Google Chrome’s Users Take a Back Seat to Its Bottom Line

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Google Chrome is the most popular browser in the world. Chrome routinely leads the pack in features for security and usability, most recently helping to drive the adoption of HTTPS. But when it comes to privacy, specifically protecting users from tracking, most of its rivals leave it in the dust.

 

 

Users are more aware of, and concerned about, the harms of pervasive tracking than ever before. So why is Chrome so far behind? It’s because Google still makes most of its money from tracker-driven, behaviorally-targeted ads. The marginal benefit of each additional bit of information about your activities online is relatively small to an advertiser, especially given how much you directly give Google through your searches and use of tools like Google Home. But Google still builds Chrome as if it needs to vacuum up everything it can about your online activities, whether you want it to or not.

 

In the documents that define how the Web works, a browser is called a user agent. It’s supposed to be the thing that acts on your behalf in cyberspace. If the massive data collection appetite of Google’s advertising- and tracking-based business model are incentivizing Chrome to act in Google’s best interest instead of yours, that’s a big problem—one that consumers and regulators should not ignore.

Chrome is More Popular Than Ever. So is Privacy.

Since Chrome’s introduction in 2008, its market share has risen inexorably. It now accounts for 60% of the browsers on the web. At the same time, the public has become increasingly concerned about privacy online. In 2013, Edward Snowden’s disclosures highlighted the links between massive, surreptitious corporate surveillance and the NSA’s spy programs. In 2016, the EU ratified the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping (and complicated) set of guidelines that reflected a new, serious approach to data privacy. And in the U.S., this year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal sparked unprecedented backlash against Facebook and other big tech companies, driving states like California to pass real data privacy laws for the first time (although those laws are under threat federally by, you guessed it, Google and Facebook).

 

Around the world, people are waking up to the realities of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance business model:  the business of “commodifying reality,” transforming it into behavioral data, and using that data and inferences from it to target us on an ever-more granular level.  The more users learn about this business model, the more they want out.

 

That’s why the use of ad and tracker blockers, like EFF’s Privacy Badger, has grown dramatically in recent years. Their popularity is a testament to users’ frustration with the modern web: ads and trackers slow down the browsing experience, burn through data plans, and give people an uneasy feeling of being watched. Companies often justify their digital snooping by arguing that people prefer ads that are “relevant” to them, but studies show that most users don’t want their personal information to be used to target ads.

 

All of this demonstrates a clear, growing demand for consumer privacy, especially as it relates to trackers on the web.

 

As a result, many browser developers are taking action. In the past, tracker blockers have only been available as third-party “extensions” to popular browsers, requiring diligent users to seek them out. But recently, developers of major browsers have started building tracking protections into their own products. Apple’s Safari has been developing Intelligent Tracking Protection, or ITP, a system that uses machine learning to identify and stop third-party trackers; this year, the improved ITP 2.0 became the default for tens of millions of Apple users. Firefox recently rolled out its own tracking protection feature, which is on by default in private browsing windows. Opera ships with the option to turn on both ad and tracker blocking. Even the much-maligned Internet Explorer has a built-in “tracking protection” mode.

 

Yet Google Chrome, the largest browser in the world, has no built-in tracker blocker, nor has the company indicated any plans to build one. Sure, it now blocks some intrusive ads, but that feature has nothing to do with privacy. The closest thing it offers to “private” browsing out-of-the-box is “incognito mode,” which only hides what you do from others who use your machine.  That might hide embarrassing searches from your family, but does nothing to protect you from being tracked by Google.

Conflicts of Interest

Google is the biggest browser company in the world. It’s also the biggest search engine, mobile operating system, video host, and email service. But most importantly, it’s the biggest server of digital ads. Google controls 42% of the digital advertising market, significantly more than Facebook, its largest rival, and vastly more than anyone else. Its tracking codes appear on three quarters of the top million sites on the web. 86% of Alphabet’s revenue (Google’s parent company) comes from advertising. That means all of Alphabet has a vested interest in helping track people and serve them ads, even when that puts the company at odds with its users.

 

Source: The EFF