Are you running a Chromium-based browser, such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge? Chances are, it's silently telling Google all about your CPU and GPU usage when you visit one of the search giant's sites.
How to stop Google Chrome Helper from eating CPU
The feature is, as far as we can tell, for performance monitoring and not really for tracking — Google knows who you are and what you're doing anyway when you're logged in and using its sites — but it raises some antitrust concerns in light of Europe's pro-competition laws digital markets (DMA).
When you visit a *.google.com domain, the Google website can use the API to query your browser's real-time CPU, GPU and memory usage, as well as information about the processor you are using, so that any service is provided – such as video conferencing with Google Meet – for example, can be optimized and adjusted so that it does not burden your computer too much. The functionality is implemented as an API provided by an extension baked into Chromium – the browser brains primarily developed by Google and used in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave and others.
Non-Chrome-based browsers — like Mozilla's Firefox — don't have that extension, putting them at a potential disadvantage. Without the API, they can offer a worse experience on Google sites than is possible on the same hardware with Google's own browser, because they can't provide that live performance information.
