Will you switch browsers?
To understand why requires a brief guide to how ScrollToTextFragment works. The simple version is it allows Google to index websites and share links down to a single word of text and its position on the page. It does this by creating its own anchors to text (using the format: #:~:text=[prefix-,]textStart[,textEnd][,-suffix]) and it doesn’t require the permission of the web page author to do so.
Uh, what?
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Chrome’s very existence is a privacy issue. This specific feature is nothing.
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I think basically people can see what you are searching for. Where ‘people’ are your ISP or other people on your network.
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Don’t care. I value convenience over privacy when it comes to internet browsing.
Tired of these click bait articles.
XXX just gave XXX users a reason to switch.
I ignore them all now.
The problem is it can also be exploited. Warning about the development of ScrollToTextFragment in December, Peter Snyder, a privacy researcher at Brave Browser explained:
“Consider a situation where I can view DNS traffic (e.g. company network), and I send a link to the company health portal, with [the anchor] #:~:text=cancer. On certain page layouts, I might be able [to] tell if the employee has cancer by looking for lower-on-the-page resources being requested.”
I think the article is saying that the ScrollToText allows the browser to access information that they shouldn’t and be able to use it maliciously.
I am using Safari for daily use, I don’t see why someone would use Chrome as main browser. I use it only for work (web dev + testing). If I weren’t iOS + macOS user would use Firefox. Chrome leaks personal information a lot.