Slashdot Mirror
New Chrome Beta Adds Privacy Controls, Translation Option
billandad writes "Anyone would think the timing was deliberate; just as Microsoft is forced into giving users the option to switch from IE via the browser ballot screen, so Google introduces a new Chrome beta with enhanced privacy features to chisel away at Microsoft's market share. '... you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.' The new beta also adds language detection, and will prompt the user to translate a page if it's written in a foreign tongue."
Okay - chromium can be made safe, but not Chrome. Chrome + Vbox machine + Wireshark = Proof of concept. Chrome talks to google servers no matter what settings you put them on. Good luck with privacy.
That's the usual trick. The privacy settings conveniently ignore any such issue and only concentrate on the client side things like "private tab" or cookie handling. Of course, if you don't want to go completely white-list based (and most users don't), there's no way to explicitly block certain domains like google-analytics.com.
Of course it's convenient for Google to call only that privacy and completely ignore the fact that every Chrome installation has identifier about where you downloaded it, when you installed it, an unique identifier, everything you type to browser bar is sent to Google, any domain you visit is sent to Google, and so on...