chrome://settings/adPrivacy
Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.
Completely immune from this and you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.
I will be caustious with such statement.
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/
IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.
Mozilla is one of the authors.
It's difficult to deal with because as the code evolves, so do the configuration settings. The rate of change is high, and it's not always obvious what is relevant to users (and whether a new feature increases or decreases privacy!), so it's hard to communicate this in release notes.
This isn't iPhone vs Android. This isn't vim vs emacs. You can switch browsers in 5 minutes and never notice any meaningful difference.
Degoogle today.
Using Firefox Developer edition and toggle(s) will get mysteriously turned back on all the time. And Mozilla is not immune to this practice at all for standard Firefox.
Use chromium-ungoogled [1] if you want chrome(ium) without Google-specific stuff.
[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
Show someone how to do it, and they can be asked to show someone else
The deception is to make people believe that studying them as ad targets through their internet use can be "private". Many will believe this nonsense. Including regulators. "It's OK, folks. Privacy is preserved." Green light to keep on tracking, collecting data and serving ads.
But the study of people's internet use to enable programmtic advertising _is_ the problem. There will be more ads. They will be more personal. The www will become even more annoying. Perhaps moreso than any other medium that has come before it.
To Mozilla, there can be no www without advertising. The truth is that there can be no so-called "tech" companies, monopolisng intermediaries, without programmatic internet advertising. The www does not need it and the original www did not have it.
First Mozilla partners with Yahoo. Then Google. Perhaps Meta will be next. Mozilla is no different than so-called "tech" companies in at least one regard: it cannot find a "business model" besides internet advertising.
https://analyticsindiamag.com/despite-clashes-in-the-past-mo...
https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/ipa-the-meta-and-mozilla...
https://www.admonsters.com/eletters/mozilla-and-metas-ipa-fr...
Embrace: Embrace the open web, create an excellent product and aggressively promote it until you take over the market
Extend: Chrome experiments and advanced features that improve the user experience and developer experience through Chrome only API and Google services. Even provide these services to everyone who wants to use them free or charge so that the user expectations are elevated to that point and web businesses depend on these by building their products around them. Maybe make developers depend on this "topics" feature even.
Exterminate: Cut off or degrade the free services to 3rd party browsers, remove or tame extensions that harm your business and recoup the costs of the free services. Since you no longer have viable competition, reduce the development of Chrome any further, optimize only for profit. Developers who depend on you ad tech can choose to refuse serving users using another browser or opt out of Google verification or account services? The users will stay like they sat with IE.
IE of the 2020s.
Try Chromium?
Decide the site is too much hassle and back away?
Not always practical options, but they are options.
--
[1] I switched to Chrome a few years ago when FF went through a period of being unstable²
[2] and because certain extensions didn't have good FF alternatives, because they never were or because some were crippled by the changes in ~2017³, but that latter point is fairly moot as Google is now taking their turn to work towards crippling useful extensions
[3] at least FF's change here were mostly due to massively misreading the room while trying to streamline their platform, where Google's seem to be more malicious when you consider most of the affected extensions are ones that go against their primary business of tracking people & selling adverts.
[4] things breaking after updates, periods of general instability, not keeping up in the performance race for a while, etc.
In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first):
1. ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services.
2. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible.
Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
3. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency.
However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview.He's faced enormous challenges due to Google's "privacy" policies... Google is removing nearly all access to user data, they don't even like you looking at the user agent string (which issues a warning)... not to mention its impossible to know about search traffic and even referring urls.
Meanwhile Google has access to all this data, so he tells me all this is just gaslighting so they can illicitly protect their monopoly on web data.
1. Roll out stuff they brand as “privacy respecting” that actually collects data for their own use.
2. Brand anything that would give competitors access to that data (third party cookies, user agent strings, etc) as a threat to user privacy.
