I gather that you're implying the primary purpose of Chromebooks is tracking use...

happyopossum · on May 21, 2016

> Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari

Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account? Can you block ads, trackers, and other creepy JavaScript on a Chromebook? Even the ones from Google?

geofft · on May 21, 2016

> Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account?

That's a good point. You log in to the OS via a Google account. You can log out of that account from Chrome-the-browser, though. (In fact it looks like I'm currently only logged in to my employer's Google Apps account, and nobody's told https://accounts.google.com about my Chromebook account.) And I log into my Chromebook with a dedicated Google account, but I realize that not everyone will.

However, you can install Privacy Badger or anything else that you could install on other Chrome platforms, and it should effectively block Google's cookies from reaching other domains. There's probably some JS involved in running the browser itself that's shipped on the device, but if you want to avoid all google.com-delivered JS, you should be able to do that. (I believe this is no different from Chrome on the Mac.)

pgeorgi · on May 21, 2016

Using a chromebooks without logging in with a google account is painful (as you have no local state without that), so there's that.

You can run all Chrome extensions, including µblock , adblock , privacy badger, ...

xenihn · on May 20, 2016

My answer to both is "I don't know, but probably".

There's not really any way to know based on the current information I have access to.

nameless912 · on May 20, 2016

So your answer is "I think so, therefore I assume so without any justification"?

ekun · on May 20, 2016

It's like the comment is saying I use OSX but not a broswer or the Internet so I'm not being tracked.