Be Careful of this Google Chrome Feature!

I never thought that this day will come when I need to worry about what Google is doing. I don't know why anyone would want Google to control what it wants you to see but Google has a feature to do that!

Let me explain, my wife bought me a new phone a few days ago and I started playing with it. The default browsers are usually not what I want so I decided to switch to Chrome as my default browser. I was fiddling with the setting on Chrome and found a feature that I had not noticed before. The feature is called 'Data Saver'. When I enabled it, it promised to help me save some bandwidth so I happily accepted it. The feature pointed out to me that HTTPS connections will not be optimized which seem acceptable at the time.

At my office, the next day I decided to use my new phone to test it out with MB™ with this feature enabled. To my horror, no traffic was registered by MB™. However, my phone was able to still reached the contents of my site. I tried it a few times and then it hit me, I understood what was happening. Google Analytics (GA) showed the traffic hit but the traffic never really got to my site. Google was crawling my site (which I allowed on MB™) and caching the contents. When my browser requested for the page, Google Chrome did not go to my site rather it fetched the page from their own cache and updated GA!

That may sound harmless at first glance for the sake of saving a few bytes on my phone but the implications are far reaching. Many of my friends and family know nuts about technology so for them enabling a feature like this when there is no explanation of what is going on at the background is a real cause for worry. Thankfully, this feature is not turned on by default for now! Lets give Google the benefit of doubt that they are trying to do good and save the world but still my worry is that bad things happen on the Internet all the time. Just imagine if the cache that Google has was hacked and filled with porn. You are with your family and about to go visit your Church website for last week's sermon and out comes an orgy picture with your entire family staring at the screen together with you. This is the best case scenario in the case when bad things happen.

Lets take that thought even further and imagine the worst case scenario. If one day Google Chrome ruled the web. Google now has the power to decide how many visitors go to your site and that includes what content they allow your visitors to see on your website. If they needed some advertisements to be inserted into your page, they could easily do that at a click of the finger. You can try all you want on your web server to fix it but in reality there is nothing you will be able to do about it.

You may argue that using HTTPS solves all the problem, but many people in the 3rd world nations can't afford these type of privileges. This feature actually penalizes the poor more than the well to do. It simply puts those who cannot afford such privileges at greater risk while trying to 'promote' better security practices such as using HTTPS. I know it is a tough problem and I am not trying to solve it. All that I am pointing out is that if you use Google Chrome, make sure you know what is happening and the risks that is involved in using such a feature!