According to Geoffrey A. Fowler, technology columnist for The Washington Post, andThe Google Chrome browser is spyware. So that your readers have no doubt what you think, put your conclusion in one of the first paragraphs of the article:
Turning the world's largest ad agency into the most popular browser was as smart as putting kids to run a candy store.
Why Chrome is spyware
Fowler compared for a week Chrome's behavior against Firefox and found that while Firefox had blocked all tracking cookies, Google's browser had installed 11189. These cookies, belonging to both companies and state bodies, are used by them to build profiles of interests, income and personality of each browser user.
The journalist cites the case of the website of the insurance company Aetna, and that of the Federal Student Aid Service (USA) In both cases Chrome allowed cookies to be installed to track your activity on the search engine and on Facebook.
He also discovered that Google took logging into Gmail as permission to log into your Google account, this allows you to collect even more personal information.
Do you have Chrome on your phone? It probably is, because unless you disable it (it cannot be uninstalled) it comes with Android. CEvery time you do a search, Chrome sends your location. It is true that you can deactivate the option to share location. In that case, send it the same, but not as accurate
Note from me: There are two kinds of people on the Internet; the customer and the product. If you are not one, you are the other. Google doesn't give you a free online browser, email service, or office suite because it wants you. It does so because you are the merchandise its advertisers pay it for.
You may be tempted to refute my statement above with the Firefox counterexample. Bad idea. Google was for years the Mozilla Foundation's main financial backer and its main promoter. When they learned everything they needed to know about the browser market, they released Chrome, and got the majority of the market thanks to its spreading power. It is more or less the same as they would later do with the manufacturer of smart speakers Sonos, according to the accusation that we already discussed.
Going back to the Washington Post, from Google they told Fowler that in their browser they give priority to the control of users and privacy options, and they will continue to look for new ways to control cookies. But, at the same time, they highlighted their need to maintain “a healthy web ecosystem”.
My translation would be "We are working on keeping the chicken coop safe, but at the same time we must ensure the fox the amount of calories it needs"
In fairness to Google, when Chrome appeared it came to fix the problems caused by Internet Explorer. Taking advantage of its near monopoly, Microsoft insisted on using non-standardized technologies that prevented those of us who did not use Windows from accessing many sites.
Google took WebKit, an open source rendering engine, and developed Blink from it. Blink performed much better than Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine, Trident, the Explorer rendering engine, and WebCore the Safari rendering engine.. In addition to the fact that Google showed you advertising every time you used its search engine and each of its services, it immediately grew in market share. To this, we must add that they had the intelligence to do it multiplatform.
At that time, privacy was not as big of a concern as it is today.
Of course the first alternative to change this is to use another browser. The journalist recommends switching to Firefox, but you can also opt for Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi and, if you use Windows or Android, Microsoft Edge. But, As long as you continue to use free services from Google (or other providers) they will have some way of tracking you.
In any case, if you think privacy is important to you, you will have to consider the possibility of hiring an email service with your own domain or using an offline office suite.