3. Lock all of that stuff down so that nobody can access it (“we’re protecting you!”)
4. I don’t think we need the ???, it’s just straight to profit, via monopoly over the data.
The brilliant/terrible thing about this is that third party cookie tracking is not great so it’s hard to set up a defensible argument where leaving things as they are is the better alternative. Apple and others have been waging a war on third party tracking for years now, and pushing public opinion in that direction, and it seems to me that Google is playing 4D chess here and using it against them (and frankly, the entire internet).
Use a browser that is not made by an advertising company.
In other words, just drop chrome. It has never been easier to do, with Edge and Safari readily available on all major platforms and Firefox for those who prefer it, and of course the many other chromium forks that are around.
There is no reason to be dependent on chrome today. There was a few years where it was overly dominant and very hard to avoid for compatibility and performance reasons, but that is just not true today.
Personally I use Firefox on android and desktop and I don't miss chrome at all. I uninstalled (technically, disabled) it on mobile as Google widgets like to open links in it otherwise.
I have chrome on the desktop as I work in software so I need to test compatibility with it, but that's it.
The kool-aid is in their definition of the word "privacy." You and I might think "privacy" means "other entities aren't observing you" but Google in their benevolence knows that it really means "Google will keep your data safe from third parties." Their newspeak doesn't even allow the concept of "data that Google does not collect."
(A friend of mine was involved in the launch of Google Allo. I asked them if it would be possible to use the virtual assistant features offline without sending everything to Google. They never spoke to me again.)
Or do you mean your friend's product is a browser plugin? In which case, um, yes, I don't want it having access to any more information than it it needs to do it's job (and honestly, probably not even that.)
They (Chrome) are taking it away [0].
[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/en/docs/privacy-sandbox/user-ag...
I’m loathe the defend Google but I don’t think this is the case. The replacement for user agent sniffing (client hints? I forget) is a universal thing and I don’t think Google has a secret back door tracking mechanism their ad network is able to use. It would certainly be a big story if they did.
they have 80% population using search, youtube, storing browsing history etc while logged into google account, so they have lots of data about most of the people.
To throw them in the same pit, they're taking a page from Apple's playbook: the privacy benefits for the user will justify any market effect from closing the platform and keeping all user data internals. Platform owner gets to protect the user from some of the abuse, while gaining a critical edge on the competition.
In the current climate, I'm not sure there is any good angle to solve this, short of strong regulation limiting the advantage they get from doing these "privacy first" moves (basically find a way to forbid the platform owners from using their own users' data...I'm not holding my breath)
I think it was the migration to https everywhere that killed that. Not sure why it went down that way, or if Google was responsible.
But yeah, when I ran a blog, I would look through the referrer URLs to see what people were actually searching for and write articles about that because it was obviously an untapped void in the market.
Or check this video if you can't make it in person:
I have very little trust for Google and other megacorps like it, but I have even less trust for parasitic entities like Jake that just piggyback on top of Google's already horrid practices to extract wealth from, so you'll find no sympathy for Jake from me.
When a large, publicly traded ad-company (that relies on collecting data and tracking users for most of it's income), creates a product that costs them quite a lot of money to make, and then gives that product to you for free...
Do you expect them:
A.) to be taking a loss on that product because they really just want to gift it to you from the goodness of their heart with no ulterior motives?
B.) to actually have another way to make money from that product, which makes the whole endeavor financially worthwhile to them?
I don't mean to trivialize it but it seriously reads like an abusive relationship. Or an addiction or something. Just leave, man.
> Chrome user opinion to them is important to their business in about the same way meatpackers care about what cattle think of the design of the feeding stations. As long as they keep coming to eat, it's just mooing.
If you have to chose one devil over another anyway it becomes easier to put your convenience first and ignore the rest.
Windows now comes with three built in browsers: IE, Edge(Blink), Edge(Webkit) - none of which can be uninstalled.
Every other update users will bugged about switching to Edge again (exact amount varies by version and locale).
System apps will ignore default browser settings and use Edge to open all links (except in the EU they very recently went back to using the default browser again).
