Package: chromium Severity: normal Tags: patch Dear Maintainer,
The current description [1] of 'chromium' in Debian is "Web browser that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable internet browsing experience." While that might be literally true in terms of the *aims* of some of the original developers, it is misleading given the atrocious privacy violations of Google's version Chrome [2]. Google itself controls the development of Chromium, so even though it's free-licensed, the human resources for fixing privacy violations are mostly under Google/Alphbet's control. The current ungoogled-chromium.md patch list in the Debian Chromium source [3] lists about 100 patches. I'm sure that the main reason why these are mostly not yet implemented (nor rejected) by the Debian Chromium team is lack of time: each patch needs to be carefully checked. Alphabet Inc is a multi-100-billion USD corporation; Debian is not. And Chromium is a huge package with a huge number of dependencies. It seems to me that the Debian Chromium version very likely includes many privacy violations, despite the best intentions of the team. My suggestion is something like "Web browser running a code base that is partially shared with Google Chrome." although ideally, as an ethical software distributor, we should include something that effectively says the equivalent of "This browser will almost certainly violate your privacy even though if they had sufficient person-power, the Debian Chromium maintainers would very much like to implement patches to make the browser safe." However, I don't see any brief way to say that, and I'm not sure what the consensus is on how much we should warn people installing unsafe packages. Maybe: "Web browser running a code base that is partially shared with Google Chrome; patches to improve privacy are welcome." [1] https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/control [2] https://contrachrome.com/comic/page01 [3] https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/ungoogled-chromium.md Cheers Boud
