The Privacy of Google Chrome

Break out those tinfoil hats. Big Brother Google is out to get you!

Despite plenty of blog posts written debunking the conspiracy theory that Google Chrome is really just a way for Google to harvest yet more personal data from their users, the stigma doesn’t seem to want to go away.

Matt Cutts recently posted about the privacy options in the settings of Chrome, detailing every last piece of information that is transmitted between your browser and Google. The settings themselves include a link to this page, explaining the terminology behind the settings.

If you haven’t gotten a peek at the settings yet, here’s an image:

You’re given an option of allowing Chrome to send some of your not-so-important information over to Google. Don’t believe Matt Cutts and Google? Fine, uncheck all of the boxes and you’re in the clear.

Unless of course you still don’t believe that the settings are an exhaustive set of the communication occurrences. But herein lies the biggest, most important point that many people are overlooking.

Google Chrome is open-source. That means that there are tons of very knowledgeable developers out there that are not employed by Google, that have full, unfettered access to the inner workings of Chrome. If there is some undocumented and undiscovered piece of communication between the browser and Google, it will be found by the masses, I can assure you.

You can take off that tinfoil hat now.