Recent changes in Chrome and your privacy in My Session

The recent news about Google Chrome made me think of why I wanted to build a new web browser in the first place. See the coverage here:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

https://www.theverge.com/23860050/chrome-ads-topics-sandbox

Its a constant game of chicken when you use a browser made by a company whose primary business is Ads. Is the browser really free when they are making so much money off of you, your data, and your privacy.

Unfortunately, we are in a world where all the dominant browsers have gone "Chromium" based (with a notable exception being Firefox). However, there is still room to care about the data protection and user privacy at the feature level, even though most dominant browser won't.

Browsers like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi are definitely thinking about it and have introduced easier ways to allow users to control how much data they share with the makers. Unfortunately, these are not full proof as these options are not made default and are typically hidden in the onboarding flow and deep in the settings and for non-savvy users this is still a chore and something easily forgotten.

With My Session, we believe in doing things differently. There is no opt-out needed to stop sharing your data. It's the default option, and the only option. You can't share your usage data with us even if you wanted to. Your usage data, and what you do on the websites is for you to know and we don't need it.

We get the revenue upfront through a paid-App model that supports the development costs and we don't offer any subscription options or any other tiers of access.

This has meant some compromises. To sync your bookmarks, you need to link your session to your OneDrive where your bookmarks, tabs, pinned windows etc. are stored. So, this data can't be accessed by us. As an additional safeguarding measure, this syncing doesn't include your user data (like passwords, payment information etc.), which are only saved locally. Sure, this impacts the user experience a bit but we made those decisions very thoughtfully putting user privacy first.

We also made a conscious decision to build My Session as an UWP (Windows Store) app, where each App is automatically siloed in its own container, to use a layman language, and doesn't see what's going on in other Apps running on your computer. This provides a more fundamental level of protection that no UWP App can bypass giving even more security and peace of mind to the users.

That's it. If you care about your privacy and security, give My Session a try. There is a free trial and if you are satisfied with what you see, then the cost is equivalent to just one cup of coffee for a lifetime ownership of a tool that you will perhaps use multiple times daily for hours everyday. 

https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/my-session-file-and-web-browser/9MVQBN4KB0XZ