So Apple introduced new privacy labels to their iOS app a few months ago, but Google delayed adding those labels until now. They clearly didn’t want to show how much data they were collecting, and now we know why. Here are the privacy labels for Chrome and the Google app on iOS:
Remember that even if you are using an VPN, Google can triangulate from all the things you do, who you are. This is one of the biggest mistakes people do regarding privacy. If you don’t create your identity from the start thinking about privacy, then you are wasting your time. It also only requires that you log in without VPN to one device, for companies to understand you are the user of that device and link it to all their other tracking. Even if you then correct your mistakes, that device is tainted with your info.
It’s pretty shocking with Facebook for example. Lets say you don’t have a Facebook account. Well surprise, Facebook already has gathered everything about you from your friends that do have an account. They have photos of you stored and analyzed. In the background your profile is already filled out for you. You have been in reality registered for years, without knowing. If they managed to collect any photos of you, they have full 3D renders of your face, and if there is any audio of you, they could even synthesize your voice (easily done with https://github.com/keithito/tacotron usingTenserFlow). Not to mention make a beautiful DeepFake of you, for example Very realistic Tom Cruise Deepfake | AI Tom Cruise - YouTube.
It’s the same thing with Google. Maybe you don’t use any of their services. If you do however use Chrome, then it doesn’t matter, Google already has all they want about you.
If you haven’t already, change browser if you use Chrome. They are also changing in their Manifest v3 how extensions work. This will cause a lot of problems for adblockers, maybe even make it impossible for them to run as they do now. You can ready about it here:
So what to do? Well the best thing right now is to go with something like Brave or Vivaldi. I personally use Vivaldi, I love the level of customization I can do. The entire browser UI is Javascript and CSS, so you can add new features and there are a lot of copy paste modifications for it.
The unfortunate thing is that Brave and Vivaldi are Chromium based, so Google will force Manifest v3 to them too. Short term we can use them, but later we will probably have to move to Firefox or something that is not Chromium or Google influenced to be able to block ads correctly. Google is pushing hard for Manifest v3, because as we know, it’s bad business for them to block ads since they are the biggest provider of them.