Browser-choice dialogue is gone, instead Edge will pester you if try to use it to download another browser.
Point being, all those punishments did absolutely nothing to stop or curb the anti-competitive behavior.
Your theory doesn't make any sense since every OS/device comes with a free web browser since I can think.
Without Chrome, Google has no control over its product (your eyeballs as you browse) at all.
How then duckduck go managing to compete with them wituhout collecting data and tracking user to the same extend? https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-business-model/
For example: if you search for "standing desk", it will include one or more paid ads that are keyed for some combination that matches with the search query. Those ads aren't targeted at you based on your gender, or your home address or where you eat lunch on Tuesdays or how many devices you regularly use or any number of other creepy shit Google tracks about it's flock of willing cattle.
Has Google benefitted more from other people's open source contributions, or have we benefitted more from Google's open source contributions? The answer is not obvious to me.
Safari started as Webkit which forked from KHTML which was part of KDE.
The various forks of webkit incl Chrome came later. If Chrome was ever based on webkit, iForget.
And being a publicly traded company - they would have to shut down Chrome as well, if it actually were unprofitable/not worthwhile.
And they do have the data needed to actually get a relatively accurate picture of how Chrome affects their bottom lines overall. They know what they are doing, giving it away for free.
This article has multiple problems:
1. Privacy Sandbox is a project, consisting of many proposals. To pitch it as some cohesive product is misleading.
2. Related: FLoC and Topics are completely separate things, aside from existing under the same project.
3. Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While the proposal has issues and doesn’t resist tracking as well as Google claims (see below article), Ars’ implication that this is somehow making Chrome less privacy-preserving is patently false.
> 1. Privacy Sandbox is a project, consisting of many proposals. To pitch it as some cohesive product is misleading.
Look, that’s how Google are branding it. It’s an initiative which has turned into a cohesive brand. Just look at how https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-for-the-web-... speaks of it all. That’s pretty much how it’s being presented in the browser, too.
> 2. Related: FLoC and Topics are completely separate things, aside from existing under the same project.
They’re about as completely separate as Chrome 17 and Chrome 117, or StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. OK, these are both very imperfect comparisons, but although FLoC and Topics work in somewhat different ways, Topics is for all practical purposes just a fork that continues FLoC. They even treated it that way in the browser (at the time at least, no idea if it’s still so). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts#... seems overall a fair enough portrayal. They simply rebranded the basic concept.
> 3. Topics is reducible to (implementable using) third-party cookies. While the proposal has issues and doesn’t resist tracking as well as Google claims (see below article), Ars’ implication that this is somehow making Chrome less privacy-preserving is patently false.
The first and last claims here are obvious nonsense. Third-party cookies only let you track stuff where your code runs, whereas the Topics API uses the entire browser history, so it’s not reducible to third-party cookies unless you mean something very different from me by that word. Ars’ implication is by no means patently false; as far as the current status is concerned, where they’ve added this and not removed third-party cookies, it’s patently true. In the longer term, it’s less clear, better in some ways and worse in others, but “patently false” is still an unreasonable characterisation.
This is false. Topics only allows ad trackers to see topics associated with sites they were embedded in. In this way, topics is reducible to TPC.
It doesn't use the full history. If a site is using the Topics API it will only get back topics that it has observed from sites in the last 3 epochs. For site X to observe a topic from site Y. Site Y must either:
* Be site X
* Embed site X in an iframe on the page with a special attribute on the iframe element
* Send a fetch request to site X with a special header and site X must respond with a special header
That's not an option now thanks to multiple antitrust regulatories. Google actually tried to get rid of 3p cookies to use it as an advantage against competitors as well as privacy friendly PR but this has been blocked. One example from CMA (but not limited to): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62052c52e90e0...
Yes, but aren't 3rd party cookies going to get banned? That seems to be the common assumption in the adtech space. If that's true isn't topics just google's mechanism to continue the kind of tracking that lawmakers are trying to ban by banning 3rd party cookies?
