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Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is surprised about chrome sending urls to Google, you can turn the “feature” off by unchecking “Make searches and browsing better” in the sync section of Google chrome settings.

Creepy.

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Or, and hear me out, you never use Chrome again, in any platform.. like ever ever again.

I only have chrome installed for a couple of work related sites that don't display correctly on firefox. I dont get to choose not use the work related site and MS edge likely isn't any safer and also is not available on my choice of operating system

you could use ungoogled-chromium, brave, vivaldi

"But what if I don't want my own computer to build and share a detailed profile of everyone I know, everywhere I go, all my preferences, and how to manipulate me?"

"Well obviously it's your fault for not picking the 'Don't Be Cool' option on subpage 27b-6, duh!"

Yeah. It's victim blaming. Reminds me of "they should have shouted louder".

The confusing thing is the crime itself is small on an individual level. The question is: does it add up cumulatively if a small crime is committed against many?

I don't know if it's "Victim Blaming"...I teach Digital Literacy courses for seniors new to technology. While I do set them up with Firefox and Ublock, we generally have them use Gmail as they are all Android Devices. Google sends a confirmation email to walk each one of them through their security settings. Of course most users just ignore this email (like I used to have students do) but now we go through it and uncheck this setting in all my courses, and unpersonalize ads as well. Feel like the most basic user who has even the tiniest concern of data privacy should know how to look at their Google Account settings. These are 80 year olds who don't even know what a "click" is but they know to be skeptical of using Google.

please also explicitly teach folks to re-visit settings frequently; apps/webui's love to change settings, and often opt-in to new "features". one thing i feel is underrated is the frequency at which those settings change on users for the company's benifit

A small crime can result in massive power. Knowledge is power.

Barring the ethics you can single handedly use such data to manipulate stock market, countries etc.

It’s just too much power

> unchecking “Make searches and browsing better”

Before that, you can make it audible: <https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller>

Is that part of Chrome not open-source?

Presumably no, I haven't seen any overly creepy shit in Chromium. There's a project called ungoogled-chromium that tracks all the Google junk in Chromium and gets rid of it, their patch set is actually surprisingly small:

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/tre...

Imagine thinking you can escape your abuser by living in their house and asking them politely to stop.

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