this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
271 points (100.0% liked)
privacy
3604 readers
1 users here now
Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
Partners:
- community.nicfab.it/c/privacy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Simply not true. The only way to stop Firefox from phoning home completely is via about:config or a policy template file:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections https://mozilla.github.io/policy-templates/
You can do the same with Chrome:
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/
Firefox certainly phones home less by default, especially when opting out through various settings, but not completely. Chrome/Chromium isn't evil either. Chromium sandboxing has long been praised as a more secure browser, hence why GrapheneOS (praised as the most secure phone distro) uses Chromium as their browser and not Firefox. Not saying Firefox is bad either. I actually prefer Firefox in certain scenarios and there is a reason that Tor and Mullvad use Firefox for their browsers too (easier to prevent JS from leaking system info), but Chromium is open source as well and used in things like Electron for Signal.
Again Chromium is open source. Chrome is Google's bundled browser that includes API keys and plugins to share information for signing in to Google and syncing data with your Google account. You do not have to enable these, and they can be disabled using policies & flags.
It is hard to have a discussion with you when you exaggerate. Rapist mentality is far from what Chromium is. You really can't equate rape to technology, since you have a choice.
The API you references communicates with Google using its own API when you use Google services, and as specifically designed for Google Hangouts at the time to report system information during calls. This has been known about since at least 2018. Any developer could have submitted a PR to have it removed. That is how open source works.
This has already been disabled in other Chromium builds:
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/flags.gn#L5
Just because Brave recently submitted a bug report doesn't mean that others have noticed. Again, I encourage you to look at what can be disabled via policies in Chrome (like Firefox):
https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#WebRtcEventLogCollectionAllowed