But it seems this comparison to third party cookies ignores the fact that now one company, Google, gets a maximum amount of tracking data without having to cooperate with any other entity. That potentially could be a loss for privacy because the concentration of personal data at one entity, i.e., Google, requires less cooperation, e.g., data sharing. It's easier.
Even with 1st-party cookie jar isolation?
Disclaimer: I work for Google but my opinions and web crawling abilities are mine and mine alone.
I got the actual update today on my work laptop and… just wow. How did the folks at Google ship this with a straight face? The changeboarding modal basically lies to your face.
I’ve always felt a little weird about Google’s tracking, but this takes it to another level. Creepy as heck.
You have been doing 60-70 hours a week for a few years at startups that never took off. You tried to go into some big companies but got rejected several times. You managed to pass the first screening to the process at being hired at Google. You go through all the process. It’s long and tiring. Somehow you went through it after several weeks and so many steps. After several years in your career of not so successful job/startups this is like a huge thing. You can say to all your family and friends and girlfriend that you work at Google. The pay is great but the work is bad. They ask you to code more stuff to track people into Chrome. You evaluate what quitting would be like and what other opportunities like this you could have. And then I guess they are like hmm no. Let’s code this things from now on.
It’s impossible to say for sure, but there’s a certain pervasive collective worship of these employers that will just not quit.
In just about any other context this is called a bribe. But you're right. If that person doesn't do it, someone else will.
When all other browsers disable third party cookies, everything is fine. Apple for example has disabled it for years. When Google does it, antitrust regulators fear that this could benefit Google ads more than non-Google ads. Hence this bullshit to "restore competitiveness" between Google and non-Google ad networks.
My recommendation is to both disable third party cookies and this new thing. You don't need either of them.
This is definitely what Google would like you to believe. Considering indeed all other browsers have killed third party cookies, Google legally very well could as well. But they'd love you to believe they must provide a way to invade your privacy.
The issue regulators had was Google retaining special access to user tracking, they have no problem with Google removing their own ability to track as well. Of course, that doesn't buy Larry and Sergey's next yacht or private island remodel.
Who says that, google?
To make an analogy, don't believe any EU country government when they blame some EU directive for a new law.
Then neo-liberalism took over and they took a page out of the US’ playbook, and started prioritizing businesses.
But unlike in the US they aren’t comfortable outright stating that they’re prioritizing business interests over consumer interests, so instead they do this weird thing in their communications where they act like they’re standing up for small businesses. Problem however is that their definition of “small” business is everything below a trillion euro market cap.
It’s kind of jarring really, to hear them talk about having to protect those poor advertisers, like it’s some UNICEF donation ad.
then you will see random low quality ads instead of something you may be interested in
In the end, I reverted to clicking the non-primary button (which you are not supposed to click) and checked in the settings everything was in order.
Switch to a better browser.
Maybe I'm just an open source purist. However, I will say that in almost all tests with websites I am actually using Firefox is faster.
(Maybe not that much of a purist: I do use Chrome at work as we're using various Google products... docs, meet, etc, and those work better on Chrome. Go figure.)
Firefox has since largely caught-up from a performance perspective, although there is still some functionality inconvenience.
Of course the stated attitude toward the user is night and day - I switched back to Firefox about the same time they started integrating Gmail / Google accounts into Chrome.
When it first came out, it was almost literally Safari (well, WebKit).
I'll admit this traditional installer dark pattern seems quaint compared to what OSes regularly attack users with these days but this was the behavior of most pay-to-pack-in crapware at the time.
Chrome users looked at worse versions of images on the web for years. It is a completely bonkers performance optimization.
Chrome did kick Firefox off in web development tools though, so I can understand some people. But today I don't think there is much difference anymore. I am not web dev though. On the other hand webdevs should know about image quality on websites.
I dare say it's actually a nicer experience overall than Chrome, with the caveat that I haven't looked into battery life impact yet.
In the intervening years I bounced between the two depending on which made the most asinine UI decisions but settled on Firefox when my FOSS sensibilities and distaste for Google hardened.
