, you’ll see the screen below indicating success:
You can download “unchrome” free from Ablesoft here.
