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Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.
[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:46PM
That is what people want to believe, but chromium have several (uniq) google keys and it is always talking to google. Most of those features can't be disabled and even trying to compile chrome without then simply fail.
You have to patch several parts to be able to compile it, but then you lose several features. IIRC, even videos will stop working
What is happening here is that those keys in debian chromium are always the same for many users, decreasing the google ID potential (they aren't the only ways google have to track you, even after a profile cleanup, but do increase the user id collisions). By enforcing their own build, they can push new ids on each download and keep their tracking at 100%