What is google safe browsing?

Does Google track browsing activity of Chrome users?

• If you set up the sync service, Google Chrome knows your Google account. Does it use that to track browsing patterns in any way? Note that I'm not asking if Google Search tracks searches - for the purposes of this question assume a Chrome user who doesn't other Google service beyond Chrome's sync.

• Answer:

  Yes. Chrome sync requires your browsing history to be sent to Google servers, otherwise it would be impossible to access your browsing history on multiple devices, which is a feature of Chrome sync. Now, Google could encrypt this history with your Google log-in password and make it unreadable by anyone other than you, including Google itself. This is what a few "online password vault" services do and is considered a privacy best practice for these sort of systems. Since you can still see your Chrome history after performing a "forgot my password" type password reset for your Google account, it is clear that they don't do that (otherwise changing your password would render history data from other devices unreadable). So even "assuming good faith", Google definitely collects this data. So, it's on their servers, beyond your control and their ToS probably grant them at the very least the right to "use the data in order to provide the service and do quality assurance", which means they can definitely look at it. Do they use that data for ads? I don't know for sure, but given Google's business model, it wouldn't surprise me at all. Do they sell the data to other companies? Probably not, way too valuable for themselves. I am not even gonna speculate about giving web history to the NSA; your browsing history is the sort of "meta-data" that you can assume the NSA is collecting one way or the other, no ifs or buts about it. Also, in theory pages browsed in "incognito mode" are not synched by Chrome sync. But I wouldn't guarantee that Google doesn't track them in some other way, intentionally or not (e.g. Chrome has analytics and diagnostics services built in that send usage data to Google, usually for perfectly legitimate QA purposes, but that doesn't mean that data can't be accessed or re-purposed for advertisement).