this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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It doesn't feel legal. A bookmark is textual data you've stored on your computer for later reference, and while it is on their application, somehow this feels wrong. It's definitely wrong ethically, but is there something in the user agreement that says they have full reign of whatever the browser can touch?
Pretty much everything you do on Chrome gets sent to Google. It is one of, if not the worst browsers, for privacy. Their Privacy Policy is pretty clear on this. It’s all for a better “user experience”.
Actually this is only on Google Collections which is a bookmark sharing service, not just the browser bookmark sync.
Your synced bookmarks should be unaffected as Google says everything in browser sync is encrypted locally before being synced, so Google shouldn't be able to scan those (or really care about them at all)
They are doing it to protect themselves from legal liability specifically because of the public-facing nature of Google Collections bookmarks.
They don't care about your synced bookmarks or browser history because it's not public-facing and they aren't legally liable for the contents
There's a comment above explaining that this isn't quite the same as bookmarks