What’s going on now?

If you are a user of Google Chrome, you may have noticed a message/warning, from Google Chrome, if you have installed harmful software on your computer, or you simply visit harmful websites.

In order for this to work, Google has worked with ESET (Security company), to create a tool that scans your computer. Said tool will report to the user, if harmful software is found on the computer – harmful software that hurts your browsing experience, or that clashes with Google Chrome performance, that is. This is not a stand-in for anti-virus!

Sounds good, right?

The idea behind the tool is great! It will help its users to hopefully be more safe when browsing the internet. The tool will periodically scan your computer for unwanted software, specifically software that can change the settings of the Chrome browser, without the users’ consent. For example, it could be a change of the default search engine, to some harmful website with injected advertisements, or the installation of a toolbar.

So what’s the catch?

By default, this feature is enabled, but it is also an opt-out “feature” that the tool reports back to Google with information about the harmful software, system settings and processes.

Paranoia city, how do I opt-out?

There’s no immediate reason to feel paranoid about this feature, and that it sends some information back to Google every single time it has done its periodical scan.

However, the information being sent back, includes:

• The web request (URL)
• IP address
• Browser type
• Browser language
• Time and date
• One or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser

Source (Chrome Privacy Policy)

Not that Google doesn’t already know everything about you, but this is another little helping hand to identify your browsing habits, especially useful if you are not logged into Gmail or the browser, when using Google Chrome.

Opting out – how to?

Navigate your browser to chrome://settings/cleanup and disable “Report details to Google”

Over’n’out,

Brian Lykke