For me it's because I control my interaction with Google. I don't use their search for things I don't want them recording, I don't use gmail for conversations I expect to be private. Once your talking about the private files I store on my hard drive and access with the OS, the keystrokes I enter on my keyboard for every application, then the reach is far greater. Having a company like Google say "You can use these services, but we're going to spy on you" is not the same as MS saying "we will be watching and have access to everything on your computer, oh and you can't disable all of this spying without an enterprise license."
http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-...
For another thing, Chrome doesn't log every website you visit. The closest thing they do is suggest autocompletions for searches/URLs you type in the URL, which is a straightforwardly-explained checkbox in Chrome's privacy settings.
But it does. If you get a new android phone and log in with a google account then it updates your browser history on chrome. Which could only be done if your non-incognito history is stored in google's servers.
To be fair, that feature also isn't very hidden; the sync settings let you turn off history sync or use a sync passphrase which prevents Google from seeing your browsing history.
I find it shocking how hypocritical Microsoft was towards Google all these years only to find out their even worse than Google because they baked these privacy "violations" into their browser.
>Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged
Utter bullshit. I don't login to Chrome when I use it and none of my URL's are sent to Google.
Citation?
A while back I put together a Linode server for a small project. Because I was lazy I made a private page of web links for the site logs and made the URL something long and obscure with plenty of backslashes that couldn't be spidered or guessed. The main site had no Google analytics and barely any traffic.
When I checked the logs a couple of days later my private log page had been accessed externally. The visitor's IP address was in one of the ranges that belongs to Google.
So... I changed the URL, looked at the new URL in Chrome, and checked again a day later.
Same thing. Someone - or something - from Google was accessing my private URL, based on my Chrome history.
I changed the URL again and switched to Safari.
Nothing.
Clearly, Chrome phones home and Google feels entitled to check new URLs that it can't spider. Safari doesn't phone home. (Or if it does, no one at Apple cares enough to check weird URLs).
I don't think any other conclusion is possible.
Yesterday one of my friends bought a mac. He needed a credit card before he could install vim... vim needs brew, which needs xcode, which needs the istore, which needs an appleid, which needs (well, wants) a credit card on file.
While I don't disagree that Google does consume a lot of user data, I'm pretty sure most of these are opt in or at least explained fairly up-front, and that their resultant policies are no worse than Microsoft's.
Can you give an example of where their policies are clearly worse?
Well, I thought Google already tracked you whichever browser you use, via its advertising networks.
However, it does offer good control and opt-out cookies for the (whatever) 0.0001 percent of people who find out about this and actually give a damn.
For instance, in Android, Google tracks with GPS accuracy your whereabouts constantly. This isn't just what IP your desktop is attached to. Furthermore, there is no prompt telling you this happens with a very easy way of undoing. In fact even if you knew about this it is very hard to find a way to disable.
Secondly, Chrome send every website you visit to their servers to be logged. Again, this is not explained in some easy opt-out screen and in fact the only way to get around this is to use SRWare Iron, where they removed that code.
But Microsoft makes it easy for you to choose the privacy options even telling you about them on install.