Modern adtech can track users regardless if cookies are enabled or not, and whether they enable this new Chrome feature or not, via browser fingerprinting. They've been doing this for years.
So this new "privacy sandbox" is a diversion to the public, and particularly to law makers, that signals "see, we care about user privacy". When in fact it ultimately makes no impact on their revenue.
The public and law makers are barely starting to get an understanding about cookies, and there's a growing concern about them, so this is Google being proactive towards the blowback. Fingerprinting is much more complex to understand, and concern about it is so under the radar, that it will take many more years for the focus to catch up to these nefarious practices.
The frog is being boiled[1], make no mistake about that.
Additionally fingerprinting is not a tactic that advertisers want to use - anyone spending real money bets their vendors and wants to stay away from sketchy bs vendors who do that. Google doesn’t want it, TTD doesn’t want it, xandr doesn’t, cococola doesn’t, Nike doesn’t, etc. We all want a technology that is truly privacy focused for users, but still enables functionality that is critical to advertising like brand safety, frequency caps, and some semblance of targeting (even via context). That doesn’t even get into retargeting/dynamic retargeting.
> there is nothing to match a fingerprint to, so fingerprinting is useless
Huh? A fingerprint doesn't need to match _to_ anything. It just needs to be consistent across browsing sessions for a profile of visited sites and interests to be built.
> Additionally fingerprinting is not a tactic that advertisers want to use
Really? Citation needed. All advertisers want their ads to be highly targeted to a consumer who is most likely to make a purchase. The reason web advertising is much more appealing than advertising in traditional media is precisely because it allows microtargetting on a level not possible via traditional means. Advertisers are always chasing a higher conversion rate, and microtargetting is proven to yield better results than showing ads to a large and generic cohort of consumers. Advertisers aren't happy about the Topics API, and many will choose the technology that allows them to continue to target ads more accurately. Fingerprinting is so far the most foolproof method of doing this, since it avoids pesky cookie blockers, and is difficult to detect.
> We all want a technology that is truly privacy focused for users, but still enables functionality that is critical to advertising like brand safety, frequency caps, and some semblance of targeting
I call BS on the first part. Ad targetting goes directly against user privacy. There's no reconciliation of the two. Advertisers can go back to buying ad space in context-relevant places (e.g. show fishing ads on fishing-related sites), but none of them want to lose a _substantial_ part of their revenue by not taking advantage of user tracking.
How you can be so defensive about this is beyond me, and leads me to believe you work in the ad industry.
One of the explicit goal of "privacy sandbox" is preventing browser fingerprinting by limiting informational entropy from user environment. https://github.com/mikewest/privacy-budget
For anything “privacy tech” you must divorce the adversarial case (an actor maximizing an attack vector) with the average case (a monopolistic company using the tech to control overall opportunity costs). The latter has under-funded public study because Google et al will both throw gobs of money against it and throw shiny privacy tech problems out there to distract researchers.
Google's justification for this was after all that it's a nerved alternative to persistent user identifiers (like 3rd party cookies), because you have to give the poor, starving advertisers something in exchange if you take away their ability to identify users.
So far, so bad, but if advertisers can in fact still identify users, then FLoC will just be another, relatively high-quality signal that they can add to the profile. (In fact, fingerprinting isn't even needed yet as Google apparently feels it's fine to activate FLoC long before they disable 3rd party cookies. How that squares with the presentation as a privacy feature is a lection in corpospeak I guess)
So especially in that situation, you should turn off FLoC.
They also need to not make sweeping changes to the ad industry that could be described as anti-competitive or monopolistic. I doubt they'd get away with just turning off third-party cookies in their browser.
Not sure what the point you're trying to make is.
Also, Google under Privacy Sandbox has been exploring ways to introduce a fingerprinting limitations and a budget. Which may as well be smoke and mirrors, but if you watch their marketing materials, they talk of fingerprinting in general.
