this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
163 points (66.2% liked)
Privacy
31957 readers
707 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I’m not surprised. Not just because of their lack of privacy (them knowing your bookmarks), but also legally. Some countries are trying to crack down on piracy, and other illegal material, asking companies (like Google) to do this.
Bottom line, don’t use Chrome, and Google Sync.
This doesn't involve your browser bookmarks. Google Collections is a link sharing tool.
It doesn't feel legal. A bookmark is textual data you've stored on your computer for later reference, and while it is on their application, somehow this feels wrong. It's definitely wrong ethically, but is there something in the user agreement that says they have full reign of whatever the browser can touch?
Pretty much everything you do on Chrome gets sent to Google. It is one of, if not the worst browsers, for privacy. Their Privacy Policy is pretty clear on this. It’s all for a better “user experience”.
Actually this is only on Google Collections which is a bookmark sharing service, not just the browser bookmark sync.
Your synced bookmarks should be unaffected as Google says everything in browser sync is encrypted locally before being synced, so Google shouldn't be able to scan those (or really care about them at all)
They are doing it to protect themselves from legal liability specifically because of the public-facing nature of Google Collections bookmarks.
They don't care about your synced bookmarks or browser history because it's not public-facing and they aren't legally liable for the contents
There's a comment above explaining that this isn't quite the same as bookmarks