I’m all for raising privacy concerns, as long as it is done well and responsibly.  However, this morning I stumbled upon a gem of an article that tries to make claims about Google Chrome’s policies that simply aren’t true.  The sad thing is, the only research needed to deny the claims made in the article involves launching the browser and going to a URL.

In Chrome is not an Internet Browser and not open, but closed to the Internet’s Domain Name System, Scott Cleland, a self-proclaimed “prescient analyst,” claims that Chrome is “a gateway to Google’s datacenter to browse Google’s mirror copy of the Internet and track the user’s every movement.”  However, the two most incredible claims in the article are as follows:

  • “Google’s Chrome browser effectively eliminates the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) address bar where a user can directly go to [a] URL.”
  • “When one puts a URL, www.brand.com, into Google’s OmniBox search bar they do not go where they asked to go but to Google’s results page where Google can advertise against that brand without sharing the ad revenues with that brand, and where Google can offer competitors an opportunity to divert the user from their requested destination and to a competitor’s destination.”

The claims about Google’s “mirror copy” and bypassing the Internet Domain Name System are discredited point blank in a post from The Chromium Blog titled DNS Prefetching (or Pre-Resolving), which states “Google Chrome resolves domain names…using your computer’s normal DNS resolution mechanism; no connection to Google is used.”

That second bullet point, though, is the most easily discredited.  If you launch Chrome and type “www.starbucks.com” into the OmniBox, you are taken to www.starbucks.com.  You aren’t taken to a search results page and certainly don’t see any competitors offering their services along the way.  If you type only “starbucks” into the OmniBox, that’s a somewhat different story, but the article is making its claim about URLs, which is just flat out wrong.

Perhaps the most concerning fact among all these non-facts is that Scott Cleland is a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and an advisor to Congress! His bio states, “eight different Congressional subcommittees have sought Cleland’s expert testimony.”

He might as well have titled his article “Chrome bypasses the series of tubes.”

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