Consider adding guides for configuring Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge

I want to make one thing very clear here. Conversations that you have on this forum with other members are not reflective of the Privacy Guides team or have anything to do with our official recommendations.

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This discussion forum contains community and personal advice, tool suggestions, and proposed changes; none of which have been approved or vetted for accuracy. If you are looking for advice right now, today, visit privacyguides.org.

Furthermore, I would like to comment on this:

Honestly, I’m starting to think that this website should be called SecurityGuides, not PrivacyGuides

I reject this notion. Privacy and security are not a binary either/or thing. A thing that we see a lot in the community is that people seem to think that these things are unrelated to one another.

What’s the use in “privacy” if you’re using a system that has known unpatched vulnerabilities, for example? That means that the ways to exploit your system (and therefore potentially compromise your privacy) are publicly available.

Security, in many cases, is a prerequisite for privacy. I will agree with you that something that is secure is not necessarily private, and that is why we carefully consider our recommendations to navigate these nuances, but conversation about this topic also needs to be nuanced instead of a binary privacy/security paradigm.

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This website is about privacy and security, none of which are. On windows you can uninstall those bloatware/spyware for libre wolf (harden firefox fork) or Use brave.com browser. Then you use those to add your security “hardening” with those.

What’s the point of being secure if they track us and don’t respect our privacy? Are you even listening to yourselves? You are talking about Chrome and Edge, you are literally talking about the two browsers that those of us who care about privacy should avoid the most.
I really don’t understand you guys. It’s true that security is important, of course, but this is outrageous. Would you recommend a ProtonMail that has full access to read every single detail of your emails, and share them with third parties? or a Tor that tracks your every move within its network? Outlook is a secure and stable email client, so come on, what are you waiting for to make it a guide and recommend it among your PRIVACY GUIDES?
Come on, please, it’s one thing to be permissive and quite another to take us for a ride.
Be coherent at least, please, I do not say that you do not have part of reason, but I insist, from there to recommend Chrome and Edge before other projects widely more dedicated or at least committed to privacy, is a joke, and not exactly a good one.

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Privacy just means the big corporations aren’t tracking you. Security is what keeps outside parties like hackers from tracking you.

Except they don’t. Google is good at keeping hackers from reading your emails, but they still read them. PGP can prevent Google from reading emails but it’s very limited as it doesn’t support forward secrecy nor does it encrypt metadata. Google also forbids use of insecure email clients, which is another reason why Gmail is so secure.

Security is necessary to have privacy, and I do recommend a lot of open source products, including Signal and GrapheneOS, but the reality is open source and proprietary, privacy-respecting or no, has nothing to do with security. Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the most secure browsers and because of that they offer good privacy from hackers and malicious websites, but they are not private in themselves. Because security is necessary, those browsers can be made private whereas Pale Moon cannot.

Sometimes the best options for privacy are the ones that aren’t committed. For example, Microsoft Office is the recommended office suite for Windows as LibreOffice is insecure. Google Pixel devices are the only secure phones and all other phones should be avoided. Stock Android is far more secure than all custom ROMs (including DivestOS which exists solely to provide harm reduction for those who cannot afford the newest Google pixel and should only be used as a last resort) except GrapheneOS and all Linux phones.

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Security is what keeps outside parties like hackers from tracking you.

Security is what prevents adversaries (literally anyone with malicious intent, not just hackers) from accessing information or gaining control over systems you do not wish them to.

Except they don’t…

Please explain the exact security vulnerabilities that Proton has, that GMail does not. Otherwise this is just promoting FUD.

Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the most secure browsers and because of that they offer good privacy from hackers and malicious websites

So they’re the most secure purely because they’re big corporates? What evidence do you have? Large open source projects have proven to fix flaws faster than big corporates… Google themselves agree. Source

Microsoft Office is the recommended office suite for Windows as LibreOffice is insecure

Recommended only according to you. How is LibreOffice insecure? No evidence just more tinfoil FUD

Google Pixel devices are the only secure phones and all other phones should be avoided.

