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When it comes to privacy, is Chromium safe to use?

1 points by castor_t ↗ HN
I go back and forth on whether to use Chromium or Firefox Developer Edition. I generally, like to keep up with the latest updates. In my experience, Chromium is fast and stable. I would like to use it, but I give a great deal of importance to my privacy. As a rule, I do not to connect to Google unless its important. I use uMatrix and uBlock addons, and startpage as my search engine. With uMatrix filtering, I only allow ajax.googleapis on websites only when its required.

So, my question is this. Can I use Chromium? I know that it connects to google servers on every startup, and it updates extensions automatically. So, whenever I open the browser, Google knows my IP address and the list of extensions present in my system along with other browser details. I can easily avoid this by using Firefox, or am I being paranoid?

2 comments

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subudeepak
You are not paranoid. You could use Chromium which has relatively fewer connections to google servers. You could also look at alternative browsers that have been forked from the chromium project with an emphasis on privacy.

For example: WhiteHat Aviator.

If you are comfortable changing settings of the browser, you could disable most of the google connections from the browser. [The first things I recommend changing is the search URL, disable auto-completion, bad site checking etc.] Then you have the do not track header ..

Of course, if browsing privacy is your biggest concern, the safest browser is Lynx ;) [Though not truly practical for most cases]

castor_t
Thanks for the reply. Ofcourse, I disabled all the privacy settings that I can through settings in Chromium. But still, I could not avoid connections on startup on Chromium. It generally is not a problem, but I do not want Google to know whenever I open the browser :)