Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
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Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#2> “Some new features for your Google account.”
Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever."
How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#3> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com for search.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#4> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
Use alternatives? For example, https://duckduckgo.com for search.
Has DuckDuckGo email and an app suite?
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#5> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
> How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
Legal protection is necessary, and that's what works in other industries. It's not a fair negotiation, between a company's teams of engineers, management, and attorneys on one side, and a lone individual on the other. Financial firms, for example, can't just put whatever they want in agreements or do whatever they want.
EDIT: The solution of informed consent doesn't work. Consumers don't have time to become informed, which requires not only reading every click-wrap agreement but understanding the technology (remember the solution must work for all users, not only the HN crowd but people who don't know what a web browser is), and understanding privacy and its consequences, and then starting that process over again to find an alternative that meets their needs - for every technology in the stack. It's unrealistic in theory, and in practice obviously doesn't work: Almost nobody, even the HN crowd, is informed.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#6> “Some new features for your Google account.” Oh, yeah, I remember that. I totally clicked "Ok, whatever." How does one not be herded like cattle by the corporations, without making a full time job of resisting it?
Just don't have Google account and clean cookies and history regularly[1], forbid saving 3rd party cookies (built-in in Firefox) and noise your canvas generator [2], block 3rd party JS, CSS, media and fonts [3], control your referals your browser sends on each click [4] use VPN or Tor on startup. You don't need to bother with those tools, they will just work in background (µBlock requires some configuration).
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/expire-histor... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/no-canvas-fin... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... [4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#7Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#8I'd just like to draw people's attention to a little bit of conflict-of-interest research some Stanford University researchers published a few years ago:
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking
#9Earlier:
We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with your
personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in
consent.
Depending on your account settings, your activity on other
sites and apps may be associated with your personal information
in order to improve Google's services and the ads delivered by
Google.