Showing posts with label Chrome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chrome. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.
Technology
Review: Google Chrome has become surveillance software. It’s time to switch.
By Washington Post | wapo@dfmdev.com |
PUBLISHED: June 21, 2019 at 11:56 am | UPDATED: June 22, 2019 at 9:14 am
By Geoffrey A. Fowler | The Washington Post Columnist
You open your browser to look at the web. Do you know who is looking back at you?
Over a recent week of web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the web.
This was made possible by the web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.
Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really is up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most-popular web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.
It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla’s Firefox, which has default privacy protections. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine.
My tests of Chrome versus Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer, but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.
Chrome welcomed trackers even at websites you’d think would be private. I watched Aetna and the Federal Student Aid website set cookies for Facebook and Google. They surreptitiously told the data giants every time I pulled up the insurance and loan service’s log-in pages.
And that’s not the half of it.
Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you’re logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your web activity to target ads. Don’t recall signing in? I didn’t, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail.
Saturday, April 07, 2018
Yes Chrome is scanning your Windows PC, but it might be a bug
Technology
Richard Lawler,Engadget 8 hours ago
A few days ago Kelly Shortridge, a product manager at SecurityScorecard
A few days ago Kelly Shortridge, a product manager at SecurityScorecard detected some unexpected behavior on her PC, as a honeypot Canarytoken reported being accessed by Chrome.exe. That's not what you'd expect from a web browser normally, except for one thing -- Google did add some antivirus-y capabilities to its browser on Windows late last year as an enhancement to its Chrome Cleanup tool that can help reset hijacked settings. Google Chrome security lead Justin Schuh explained how the feature works and pointed to some documentation about it, and that was that -- until last night.
If you are hitting this issue and you want a fix right now then go to chrome://downloads in your browser, go to the menu in the top right, and select Clear All. That will clear Chrome's list of downloaded files so that it won't have any files to existence-check at startup. If you have a large list of downloaded files then this will improve startup time slightly.
It turns out the "AV scanning" wasn't that at all, and what it was doing could affect you right now. It turns out that Chrome is checking the integrity of downloaded files at startup, and a bug lead it to that particular folder. It relies on the Downloaded History list for this check, and if you have a lot of files in there, it could slow down your computer when you start Chrome. While the dev team is working to skip the check entirely in a future update, users worried about it can fix it by clearing their download history. Easy, right?
Kelly Shortridge @swagitda_
I was wondering why my Canarytoken (a file folder) was triggering & discovered the culprit was chrome.exe. Turns out @googlechrome quietly began performing AV scans on Windows devices last fall. Wtf m8? This isn’t a system dir, either, it’s in \Documents\
5:58 PM - Mar 29, 2018
1,168
1,082 people are talking about this
Followed up with @swagitda_ and it turns out the log events weren't CCT scans. Chrome existence-checks (code below) previously downloaded files, but a bug moved the checks into the startup path. Clearing download history stops the checks. Bug filed here: https://t.co/gLNHJRSGq2pic.twitter.com/r0aeVAsurr
— Justin Schuh ]]>😑
A few days ago Kelly Shortridge, a product manager at SecurityScorecard detected some unexpected behavior on her PC, as a honeypot Canarytoken reported being accessed by Chrome.exe. That's not what you'd expect from a web browser normally, except for one thing -- Google did add some antivirus-y capabilities to its browser on Windows late last year as an enhancement to its Chrome Cleanup tool that can help reset hijacked settings. Google Chrome security lead Justin Schuh explained how the feature works and pointed to some documentation about it, and that was that -- until last night.
If you are hitting this issue and you want a fix right now then go to chrome://downloads in your browser, go to the menu in the top right, and select Clear All. That will clear Chrome's list of downloaded files so that it won't have any files to existence-check at startup. If you have a large list of downloaded files then this will improve startup time slightly.
It turns out the "AV scanning" wasn't that at all, and what it was doing could affect you right now. It turns out that Chrome is checking the integrity of downloaded files at startup, and a bug lead it to that particular folder. It relies on the Downloaded History list for this check, and if you have a lot of files in there, it could slow down your computer when you start Chrome. While the dev team is working to skip the check entirely in a future update, users worried about it can fix it by clearing their download history. Easy, right?
Kelly Shortridge @swagitda_
I was wondering why my Canarytoken (a file folder) was triggering & discovered the culprit was chrome.exe. Turns out @googlechrome quietly began performing AV scans on Windows devices last fall. Wtf m8? This isn’t a system dir, either, it’s in \Documents\
5:58 PM - Mar 29, 2018
1,168
1,082 people are talking about this
Followed up with @swagitda_ and it turns out the log events weren't CCT scans. Chrome existence-checks (code below) previously downloaded files, but a bug moved the checks into the startup path. Clearing download history stops the checks. Bug filed here: https://t.co/gLNHJRSGq2pic.twitter.com/r0aeVAsurr
— Justin Schuh ]]>😑
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