Another generic misleading statement. Yes they are likely the most secure on the market that doesn’t make all other phone insecure by default. If you create a list of security risks/attack surface a mobile phone poses and the effectiveness of the controls in place to mitigate those risks and then used that to score the phones then ONLY if the Pixels received a significantly better score could you say that they’re the only secure phone. If the s22 mitigated 85% of security risks and the Pixel 88% does that make the Pixel the ONLY secure phone? No it makes it the most secure.

Stock Android is far more secure than all custom ROMs

By ‘Stock Android’ you mean the version of AOSP that Google runs with its
proprietary blobs…?
Or the cleaner GSI direct from AOSP themselves (albeit with its own usability drawbacks).

You’re spreading a lot of FUD in these statements, please link real evidence before making absolute statements, your advice can hurt others…

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I understand your frustration. I think the “Principle of Charity” might be helpful for discussions like these—where the subject might be counter-intuitive. :smile:

I think that both you, @anon82677111, and others, raise important points! For instance:

  • As @anon82677111 argues, the right to privacy depends on sufficient security. In comparisons between mainstream tools, like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, which have a well-documented history of unethical practices (PDF), and specific alternatives, there might be good reason to say that the loss in security is too severe for particular threat models. So, while they are major offenders against people’s privacy, there might be certain cases where even they are still preferable.

  • However, as you rightly point-out, the Privacy Guides website is respected—among other reasons—for its rigorous evaluation and selective recommendation of options (e.g. web browsers). So, I agree that it’s important to consider whether advising on “configuring Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge” is right to do (or can be done at all, without it seeming like an endorsement).

Personally, I think that it might be simple enough to advise on these browsers with explicit warnings about their ethical history (say, with warning admonitions). However, I think a more pressing issue is that it might create an educational design which works against the reader: not everyone reads the whole website, or even whole articles, and including these guides might devalue our actual recommendations.

Consider skimming-through the tables-of-contents and seeing that “hey, there’s a Google Chrome section as well as Brave. I installed a privacy extension I saw on YouTube. They’re probably just gonna say that.”

Obviously, we have no control over what visitors do or should read, but I think that optimizing the structure of information is essential to enabling them—however they might interact with the site. Will it stop these cases? Almost definitely not. Are they likely? Probably not. Is it an important part of writing UX? Yes, almost definitely.

This is a wider point, though (see this thread for more discussion).

The inevitable takeaway is @matchboxbananasynergy’s point: this forum is not a reflection of Privacy Guides or the team’s advice (including this reply)! It’s just our discussion, and it can be a tricky process. :smile:

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They’re the most secure because they have the most exploit mitigations, best sandboxing, and are the most up-to-date, and Edge supports MDAG on Windows and has a hardened security mode which disables JIT and enables more exploit mitigations.

Google Pixel phones properly support verified boot for third-party operating systems and they are the only phones that use the custom Titan M2 chip. No other phone comes close to being as secure. This goes to show that sometimes DeGoogling and alternatives can be harmful to privacy.

Most custom ROMs are known to break the Android security model. A lot of ROMs do not support Verified boot and most require rooting the device or leaving the bootloader unlocked. There is a reason mobile network operators do not allow unlocking the bootloader: to protect their customers.

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What’s the point of being secure if they track us and don’t respect our privacy? Are you even listening to yourselves? You are talking about Chrome and Edge, you are literally talking about the two browsers that those of us who care about privacy should avoid the most.

The OP (in this thread) is not recommending that Privacy Guides adds Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge as official recommendations, but rather that we provide guidance on how to configure them for people that want or need to use them.

As I have previously explained, and as @anon34719932 also mentioned in this thread, there are ways for us to provide configuration advice for setups that we do not necessarily endorse.

