News Just when you thought that you knew all about Chrome's phone-home happiness

[mikeymikec]

Why Chromium tells Google sites about your CPU, GPU usage

OK, now tell us why this isn't an EU DMA violation – asking for a friend in Brussels

www.theregister.com

Not all that surprising I guess, but the API only being accessible to Google makes me think that nasty antitrust lawsuits are not things to be avoided at all costs but scenarios to play chicken with on a regular basis.

"Google told us it intends to comply with the Digital Markets Act" - we intend to, at some point, if it becomes necessary...

 

[lantis3]

So it's baked into all Chromium based browsers, that's about all browsers except Firefox. So it's not just Google.

Sending PC's hardware info doesn't really leak your personal info.

 

[mikeymikec]

So it's baked into all Chromium based browsers, that's about all browsers except Firefox. So it's not just Google.

Sending PC's hardware info doesn't really leak your personal info.

No-one said it did leak personal data, but bear in mind the "it's only metadata" argument is a load of bunk for a number of reasons:

1 - add enough metadata together and with an external database you will be able to ID someone and tag all that metadata to them.
2 - "it's only metadata" unless the party that wants it considers it to be primary (e.g. marketable) data. The concept of metadata is simply a matter of perspective. IMO the correct way of looking at it from a privacy perspective is that there's no such thing as metadata.

One funny thing that often comes back to me regarding online privacy and the information trading age is how in the early days of the Pentium III, the IT industry / tech media went ballistic about Pentium III processors having unique ID numbers that could be requested through software. The conclusion of the furore ended up being a BIOS setting (that was often disabled by default) to govern whether it could give up that information.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't get why so many people even use Chrome when Firefox exists. Never really got the appeal. I trust Firefox way more than a browser made by a company who's entire industry is spying on us.

 

[mikeymikec]

I don't get why so many people even use Chrome when Firefox exists. Never really got the appeal. I trust Firefox way more than a browser made by a company who's entire industry is spying on us.

Some stuff only works on Chromium, for example I handled a Teams call on Linux through Chromium (and through recent experience I know it doesn't work in Firefox/win32).

Doesn't stop me using FF primarily. I changed over to Chrome for a short while until Firefox got its multithreading together.