google just settled a $68 million lawsuit for secretly recording private conversations through google assistant and sharing them with advertisers. not metadata. actual conversations, handed to ad companies without consent.
they also paid $425 million in 2025 for tracking 98 million users who had explicitly disabled data collection.
chrome's new trick
on january 28, 2026, literally the same week as the lawsuit settlement, google announced full gemini ai integration into chrome. the headline features are wild. auto browse is an agentic ai that can take control of your browser and browse on your behalf. personal intelligence links your gmail, photos, calendar, youtube, and maps data together into one ai brain. there's a persistent gemini side panel that's always there, always watching, always ready.
you can hand over your browser to an ai with one click. the same company that recorded your private conversations and sold them now wants to run an autonomous agent inside the tool you use for everything.
the question
how do you trust this? seriously. a company caught twice violating user privacy now wants to run an ai agent inside your browser. one that can access your tabs, your history, your gmail, your photos. one that can literally take over and browse for you.
the pitch is convenience. let ai handle the boring stuff. but the boring stuff is your life. your emails. your calendar. the patterns of your days. and the company offering to manage all of that has already shown what it does with that kind of access.
the new normal
the weird part is how normal this feels. sharing everything is becoming the default. if you opt out you feel like you're falling behind. everyone else has ai helping them, summarizing their emails, organizing their photos, browsing for them. if you opt in you accept that surveillance is a feature. there's no good option anymore.
that's the trick. make the ai so useful that refusing it feels like refusing progress. make opting out feel like you're the problem.
i keep thinking about switching to firefox or something. just walking away from chrome entirely. but then i wonder if that even matters anymore, or if we've already crossed a line where your data is someone else's product no matter what browser you use.
maybe the real question isn't which browser to trust. maybe it's whether trust even applies anymore.