More fundamentally, your Web history - like the color of your underpants - ain't nobody's business but your own. Cookies are how a pair of pants you look at in one site end up following you around in ads elsewhere. But it doesn't share browsing data with Mozilla, which isn't in the data-collection business.Īt a minimum, Web snooping can be annoying. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.)įirefox isn't perfect - it still defaults searches to Google and permits some other tracking. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail.Ĭhrome is even sneakier on your phone. Don't recall signing in? I didn't, either. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you're logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. They surreptitiously told the data giants every time I pulled up the insurance and loan service's log-in pages. I watched Aetna and the Federal Student Aid website set cookies for Facebook and Google. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.Ĭhrome welcomed trackers even at websites you would think would be private. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker "cookies" that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox. Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine. It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla's Firefox, which has default privacy protections. It turns out, having the world's biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop. Lately I've been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.
This was made possible by the Web's biggest snoop of all: Google.
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