We can't assume good will and behavior from an industry that is built on deceiving and manipulating the user. The GDPR is a good first step at regulating these practices, but it's too vague, and it's applied far too leniently. It also obviously only applies to EU citizens, and not to the global industry.
I wasn't familiar with the privacy "budget", but it sounds like Google is trying to define privacy as a scale, where some amount of fingerprinting is OK. Users can be identified with just a few data points, and some are more valuable, depending on the context. Some might even be required for the site to function, so will there be "legitimate" exceptions to the budget in those cases? It sounds like a backwards approach that will be difficult to manage, so I'm not sure it will be a win for protecting privacy.
More importantly, I don't trust that an adtech company will go out of its way to implement solutions that go against its bottom line. These companies have a track record of abusing user data, and the only reason they take these initiatives is for good PR, which is again protecting their bottom line. The entire industry needs much broader and stronger regulation for any of this to actually improve.
Here you go:
* Arts & Entertainment
* Computers & Electronics
* Internet & telecom
* News
* Online communities
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
https://developer.chrome.com/en/docs/privacy-sandbox/topics/...
- When this was introduced, Google asked my if I permit using those topics. I declined and now in the settings the toggle is switched off, just as it should be.
- Your topics will be listed when you open the ad settings.
- Instead of disallowing topics, you can also block individual topics.
Second, if you have a bunch of parameters attached to you, then you can be tracked. What exactly those parameters are doesn't matter, as long as the set is more or less stable and unique.
Third, do you really want to disclose your interest to every website? Without a way to opt out.
It does matter what is tracked, because advertisers need to be able to match on-site behavior to what they can identify and target in a bid.
You’re not disclosing your interest to every website. Your allowing your browser to store a list of your interests and then advertisers can target users who have those interests. This is miles more privacy focused than the current solution where any vendor can place pixels all over the web to build any audience they want, small or big. They can track really any data they want, combine it with any offline data see they want, and sell it to anyone they want.
These proposals were made directly because of legislation like GDPR. It's not as if Google got up one day and said "Let's make our job harder."
I don't think I'm in the "privacy community". It's my opinion that advertising will always exist, but tracking is complete horseshit and should be abolished ASAP. I don't think this is a very unpopular opinion either. There seems to be an attempt to Stockholm us all into thinking tracking is a necessary evil we must accept.
Thinking about it in a very abstract way I find the whole thing fascinating. Google is clearly terrified that the tracking protection offered by other browsers is going to become the norm and they’re trying to head that off at the pass by implementing this compromise. But I’m not sure why they’re all that worried about it, they still have the lions share or the browser market. Maybe they’re worried about incoming legislation?
That’s not true, this new system is a tracker, not tracking protection. Simply turning it off improves privacy.
“If you let me punch your teeth out, the stabbings will stop (sometime in the future, terms and conditions may apply)”
All while refusing to acknowledge that there is an option that requires neither punching nor stabbing.
To an uninformed user that takes Google’s words at face value it sounds like an upgrade.
Third party cookies can do everything the topics API can do and more. Third party cookies lets sites collect granular data about what exact site you on and any data they want from it. This API just gives them some topics which may even be a random chosen one and not a real one.
Topics is a mess (see a great analysis from a colleague of mine[1]), but it’s a hard sell to call this current step nefarious.
1. Upgraded manually from 116.0.5845.179 to 116.0.5845.180 through About dialog.
2. Restart. No notification that anything has changed.
3. Go to settings, privacy and security, privacy guide, and on the 4th page (only 3 pips!)
Or go to settings, privacy and security, Ad privacy (the new element)
4. The privacy guide blurb: Privacy Sandbox trial
Chrome is exploring new features that allow sites
to deliver the same browsing experience using less of your data
Under Ad privacy:
5. Ad topics: Site-suggested ads.
Based on your activity on a site. This setting is on.
6. Site-suggested ads.
Based on your activity on a site. This setting is on.
7. Ad measurement.
Sites and advertisers can understand how ads perform.
