Privacy alert: Chrome 69 will now upload your browser history when you check your Gmail

Along with Material Design, the latest version of Google’s popular Chrome browser also brings along some under the hood changes which may not be as desirable to users concerned about their privacy.

With Google Chrome 69, logging into any Google service such as Gmail or YouTube will now also log you into the browser itself, which means a large number of items will automatically be uploaded to Google’s servers, where they can presumably be indexed, a user and ad profile be created or subpoenaed for your divorce proceedings.

Prior to this users had to consciously log into the browser, and users who were not logged in had their bookmarks, browser and other items stored only locally.

Google’s privacy policy makes the difference between logged in and logged-out (basic browser) mode clear.

I suspect at this point most of us have given up the fight to keep our data on our own computers and out of the cloud, but for those who are still fighting the good fight, and who are rightfully outraged by this, besides protesting loudly may also want to use an alternate browser focussed on privacy such as the Brave browser.

Read more about the change at S Balint’s site here.