Luca Casonato 🏳️🌈 on Twitter / X
Developer Luca Casonato posted a series of tweets on July 9. He revealed that Google has reserved a private API in the Chrome browser. This allows Google domain names (such as *.google.com) exclusive access to detailed system information.
The Details:
Chrome’s Private API: Google has reserved a private API in Chrome that gives Google domains exclusive access to detailed system data, including CPU architecture and processor usage.
Impact on Google Services: This API enables Google services, such as Google Meet, to monitor system resources more effectively, suggesting optimizations like closing tabs to alleviate CPU overload.
Public Discovery and Reaction: The feature was brought to light by developer Luca Casonato and further demonstrated by Simon Willison, who showed how the API responds differently when accessed from Google versus non-Google domains.
Why It Matters:
Privacy Concerns: The exclusive access Google has to detailed system information via a private API raises significant privacy concerns, particularly regarding the transparency and control users have over their data.
Competitive Fairness: This API could potentially give Google an unfair advantage by allowing its services to optimize performance based on data that is not available to competitors, leading to questions about competitive fairness in the tech industry.
Regulatory Implications: The discovery of this private API might attract regulatory scrutiny regarding how tech giants manage user data and their dominance over the web ecosystems they help create.
Faction’s Take:
While there can be perfectly innocuous product-focused reasons for Google to want to know such things, the way this was done – secretly and separately from what is available to any other developers – belies all of that. The tech giants have built back doors for gathering data on all of us into all of their software, and the ‘privacy agreements’ users sign off on with no actual choice all grant them the unencumbered right to do so. It’s time for people to wake up and demand change.