This setting is on.
This is all so shady, and very un-Google like. I have such high regard for the Chrome team: was there push back on this? Do they realize what a bad look this is?
Let's say that they do realize it. The 0.x% of users that are aware of, understand, and will do anything other than just blindly continuing to use the software is an acceptable number of lost users. In other words, everyone reading HN could stop using Chrome right now, and Googs would not notice the blip
Where have you been the last several years?
Since when has shady been un-google like? they ditched "Don't do evil" decades ago.
When they reorganized to have Alphabet as a new parent company, Alphabet’s code of conduct said “do the right thing”, but the subsidiary Google that still makes everything we usually discuss as Google kept “don’t be evil” in its code of conduct. At a later point Google did move that sentence out of of the most prominent position in the preamble, but it’s now in the second-most prominent place, right at the end.
But, yes, as I said at the start of this comment, they do a lot more awful or potentially evil things than they used to.
Disclosure: I worked for Google years ago, but I left before all the changes I discuss in this comment and had nothing to do with any of them. I am sad to see Google decline to roughly the level of being at least as ethically good as most of their major competitors, instead of far better as they used to be.
But the alternative that the people who are against it are proposing is either to keep the status quo or kindly ask Google (and other ad companies) to stop existing, which is not gonna happen. They seem to ignore the fact that ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it. Basically the only way to make it go away would be to outlaw it.
(Also so nobody accuses me as being pro-ads: I hate ads and tracking, but sort of in a way like I hate being sick. I can reduce my exposure to ads and tracking (adblock, not using certain apps, etc.), but I know that complaining about it won't make it go away)
What if the illness you hoped to avoid were leaking all your private behaviours to the world as though the sickness were the proper state of existence?
> ad-tech is a huge industry and a large part of the internet relies on it.
The Internet is not going away and advertising is not the Internet that we want.
Not necessarily. It will also go away - or more usefully, change its behaviour - if its current model becomes less cost effective. Apple restricted what apps could spy on and Facebook complained like a spoiled child but the sky did not fall. The evidence of effectiveness for all these tracking-based "personalised" ads is limited at best anyway. If you're running a search engine where users have literally just told you what kind of thing they're interested in right now or you're hosting videos where you know which video a user is about to watch or you're serving ads to be included within someone else's web page and you can tell what the content of that page is then you already have very useful information to help you choose which ads might be relevant without needing any additional user tracking at all.
Context-based advertising, AKA “advertising”, has been around forever, and respected privacy to the extent that Gatorade only needed to know that people at gyms might be thirsty. Still sold a ton of slightly salty sugar water, and didn’t even suggest that they should be allowed to rummage through every customer’s gym bag, follow them home, take notes on their dinner choices and television habits, watch them sleep while taking their pulse, and then slip random notes to them throughout the day reminding them that their electrolytes were dangerously slightly on the lower side of average (code RED).
I hope it gets implemented because it will give significant ammunition to us in Europe to make server-side behaviour tracking marked as unreasonable under GDPR provisions.
It doesn't matter if edge does not have this "feature".
Microsoft can simply scan documents on your PC.
I'm not a fan of Chrome though. But the problems with Chrome are not identical to the problems of IE.
It’s not the new IE. In my mind it’s worse than the new IE because it achieves similar goals as the IE abuse but without necessarily doing anything illegal.
Would be great to see more attention being brought to the independent browsers: Firefox, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi etc
Not sure if we are there yet, but seems we are heading that direction.
There are only 3 real browsers today that meaningfully compete and control their own destiny: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Everything else is mostly just a fresh coat of paint on one of those browsers.
Apple, which owns Safari, is the largest company in the world. Alphabet, which owns Chrome, is the 4th or 5th largest company in the world.
Mozilla is a small non-profit that exists to provide meaningful choice. Those others are small businesses trying to make a buck riding Google's treadmill or surfing their wake.
