How safe is Chrome from Google's eyes?

[foxy]

I've been using Firefox almost from its inception, and I always have a secondary browser. First IE, last few years Opera, but Opera's going in a direction I don't like.

Except for Youtube, I haven't used any Google product in years, because of their frequent privacy breaches. And then I dip their cookies in bleach to sterilize them ;-) Aside from the fact that my ISP, Verizon, is already spying on me, how safe is it to use Chrome?

[jdc2000]

It depends on your idea of "Safe". Google collects info from everything you do using Chrome, so I would not really consider it "Safe" in that sense. If you mean safe from security issues that might allow hackers to perform some nefarious trick, it is probably as safe as any other browser. There are likely undiscovered security holes in any browser you use at any given time.

You might consider either the "Brave" browser or Vivaldi as a secondary browser.

[foxy]

I meant safe from Google. And if FF makes good on their plan to drop all extensions next year, whatever's secondary will be promoted to primary. Thanks for the tips, will explore them.

[HAN]

I understand where you're coming from. But I don't think user specific user privacy is a huge concern more than with other browsers. Google lists how to manage Chrome privacy settings on the various platforms https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/114836?hl=en and here is their general privacy on Chrome itself. https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/ Finally, here is where you can control what Google (not necessarily Chrome) collects https://privacy.google.com/my-controls.html

I've been using Chrome at home here and there (to get used to it) while mainly using FF in Sandboxie. I still like FF at home for now but they may mess it up permanently when they go multi-process (Electrolysis) https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016...-electrolysis/ Plus, like you note, FF extensions futures are worrisome. At this point, I could switch to Chrome at home and feel fine about it.

At work, I've already switched everyone to 64 bit Chrome from FF. By many accounts, it is arguably one of the safest browsers to use. It auto-updates Flash and will not run web-based Java, both excellent ideas. I make plugins "Click to Play" ("Let me choose when to run plugin content"), add the WOT and uBlock Origin extensions and any other minor tweaks that seem useful. So far, so good.

[HAN]

Forgot to ask... when you mentioned "frequent privacy breaches" from Google, I was curious what breaches? There have been reports of Gmail addresses being stolen but I can't remember ever seeing where Google acknowledged any of these breaches came from them. The most recent mention of stolen credentials was not what many thought it was http://arstechnica.com/security/2016...a-is-98-bogus/

Google is not perfect. No one or nothing is. But they are pretty good at what they do...