They told us “don’t be evil”…
Most people seem unaware that Google already has both their online and offline lives under surveillance. They have used “PR” to convince the world they are benevolent tech visionaries who want to share their genius for the benefit of society. They want us to share everything with them but they are consciously opaque about their products and business operations.
No to Chrome aims raise awareness of how Google is shaping the internet, your present and future for its own ends. On the home page you can take the first step to abandon the Google Chrome browser but the rest of the site will have more information if you want to dig a little deeper.
Two overlapping and related themes summarise the problems with Google:
Google is not your friend
Google has business model built on surveillance capitalism and with a data extraction imperative – Google thinks it needs new data like human beings need oxygen. They consider it essential to their survival. Google will do everything it can to ensure its ability to extract information about you, your thoughts, feelings and relationships is unrestricted, even without your consent and sometimes in direct opposition to existing national and international laws.
“Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists are factory farms for human beings. They make their billions by farming you for your data and exploiting that intimate insight into your life to manipulate your behaviour.”
Aral Balkan – cyborg rights activist, designer and developer
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Google is not our friend
Google is an information colonialist who want to seize all information both online and in real life – irrespective of who should have the right to access it – to create a data monopoly that can only be accessed on their terms and for their profit. They are resistant to regulation, accountability and paying tax.
“Google decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission.”
Shoshana Zuboff – author of The New Age of Surveillance Capitalism
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Keeping it simple
No To Chrome is designed as a starting point for anyone who uses the internet to send a message to Google that their relentless disregard for our rights, dignity, democracy and communities will not be tolerated.
On our home page find a new better browser, uninstall or disable Google Chrome on all your devices tell everyone to do the same.
There are many ways protest against Google ranging from Tweets to full boycotts but No To Chrome is designed to be for anyone who uses the internet to participate easily and immediately.
“…the surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.”
Surveillance Giants by Amnesty International
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What are the problems with Google Chrome from Google and why you should give it up today.
The background
Launched in 2008 Chrome has become the dominant web browser in the world with 63% of the global market share.
Chrome is bundled as the default browser on phones using Android OS and on Google hardware like Pixel phone, Nexus tablet and Chromebook.
Even many rival browsers now use the Chromium Google back end to power their browsers including Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave.
The problems with Chrome
Privacy? Never from Google
- Google does not recognise the ‘do not track’ setting a clear attempt to ignore user consent.
- Chrome is a data supply chain for Google
- A Chrome ‘flaw’ allowed sites to secretly record audio and video without warning or consent.
- The fabled ‘Incognito mode’ in Chrome suggests people can opt for a private web browsing – this has been shown to not be private from Google who continues to track both you and what you’re looking at.
- In 2019 Google announced that Chrome would restrict modern ad blockers – the only major browser to do so.
- Even if you use the ‘do not track’, adjust all your browser privacy settings to avoid tracking, use ‘private browsing‘ and multiple ad blockers Google uses browser fingerprinting and it’s other surveillance tools like Analytics and DoubleClick to track you anyway
Monopoly and anti-competition
“There were dozens and dozens of ‘oopsies,’ where Google ships something and, ‘oops,’ it doesn’t work in Firefox. They say oh we’re going to fix it right away, in two months, and in the meantime every time the user goes to these sites, they think, ‘oh, Firefox is broken.”
Andreas Gal, former chief technology officer of Mozilla.
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- Chrome and Chromium are supposedly based on open-source – a tactic by Google to avoid competition scrutiny – but you still require the proprietary Google product Widevine if you intend to build your own Chromium browser. Google can just say no and realistically the decisions around Chromium are made by Google engineers and not any sort of collaborative open-source community.
- Google have been accused of ensuring other Google products only work on Chrome to undermine rival browsers.
- Sources from Microsoft said they moved their Edge browser to the Chromium back end because Google deliberately destabilised Edge when using Google products making it difficult for Microsoft to effectively support its users
- Other anti-competition practices have dogged Chrome – not least on the Android platform were Google have tried to make Chrome default on all non-Google Android installations, something the EU did not approve of.
In a week of desktop websurfing, the columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, wrote that he discovered 11,189 requests for tracker cookies that were blocked by Firefox but would have been allowed by Chrome.
David Ingram, NBC
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Who is behind this?
No to Chrome is an alliance led by Berlin based Eduardo Smith and UK based James Mullarkey.