If anything, it wouldn't surprise me if Mozilla announces that they're discontinuing Firefox. Those alternative browsers you mention don't even register on the usage radar to be relevant in a browser "war".
Everything seems to indicate that we're heading towards an even worse single-browser dominance than IE had in the 90s.
Ars seems to be confusing the topics API with the privacy sandbox as a whole. Most features are early, like client hints, while others like privacy budget haven't even been released yet.
And if Steve Gibson is to be believed Topics is not only an improvement, it's an unqualified good. (I'm not yet convinced though if Google didn't have so many other harvesting avenues I'd see it as better for privacy too.)
(for now)
He's committed to deGoogling his life now and is even migrating off Gmail this weekend - I think I'll be joining him.
Nextcloud
Syncthing
Firefox
Bitwarden
Aegis
GrapheneOS
F-Droid
ntfy
NewPipe
Signal
Matrix
Stop using email or do custom domain + some service. Sync locally with Thunderbird or whatever you like.
(a) Ignored them, or
(b) Used an incognito window.
But now, when I'm forced to use Chrome, I'm seriously looking at disguising my IP address, etc. But this is not my field.
Would a VPN do what I need? Where are instructions that a n00b can follow?
Every site I've found so far has either been:
(i) Advertising;
(ii) Assuming too much competence;
(iii) Out of date, or
(iv) Wrong.
Clear, robust, and up-to-date advice welcome, as I'm sure it would be for many.
> Would a VPN do what I need? Where are instructions that a n00b can follow?
Never used them myself but lots of HN commenters think highly of the VPN services offered by Mullvad [0]. In fact, right now, Mullvad is currently on the HN frontpage [1], from a blog post by Tailscale.
Yeah. Things are going great in Chrome world. Totally should give them dominance over the one sliver they don’t control.
(I have no problem with letting people have FF/etc. but let’s face it, it will be 90%+ Chrome within days)
This is factually incorrect. It works like third party cookies, but with privacy. A web page can only retrieve a topic if that site has already observe you visit pages of that topic. In order for you to observe a site that site must send a fetch request to you or embed you in an iframe.
If a random site calls document.browsingTopics() they get no topics as not enough data has been observed by them.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/alert-no-google-topics-in-viva...
Shortly: they disable the tracking forcibly, even if "someone" tries to enable it remotely or via flags.
Google was playing 3D chess when they started developing Chrome, and when they started making moves to strip away things like user agent strings, they were really just making the final moves of a campaign set years before to create a walled garden of ads data.
Edit: I had initially said “dominant” in the enterprise, but I imagine that title still goes to Edge?
It would be impressive if it wasn’t so depressing and gross.
Firefox has had its ups and downs, but it and its progenitors have been great daily drivers for me over 20 years now. It's not too late. The best time to switch was, well, forever ago -- but today is also a great time to switch. Get on the fucking bus.
Like most companies, Google has a mission statement or "philosophy." Google's philosophy is divided into 10 points; each point is one sentence long. The first and most interesting is quoted in the title of this part of the book. Unlike most corporate mission statements, this phrase did not come about through long committee discussions: This statement is Larry Page's mantra. Early on, when people asked him about financing his projects, he always replied with something like, "Don't worry about it. If our users are satisfied, if we give them all they want and more, we'll be able to find some money.""
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-google-way/97815932...
The conceit is the ability to view responses as nodes in a graph, and laying filters on top. The tradeoff for performance being introspection and control.
Didn't the very initial release of Chrome, many years ago, already create a unique, identifiable ID per user, and open a connection to phone home to Google servers (using that unique ID) on every single key-press and mouse click done anywhere in the browser?
Should I just restrict myself to Safari now? I don't really like Firefox for some reason.
Stop.
Stop excusing it. “It’s work. It’s my hobby. I like it. But I can make it work.”
Just stop. It’s only hard because you think you’re in this world technology that’s more important than you as a human.
Uninstall chrome. Tell others to do it. Tell others why. Tell others the lies, deceit, marginalization, and corruption. And then don’t participate.