While I’ve been a privacy nerd since the early 2000s, lately I’ve found a few of my long-time practices have been defeating my attempts to fly under the radar. I have little to hide, but I don’t care to reveal to big tech everything that I do online. For this reason, I stopped using the Google Chrome browser many years ago, nor do I use Google Search. But something else escaped my scrutiny until lately.
I’ve been using the Google Translate browser extension for years, as it’s handy for – you know – translating websites in other languages into my native language. I reconsidered the T’s & C’s for Google Translate, and find that I’m revealing far too much of my personal business to Google. Depending upon the settings you select, Google Translate will send your entire browsing history to Google, and all of the content of websites you visit. If you are privacy-conscious like me and have switched to other browsers and search engines but continue to use the Google Translate extension, your privacy efforts may have been wasted.
Peter H. Gregory 