Except that if you're an American, chances of Chinese government being able to affect you are tiny. Chances of NSA/Homeland Security/FBI tagging you as a "suspicious person - potential terrorist" and making your travel a living hell due to your Chrome history is significantly higher.

For me, no. Fuck all of them.

I particularly hate Facebook though, for turning most everyone around me into US informants.

If I see the opportunity to contribute to their obsoletion I'll dedicate years of my life to that.

> If I see the opportunity to contribute to their obsoletion I'll dedicate years of my life to that.

Here you go: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/diaspora

You might find Urbit of interest, if you haven't looked into it before now.

The jargon grinds on me, but it does look interesting. I added to my interesting decentralized/federated protocols collection.

There's also this recent piece [1], which was lost behind the Medium paywall until republished (apparently just today?) on urbit.org. It's a very solid introduction to the platform, its intent, and the reasoning which underlies it, and it's refreshingly free of jargon. If you're looking for something to whet your curiosity, I can unreservedly recommend it.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpy5vt4zfuwgzax/the%20not%20so%20d...

There is a difference between the engine I use to access a large variety of websites, and a single website/service.

I'm confused. Is "the engine you use to access a large variety of websites" Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway). If it's Google, Chrome is no better, and Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway.

More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.

> Opera, or Google the search engine? If it's Opera, Chrome then is no better (and arguably Gmail holds the keys to your kingdom anyway)

True, if I used Google, or their products.

But, I use Mozilla, who are publicly auditable, and an email provider that is not located in the US.

The majority of visits to websites have no search engine interaction, but those that do, make use of DuckDuckGo and the like.

> More generally, I don't see how China having your browsing history is worse than the US having your browsing history and your authentication attempts and all your contacts and just everything, completely everything.

Bringing up the US here, isn't entirely relevant. We're speaking about China, who have demonstrated some interesting ethics around people who are non-Chinese over the past few decades. Yes, the US is of concern, but that doesn't mean that China isn't one.

Secondly, your browser doesn't just have your history. It also has your authentication attempts, because it makes them. It also controls what certificates you use, and can trivially be used to MITM every authentication you make, unless pinning or other not-well-adopted practices are used. Which can give them everything.

... and even pinning won't save you unless you use a tool to monitor your connections and confirm you actually are using the cert your browser is saying you're using.

I'm not entirely sure it's possible to build such a tool.

Facebook and Google track you all over the web.

I'd say they attempt to track you by having various mechanisms to do so. This distinction is important as to no make this tracking appears imevitable.

you can take measures to prevent them from tracking you, a simple and quite effective one is to disable scripting and use a properly set up blocker such as ublock origin.