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Comment by om2

6 years ago

I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any mainstream tech press attention. Chrome's Privacy Whitepaper describes a number of privacy-questionable nonstandard headers which are only sent to Google services. Just try searching for X- here:

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html

And for ease of reading, a few others:

> On Android, your location will also be sent to Google via an X-Geo HTTP request header if Google is your default search engine, the Chrome app has the permission to use your geolocation, and you haven’t blocked geolocation for www.google.com (or country-specific origins such as www.google.de)

> To measure searches and Chrome usage driven by a particular campaign, Chrome inserts a promotional tag, not unique to you or your device, in the searches you perform on Google. This non-unique tag contains information about how Chrome was obtained, the week when Chrome was installed, and the week when the first search was performed. ... This non-unique promotional tag is included when performing searches via Google (the tag appears as a parameter beginning with "rlz=" when triggered from the Omnibox, or as an “x-rlz-string” HTTP header).

> On Android and desktop, Chrome signals to Google web services that you are signed into Chrome by attaching an X-Chrome-Connected and/or C-Chrome-ID-Consistency-Request header to any HTTPS requests to Google-owned domains. On iOS, the CHROME_CONNECTED cookie is used instead.

Holy rotten metal batman... those are pretty bad. Why in the world isn't everyone up in arms over this?....