Privacy Guides is only useful if it serves its readers. Blanket statements such as “Google Chrome’s and Microsoft Edge’s security benefits don’t matter because they “track us and don’t respect our privacy”” are not helpful to our readers, and they also don’t tell the full story.

A lot of people seeking privacy want to minimize or eliminate unnecessary telemetry in their digital lives, and that’s is largely a valid thing for someone to want, and a lot of what our website recommends caters to that need.

However, viewing security and privacy through those narrow lens means that you’re excluding and gatekeeping a part of the community who has different or more specific concerns. There are people who may be okay with the telemetry in a browser like Microsoft Edge if that means that they get additional security in a specific situations.

To reject or shame people with those needs or try to stuff them into a “one size fits all” model of privacy that you’ve arrived to goes against exactly what I was saying in my previous reply about evaluating these options with nuance and through the lens of various use-cases.

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The OP (in this thread) is not recommending that Privacy Guides adds Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge as official recommendations

OP might not be recommending PG add them as recs but he is giving advice to others without threat modelling context and as a statement of fact to other forum readers.
This deserves to be critically analysed and labelled as promoting FUD, lest they be misconstrued or until evidence is provided.

If we as a community don’t at least question these statements, then I’d argue, other new users reading a post by someone within the Privacy Guides community, on the official forums, and although not explicitly endorsed by them, can infer tacit agreement of the community to some extent.
It’s irresponsible to not at least question (“Why” or “show me evidence”) these statements of fact, for those above reasons .

Examples:

  • Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are the most secure browsers and because of that they offer good privacy from hackers and malicious websites
  • Microsoft Office is the recommended office suite for Windows as LibreOffice is insecure
  • Google Pixel devices are the only secure phones and all other phones should be avoided.
  • Stock Android is far more secure than all custom ROMs

Back to your core premise:

evaluating these options with nuance and through the lens of various use-cases.

Agree it comes down to threat modelling and acceptable usability trade-offs, I’d argue it should’ve been the first piece of content that all others branch off; and that a lack of a ‘gold standard’ piece of evergreen content that is promoted in the community is, in my opinion, the single biggest issues in the privacy communities.

Otherwise without establishing a relevant threat model when debating tools and process, how can we ever talk the same ‘language’?
People will likely be on different pages just as the OP and “f0r_fr33d0m” are right now.
The entire Privacy community across all platforms, struggles with this immensely and gatekeeping ends up being a byproduct of the miscommunication.

All of us exist along a ‘threat spectrum’, facing either different adversaries or the same adversaries in differing contexts. Everyone in this forum is likely in a different place on the spectrum, from new beginners just realising the threat to users with an extreme threat model, targeting 100% anonymity, that are compiling their own naked AOSP OS, running Gentoo and maybe even building their own hardware.

This ‘tool’ from IVPN, which PG, also recommends is a great example. Do I need a VPN?

Maybe we should be targetting having a common set of questions to ask others, in order to help them determine their baseline threat model in order to make discussions more meaningful to everyone.

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@Fossforus I agree with most of what you said. Threat modeling and actually looking at your situation critically and making choices based on that is what we are hoping to help people do through our community as the website itself.

Edit: See the Threat modelling page and Common threats pages are back up (last i checked I got 404’s)

That is peculiar. We did not remove those pages, unsure why you ever got a 404 on them.

My issue with the comments made previously (the ones I was responding to) is that instead of trying to evaluate the suggestions being made and trying to fit them in a threat model and then seeing if they fit on the website in some capacity, we see comments such as:

What’s the point of being secure if they track us and don’t respect our privacy? Are you even listening to yourselves? You are talking about Chrome and Edge, you are literally talking about the two browsers that those of us who care about privacy should avoid the most.

This is not approaching the issue with nuance.

On the other hand, I fully agree that a lot of the statements by @anon82677111 are absolute and lack context/proof. Even if they are correct (I’m not saying they necessarily are, by the way), evidence is necessary to promote discussion and to help the community arrive at a useful conclusion.

