Iridium is a privacy-based fork of Google Chrome. From their website: "All modifications enhance the privacy of the user and make sure that the latest and best secure technologies are used. Automatic transmission of partial queries, keywords and metrics to central services is prevented and only occurs with the approval of the user." Unlike other browsers of its kind, this one is fully featured (has all the addons that are available for Chrome), and so is recommended for everyday usage.
The only unsolicited request is for the Google SafeBrowsing feature, and can be easily turned off from the Preferences menu. Additionally, privacy enhancements unrelated to Google are added, such as blocking third party cookies by default, and deleting local storage on close. Full list of the differences between Chrome and Iridium can be found <ahref="https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/wiki/Differences-between-Iridium-and-Chromium">here</a><sup><ahref="#1">[1]</a></sup>. However this list is <b><fontcolor=red>not accurate</font></b> and each claim it makes should be verified by the user.
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<h3>Phoning Home</h3>
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Iridium browser will make these requests to Google to update a blocklist of websites for its SafeBrowsing feature:
The Iridium developers make the claim that as one of the privacy enhancements of Iridium, it uses the Google SafeBrowsing spyware feature, but with their own mirror of Google's database, meaning that you can
use the feature without constantly phoning home to google, but instead phoning home to the developers, which, while still being a form of spyware, is an increase in privacy
for the user<sup><ahref="#1">[1]</a></sup>. At least it would be if this section was actually true. You can see that from the "Phoning Home" section of this article, this claim is simply
<b><fontcolor=red>not true</font></b>, which is very bad because it undermines the crediblity of the other privacy claims that Iridium makes.
According to another writer, in his tests the browser would only connect to iridiumbrowser.de. So it is possible that this privacy claim is true for some versions of Iridium,
and false for other versions of Iridium. The version of Iridium that phones home to Google is Version 2018.4 for 64-bit Windows, tested on Windows 7, if you want to see this
Not only is this privacy claim inaccurate, but a pull request<sup><ahref="#2">[2]</a></sup> has been open on the developers github for OVER A YEAR with no response from the development team.
It's pretty dissapointing to see such a privacy concerned front to this project, but then a negligent additude with longstanding privacy issues once you pull back the curtain
and look a little deeper at the claims this browser makes.
If you want to edit this article, or contribute your own article(s), contact us on XMPP over in spyware@conference.nuegia.net, or visit us at the git repo on <ahref="https://codeberg.org/TheShadow/SpywareWatchdog">Codeberg</a>. All contributions must be licensed under the CC0 liscence to be accepted.
