Is there any other alternative to Firefox? I am not using Chrome. You cant pay me to sell my data to them. And heck if im touching Opera. What other browsers are there who havent sold out to the globalists? I legit want out of this spy watch-net!
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Chromium, which is the open source build of Chrome but without some of the telemetry by default, EMEs (so no Netflix), no proprietary codecs like MP3 (solved on most Linux distros), or Flash. It works pretty well on Linux, but honestly Firefox is the best suggestion.
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Chromium has the awful Google account login integration with browser login (i.e. access GMail from it and your browser gets logged in too) as far as I know, which is pretty much a show-stopper. Unless you or your distro patches that out when building.
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They made that a toggle in the standard privacy settings, including in Chrome:
Allow Chromium sign-in
By turning this off, you can sign in to Google sites such as Gmail, without signing in to Chromium
It started out with only a hidden flag for developers in chrome://flags.
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I think it was fixed ~18 weeks later in the next release, or maybe it was 36 weeks if it took 2 releases. I wouldn't necessarily say it's fixed, since all they changed is exposing a user-facing setting. I think it still defaults to tying Google login to the browser profile.
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It used to be that signing into Google vs. signing into Chrome (or Chromium) was completely separate. The main (only?) feature offered by signing into the browser is the option to enable sync and toggle which forms of data / settings get synced across browsers via the account.
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There was also a separate ToS if you signed into Chrome, which effectively gave them permission to perform arbitrary surveillance on your browser usage.
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It makes sense that they'd need to add that to the terms of service, since when fully enabled sync sends them the local browser data/settings and it's the reason to sign in. There's a barely known E2E encryption option though ('Keep your info private'):
support.google.com/chrome/answer/
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The main difference is that it used to ask you to sign in to enable sync and now when that setting is enabled and it signs in automatically, it will instead ask to enable sync. What they actually did it making it easier to advertise / push the sync feature by lowering friction.
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I'm sure the terms of service was still meant to correspond to enabling sync, and they just failed at keeping the documentation and terms of service up to date with the actual implementation. Chromium developers seemingly just did it on their own without considering those things.
Yes, it probably wasn't *meant* to be evil, but it was done with complete disregard for consent and privacy.
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I think the legal team that wrote the terms of use didn't fully understand how it works in Chromium even before this change, since you could always sign in but disable the sync feature, even though signing in exists almost entirely to implement sync and was worded based on it.
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