These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.Ĭhrome welcomed trackers even at websites you’d think would be private. In a week of web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer, but were automatically blocked by Firefox. My tests of Chrome versus Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. Switching involved less inconvenience than you might imagine.

It made me decide to ditch Chrome for a new version of nonprofit Mozilla’s Firefox, which has default privacy protections. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most-popular web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop. Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really is up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads.

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