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A comment on The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome. Parent comment

Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by geor9e on Saturday March 08, 2025 @11:41PM (#43306307)
Chrome Sync (i.e. saving your history + everything else to the cloud so it syncs to all your devices) is an optional setting. Microsoft Edge has the same thing under another name. Safari does too.
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Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by scarface_74 on Sunday March 09, 2025 @12:16AM (#43306492)
Google also uses your browsing history to create a profile for advertising

https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...

> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.

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Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by geor9e on Sunday March 09, 2025 @11:37AM (#43310017)
That's not Chrome's browsing history - that's an ad network, adsense, profiling you, via cookies/ip/digital fingerprinting, across every website that serves it's ads. It's like logging into facebook and saying they can see your browsing history - yes some of it, but it's because they're watching a server they own serve you requests.
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Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by scarface_74 on Sunday March 09, 2025 @12:02PM (#43310365)
The entire idea behind “privacy sandbox” is to create a profile of you for advertising based on your browsing history and the profile is created by Chrome - without being logged in and without cookies.

https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/

More specifically the Topics API

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API

It’s opposed by both Mozilla and Apple and is only supported by Google/Chrome.

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Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by geor9e on Sunday March 09, 2025 @12:23PM (#43310618)
Interesting. So the browser knows your browsing history like every browser does, but it uses it to share some distilled data. Yeah, I definitely don't want that. Looks like I already totally disabled it though, so I'm good I guess.

Privacy and security > Ad privacy

Ad topics: Generates a list of your interests based on your browsing behavior.

Site-suggested ads: Allows advertisers to retarget you based on your interactions.

Ad measurement: Enables advertisers to assess ad performance.

Toggle each of these settings to "Off" to disable them.

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Re:The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome by scarface_74 on Sunday March 09, 2025 @12:54PM (#43310987)
Yep.

And I slightly misspoke. I said it was only supported by Chrome. More accurately, it is supported by Chrome and some Chromium based browsers.

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