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I found this on it:

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#unwant...

> In addition, if you have opted in to automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google, Chrome will report information about unwanted software, including relevant file metadata and system settings linked to the unwanted software found on your computer.

I don't think I ever opted in to this but they may have have had tricky wording or I just didn't catch it. From searching around, there seems to be no way to opt out of the scan itself (not the submission) except denying read permissions to the software_reporter_tool.exe's folder. So if you have spinning drives that you want to keep idle when not in use, for power and longevity reasons, you are SOL without remembering each time you setup a machine.



From there, we get to https://www.google.com/about/unwanted-software-policy.html

which says

After installation, programs should not engage in deceptive or unexpected behavior. Some examples of deceptive or unexpected behavior include:[...]Preventing the user from controlling the software[...]The user must have a meaningful opportunity to review and approve any principal and significant updates or settings changes.

Disclosure is especially important if data collection is a non-obvious feature of the software.

Pure unadulterated hypocrisy. Not surprising coming from Google.


Also from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/security/...

> Don't scare the user. Software must not misrepresent the state of the user's machine to the user, for example by claiming the system is in a critical security state or infected with viruses.

Yet Google Chrome continues to tell users that many harmless executables are malware even after they have been informed of the false positive many times.

Maybe they should prevent people from downloading Chrome instead.




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