Chromium calls home?

R00KIE · 2011-01-16 19:45:54

I know chromium does not have (or is not supposed to have) "call home features", however every time I start chromium it does seems to call home (a connection is made to a google address on port 443).

This happens only when the search provider is configured to be google, I don't have sync configured or any of the features in the "Under the Hood" configuration tab enabled (dns prefetching, phishing protection and whatnot). I have also tried with a clean profile and hence no third party plugins and it still "calls home".

If starting chromium with the search provider set to bing or yahoo then no outgoing connection is established, if the search provider is changed to google again then an outgoing connection is immediately established.

I have searched for the reason why this happens but I couldn't find anything, I was wondering if anyone can confirm this behavior and if anyone has any clues about why this happens.

adee · 2011-01-16 22:32:02

I can confirm this, but never investigated the issue further. Maybe this is part of Google's plan for world domination

Gusar · 2011-01-16 22:37:58

It's a feature to determine whether to load google.com or a local version, google.pt in your case.

R00KIE · 2011-01-17 14:02:53

Thank you for your confirmations and clues about what's going on.

However I'm having a little trouble buying that it is just deciding which version of google to load because blocking access to port 443 for any of the google addresses does not prevent chromium from loading google.pt instead of google.com. Then there is also the matter of personal preferences that may be stored in a cookie and override that automatic selection and also chromium settings about the preferred language for pages.

It seems to me that it is a bit of an overkill to setup and encrypted connection just to figure out which version of the page to load. It is doing that right after I run the browser and before I type or do anything whatsoever and the connection stays open for a lot longer than it seems necessary to determine which localized version to load.

Edit: typo.

Last edited by R00KIE (2011-01-17 14:05:07)

Beelzebud · 2011-01-18 22:07:20

Stuff like this is why I refuse to use their browser. I simply don't trust them to not data-mine. They are an advertising company first.

Gusar · 2011-01-18 22:50:13

If there was something really crazy in Chromium, people would scream bloody murder, I'm sure of it. So since there hasn't been bloody murder yet, I trust it. Not that I use it much, Firefox is my main browser, but it's good to have a fallback, and out of all non-Firefox browsers I like Chromium the most.

karol · 2011-01-18 23:04:16

Gusar wrote:

If there was something really crazy in Chromium, people would scream bloody murder, I'm sure of it.

In the Linus Law we trust.
http://www.links.org/?p=328

jelly · 2011-01-18 23:41:59

you can disable this servie in the options menu, google calls back to autocomplete stuff iirc

R00KIE · 2011-01-19 16:07:42

jelly wrote:

you can disable this servie in the options menu, google calls back to autocomplete stuff iirc

It is disabled as well as the other options that might make it call home.

After a few tries I have traced this to the template used for the default google search provider, the template is:

{google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

As long as {google:baseURL} is there it will call home on startup, if the template is changed in any way then the search suggestions will not work (fine by me I don't use that anyway).

I have changed the template to this:

http://www.google.com/search?ncr=0&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s

Now chromium does not call home on startup anymore, as I would expect it not to. One thing I've learned is that by adding ncr=0 to the search string you will not get redirected to a localized version of google. This can be handy if you travel abroad or if you prefer google.com over your localized version.

Edit:
Put url inside a code tag.

Last edited by R00KIE (2011-01-19 16:17:09)

ANOKNUSA · 2011-01-19 17:17:02

If it really bothers you, you could always just use Iron.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_browser
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=43419

Gusar · 2011-01-19 17:42:59

No again with Iron. Search around, it's been discussed before. Bottom line is, do you trust some random guy online more than a company that everyone is watching very, very carefully?

R00KIE · 2011-01-19 18:29:38

Iron? No thanks, that discussion was brought up before and the conclusion was more or less what Gusar says.

It's not that I don't trust chromium or any other browser with the source freely and easily available, but blind trust is also bad, I just wanted to know what it was doing without me explicitly asking it to do anything. I ended up still not knowing exactly what it was doing but I found a way to stop the behavior that was displeasing me.

madeye · 2011-01-20 12:12:33

R00KIE wrote:

After a few tries I have traced this to the template used for the default google search provider.....

I was trying to locate that template but am unable to find it in either /usr/lib/chromium/* or ~/.config/chromium/*
Could you please tell me the filename and where you found it?

R00KIE · 2011-01-20 15:37:53

Right click on the omnibar -> edit search engines -> select google -> edit -> enter/edit the url.

Maybe I should have called it the search url but lots of things there will be replaced before performing the actual search so it is also like a template.

madeye · 2011-01-20 16:08:46

Super!
That did the trick.

Thanks

Mr.Elendig · 2011-01-20 16:41:35

chromium is open source, so you can always read the source to see exactly what is going on.

R00KIE · 2011-01-20 17:36:17

I know I can look at the source, the question is if I am able to understand what I'm looking at. My programing knowledge is not that good and chromium is not a small project so even if I found what I was looking for most probably I would not understand what was going on.

biggiesmalls1 · 2017-07-15 01:13:31

I didn't want to revive this necro thread, so I attempted to make a new thread to report that this issue is still ongoing (in 2017).

However, "V1del", a forum moderator, has closed my new thread because he/she cannot comprehend that I might want to continue the valuable discussion which this forum produced, right here in this thread.

Well, V1del, since you closed and deleted my topic, I'll revive this one, and if you want to close/delete this topic, please go ahead.

By the way, I find it ironic that my new topic was deleted by a moderator for being off-topic, but this thread was, itself, created by a Forum Moderator.

jasonwryan · 2017-07-15 01:24:45

The thread was closed because it was about Chromium for Windows. I don't know where you would have got the idea that anyone here cares about Windows or any apps for it.

Please ask your distro's community; we only support Arch. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … pport_ONLY

And https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … bumping.22

Closing

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-16 19:45:54

Chromium calls home?

#2 2011-01-16 22:32:02

Re: Chromium calls home?

#3 2011-01-16 22:37:58

Re: Chromium calls home?

#4 2011-01-17 14:02:53

Re: Chromium calls home?

#5 2011-01-18 22:07:20

Re: Chromium calls home?

#6 2011-01-18 22:50:13

Re: Chromium calls home?

#7 2011-01-18 23:04:16

Re: Chromium calls home?

#8 2011-01-18 23:41:59

Re: Chromium calls home?

#9 2011-01-19 16:07:42

Re: Chromium calls home?

#10 2011-01-19 17:17:02

Re: Chromium calls home?

#11 2011-01-19 17:42:59

Re: Chromium calls home?

#12 2011-01-19 18:29:38

Re: Chromium calls home?

#13 2011-01-20 12:12:33

Re: Chromium calls home?

#14 2011-01-20 15:37:53

Re: Chromium calls home?

#15 2011-01-20 16:08:46

Re: Chromium calls home?

#16 2011-01-20 16:41:35

Re: Chromium calls home?

#17 2011-01-20 17:36:17

Re: Chromium calls home?

#18 2017-07-15 01:13:31

Re: Chromium calls home?

#19 2017-07-15 01:24:45

Re: Chromium calls home?

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