I believe that both “sides” on this topic and others on this forum need to take a step back and engage in constructive discussion, providing evidence for their claims and keeping in mind that not everybody’s needs/threat model are the same.

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[citation needed] edit: from the top of this page:

This discussion forum contains community and personal advice, tool suggestions, and proposed changes; none of which have been approved or vetted for accuracy. If you are looking for advice right now, today, visit privacyguides.org.

Emmm literally this thread should count as a quote… they’re talking about making a guide to software that, yes, is secure but is also a serious (if not absolute) privacy hazard. This thread reminds me of the typical guide on how to harden your Windows for privacy, which yes, it improves it, but it’s still a danger to your privacy, but anyway, I found this thread so damn absurd that I was too lazy to continue replying. Do what you want, you are free and it’s your project, but in my opinion, you are making a mistake here.

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The OP specifically states

It’s taking a pragmatic stance to provide help to people that dgaf about the things many/most of us do here. And face it, most of the world will continue using Chrome & Edge regardless of any recommendations on the site.

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So you want advice for not following the advice? It just seems pointless to me. People who don’t want to see that chrome is violating their privacy are not going to be respective to any advice i am afraid.

It’s not like the recommendations couldn’t be prefaced with something like

We strongly advise you go with PG recommendations for browsers, but if that’s not feasible for you, you can do the following to at least minimize harm.

People don’t like change, and ignoring that won’t help anyone.

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Disagree, literally this entire project is recommending changes you can make to your technology and behavior to attain more privacy. If we want privacy-respecting technology, change will be a requirement. I can’t think of any reasonable situation wherein changing your web browser is not “feasible.”

I think we need to see evidence that Google Chrome provides tangible security benefits over say, Brave Browser. If the difference is negligible I see no reason whatsoever to add “Recommended Google Chrome settings” to the website solely because it is a popular browser.

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I think we need to see evidence that Google Chrome provides tangible security benefits over say, Brave Browser. If the difference is negligible I see no reason whatsoever to add “Recommended Google Chrome settings” to the website solely because it is a popular browser.

I fully agree with that. The particular statement you quoted was more me giving my opinion on threat models and how people seem to think security and privacy are two completely separate and unrelated things. It wasn’t me necessarily agreeing with the OP or wanting to add the guide.

I can see the case for using Microsoft Edge on Windows for some things (think things that are already tied to your identity and therefore Brave’s fingerprinting protection doesn’t really matter, in which case you could benefit from Edge’s JIT toggle, for instance) and perhaps even for non-Windows OSes, although the benefits are less prominent there.

With Google Chrome, I suppose you’re getting a near stock Chromium experience, and telemetry can be toggled off, but I don’t see any standout privacy or security benefits to Google Chrome. I would talk about it and have a section about configuring it if we make a guide on ChromeOS, though (a guide that I would eventually want us to have, by the way).

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Tentatively marking this thread as rejected for now.

As far as I’m aware Edge’s Super Duper Secure Mode (aka JITless) is available on all(?) Chrome browsers via a flag we could recommend if we wanted. At the very least it is supported by Brave:

I’m unsure Chrome/ChromeOS needs a guide on our website unless we also recommend alternative operating systems for Chromebooks (my line of thinking is that IMO we only have “stock Android” guides because we recommend Android phones, and we recommend Android phones because of the availability of GrapheneOS; and that analogy does not currently hold up when it comes to Chromebooks)… But, ChromeOS guides can be a separate topic to discuss.

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As far as I’m aware Edge’s Super Duper Secure Mode (aka JITless) is available on all(?) Chrome browsers via a flag we could recommend if we wanted. At the very least it is supported by Brave:

The only issue here is that it’s an all-or-nothing thing. Edge allows you to toggle JIT per site (similar to Vanadium) which means that you can keep JIT disabled for sites not affected by it, but enable it for sites that need it (Element web would be an example).

Element web doesn’t need JIT, I’ve been using it in enhanced security mode since forever and have no issues.