During the recent Festival of Maccabees, Google rolled out an update to their Chrome browser, which users quickly realized might contain secret recording features.
From the video screenshot taken by one of the targeted group, those little blinking faces all over the page turned out to be not just unicode greeting icons, but hidden cameras that are recording what you type. The next time you use Google, you should download Google Tor, so you can hide any recording from the search engine.
Is Google bugging you?
The Maccabees update has been working on a lot of users’ computers for the past few days, so they may have already received the update via Google Chrome. A quick search of the term, ‘Google under fire’, brought up a lot of responses from annoyed Google users, as indicated by this forum thread.
These complaints began on Wednesday, March 20th, when the search engine released their updated Chrome browser. If you’re a Mac user, you shouldn’t have trouble downloading the update.
If you’re using Chrome for Windows, this will most likely involve going to http://www.google.com/chrome/overall/download-then download-again/.
Users, who already received the update, noticed the change last night. There was a protest on the Google Chrome forums, as well, where they reported the abuse by the Mountain View tech giant.
Is this a cyberterrorism plan by Google, or something else?
How is this in violation of Google’s user agreement? Is this a nefarious plot to become even more powerful than before?
No longer is the default in the browser behaviour what it was originally used to be, say, two weeks ago. ‘Hello world, this was your first meet-up :)’ turned into ‘Welcome to a device that is recording you every single moment of the day. You should see [previous page].’ We all know how these things go.
More security weaknesses found
Apple just had a Security Alert sent out on the matter, including a workaround they recommend all Mac users download, in which they can force ‘Recents’ to clear, but that’s not the only security hole in this browser update.
On the Google Chrome Public Chrome Link page, Chrome security experts Kevin Popescu and Elliott Kaye point out that there are two other significant security risks.
The first could only be used by a user who knew their data was being recorded, and that you can’t view the history of the sessions. The second vulnerability was revealed by a hacker named Tyler Kropps, who found a vulnerability where tabs open in private windows will auto-download website entries.
Did Google stop these bugs from becoming known or are they hiding them to become even more powerful? We don’t know yet, and if you want to help, if you’ve updated Chrome since when these security holes were found, you should check out this story on the Metro.
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