Unchromed

It has been a long time since “Don’t be evil” was part of Google’s corporate philosophy. We could probably argue about whether they ever really believed in that idea, how long their belief lasted, and what about the environment they exist in was so corrosive to it. That discussion would probably include a lot of talking points along the lines of “well, actually, corporations are required by law to be evil in order to maximise shareholder value” and — at least in recent years — a lot of audible scoffing on my part.

I recently reached the point at which I wasn’t prepared to keep having that argument even with myself. I got pretty close a couple of years ago when FLoC came along (see No FLoC Here). The latest round in the exhausting saga of Google forcing surveillance advertising onto end users is the so-called Privacy Sandbox, in which Google’s preferred model for targeted web advertising is baked into the world’s dominant browser, which they not coincidentally control.

I recommend the Ars Technica article if you want depth, but here’s the lede:

Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser.

No end user asked for this. No end user benefits from this. The selected user interface (and messaging: “Privacy Sandbox”, my eye) mean that people who use Chrome will most often end up with this enabled by default and never find out how to turn it off. This benefits Google’s customers, who are not me and, probably, not you.

As a sophisticated technical user I could of course disable this and be on my way. And check it hasn’t been re-enabled every few days “by accident”. And make sure there’s no new wizard wheeze introduced that needs to be defended against. But, as I said above, this adversarial approach to a critical tool is just exhausting and at this point I’m done with it.

So, for what it’s worth, Chrome is now gone from all of my systems and won’t come back as long as there are less-abusive alternatives.

I’ve been primarily a Safari user for some years now, and although it has some flaws I’ve been pretty happy with it from a privacy perspective. Apple may not be as perfect as they would like everyone to think, but they’re not bad. Well, as long as you set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine anyway.

You can’t live with just Safari, though, which is of course the reason I was regularly using Chrome in the first place. There are still a wide variety of web sites which just don’t work perfectly on the world’s second most dominant browser. For that second, utility, browser I’ve returned after a long hiatus to good old Firefox. I don’t love it, but it works with most things that balk at Safari and it gets extra points for a nice logo.