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Chromium browsers have been quietly sending user information to Google
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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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.
The hidden plugins I'm talking about are BUILT INTO CHROMIUM.
https://community.brave.com/t/hidden-extensions-in-chromium-source/557645
Chromium based browsers (brave as an example linked above) ALSO had them present. It was only due to the new of this being a thing recently that brave (and probably others) made it disable-able (https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/24583 5 days ago).
Screaming "it's open source" means nothing if nobody ever reviewed the code, and disabled the google spyware shit that they put into chromium to begin with. Remember the Chromium is still a google product.
I'd rather just Mozilla... You know... since they didn't try to fuck me out the gate. I can accept "On by default, but we ask you during setup and you can access the setting at anytime" vs "Fuck you, you turned off all the telemetry but can't reach the hidden add-ons we install without recompiling your own browser". The mentality matters. I can trust the former to not screw me a bit more vs the latter rapist mentality.
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