2. Users were never asked about whether they wanted to be tracked or their privacy violated before these so-called spying 'features' were unilaterally introduced to the Web by powerful players—advertisers, web hosts and others who introduced the technology for their own pecuniary interests, inter alia. Even now, most PC and smartphone web users have little or no idea about how all encompassing and dangerous this technology actually is—as it's not in the interests of those who introduced it to overtly publicize the details.
3. As governments worldwide have almost universally failed to act with any degree of effectiveness to protect online users, there is still no consumer law that's specifically aimed at protecting end users from tracking harassment and privacy violations. This means that users themselves have had to take on this responsibility. Many have tried with varying degrees of success (unfortunately, they've mostly failed).
4. Years by year, users have found that it's increasingly difficult to stop themselves from being tracked and to maintain their privacy because the techniques used against them have become more frequent as well as increasingly sophisticated (as with this cache hack). Whenever users have a minor victory and succeed in thwarting hacks, Big Business responds with yet another. It's a David and Goliath problem, Big B. has huge financial resources that enable the further development of hacks and users little or none for the development of protection measures.
5. And as we know, this is only the beginning: Google's tracking ecosystem† also includes seemingly free Google apps with smartphones and PCs—apps such as Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth along with many others that have been cleverly designed to be highly-addictive. This electronic heroin as I call it has now become so all pervasive that it has become totally indispensable to not millions but actually billions of people.
6. Even if they aren't au fait with the all the details, users are effectively at war with Big Tech over privacy, tracking and the mining of their data (and tragically it's a war that Google and other Big Tech companies have been winning for years).
I would have thought the relevance of my previous post would have been obvious, that is that this browser cache matter is just one small part of this much huger problem. As such, it cannot be isolated from the other matters that I raised therein. Moreover, listing the other matters was to bring to the reader's attention the extreme lengths that internet users have to go to if they want to escape the clutches of these behemoth online monopolies. Even if they do succeed then their freedom is likely to be short-lived.
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† (One only has to look at how Google has used its overwhelming monopoly to track users and to violate their privacy, not only has it been completely successful but the way it's gone about it has meant that it has been diabolically effective doing so. Moreover, when it comes to tracking and extracting user's personal data, the Android ecosystem is conceptually and in practice a technical masterpiece without peer. It is unrivaled in its ability to collect massive amounts of data then deliver it all up to Google. The Android O/S is a watershed in operating system design as it includes paradigm-shifting technology that was specifically development by Google to ensure that it had total control over every aspect of users' smartphone data. Whilst I do not like the way it works to have 'control' over users' data, it'd be churlish of me for not to acknowledge Google's brilliance in developing it. The bottom line: Android has been and is remarkably effective for Google, it's brought in billions of dollars profit for the company.
Android was designed by lateral thinkers working at their best and it shows what can be achieved when billions of dollars profit is potentially in sight. Giving but one example, one cannot help but be truly impressed by how effective Android's 'transmitters', 'receivers' and 'broadcast' mechanism is [sorry, it's too detailed to explain here]. ('Tis a shame MS Windows isn't as sophisticated—but in a user-friendly way with more control given over to users.)
That said, Android is only just one part of Google's larger data collection operation, Google bootstraps the accuracy of its collected data by cross-referencing every aspect of it with data from a multitude of different sources. Just to mention a few, it data-mines its search engine and records who is searching and for what; it searches and collects data from its many applications including reading the contents of users' Gmail messages; and, as previously mentioned, it uses various nefarious tricks such as manipulating Wi-Fi hardware of my Google-using neighbors so as to determine my SSID with the view of determining my location, etc.—even though I'm not an active user of any Google service! Why you may well ask—well Google still needs to know about me, as information about my email address, location etc. can be used to, say, provide intermediary data which is used to link people who own Google accounts but who otherwise are seemingly separated and unconnected from each other. If I happen to know these people and I email them independently of each other then this is the only pretext Google needs to link them with the view of determining groups centered around these people, their interests and degrees of separation from others—and so on, and so on.
Nothing in all of history has ever seen the likes of this monumental surveillance system. Google now tracks personal information and indexes it for about a third of the world's population and it achieved all this without so much as a whimper from governments. No one in power ever seriously questioned whether this is legally or morally acceptable until after it was all in place and up and running. Now that ecosystem is too big to change let alone dismantle. A similar situation exists with Facebook. The implications of this for the world's population are truly enormous.)
