Why is it time to review browser sync options on Google Chrome | New



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The feature that Google has not announced in its last update to its Chrome browser may be the most educational.

A change that the search giant was intending to clarify the connection experience in its browser has alarmed some users who thought that they had just been yearning to see their Web activity sucked into their Google accounts.

This was not the case because Adrienne Porter Felt, head of engineering at Chrome confirmed in a tweet. But the renewed focus on how Google collects and processes the browsing history should be an invitation for everyone to consider both their Chrome login settings and other ways to sync their web history to their devices.

When the previous version of Chrome allowed you to sign in to Gmail or another Google service on a tab and unlinked from the browser, the current version connects you to Chrome. This did not synchronize your web activity, but the Chrome interface made it clear that only smaller browser settings would be saved to your Google Account.

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Google is excused in a blog post Tuesday night. Chrome Product Manager Zach Koch wrote that the next version of Chrome, scheduled for October, would specify whether web synchronization is enabled or disabled and that users can disable automatic browser sign-in.

While you wait for this update to arrive, take a moment to review the data Google has collected about your browsing activity. Visit chrome.google.com/sync and sign in with your Google Account, then take a look.

(Remember that Google says advertisers only pay to match their placements to the interests of this web activity, or you can see and edit what you look like for advertisers on adssettings.google.com.)

The simplest disabling is to set a sync password that will encrypt your web activity, even on Google's servers. No advertiser will be able to bid for data from this, but you will not see the pages in your Google Account browsing history that you have not entered or pasted into the address bar. Browser.

If you want to reconsider your browser choices, Mozilla Firefox is your easiest replacement. It runs on the same basic operating systems as Chrome, subject to the same iOS restriction as Chrome, which prevents you from setting it as the default browser. And Firefox browser synchronization encrypts your end-to-end history, so non-profit organizations can not see where you are.

Apple's iCloud offers its own private browsing history sync that only requires connecting to iCloud on the Settings app on a Mac or iOS device and enabling Safari sync. It should work fine until you switch to an Android or Windows device.

Microsoft Edge offers the most limited form of browser synchronization – it only covers favorites, the "play list" of pages you have set aside for later reading, and other browser settings. If you are running a current version of Windows 10, you will also see recent pages in the new Win 10 timeline feature.

In any of these scenarios, you will probably encounter the same problem of knowing that you have seen a page without seeing it in your saved history. In this case, you just have to go to Google for this page – or use Bing, DuckDuckGo or any other non-Google site that you prefer for your business.

Rob Pegoraro is a technical writer based in Washington, DC. To submit a technical question, send an email to Rob at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

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