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Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

propublica.org

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Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#211

Post by fauigerzigerk »

robg wrote: post #185
runeb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To opt out, or "Pause" as Google is tellingly calling it, from the article: To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls[1] on Google’s My Account page, and uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services." You can also delete past activity from your account. [1] https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

I turned everything off years ago. Still off today.

Me too, but I'm not sure what it means. Do they stop collecting the data or do they just stop using data for ad targetting?

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#212

Post by dredmorbius »

frabcus wrote: post #122
agentgt wrote: post #111

I'm curious what bothers people most about the privacy issues? Strangely I don't care that Google (and others) know about me. I probably should but I have just sorted have accepted the lack of privacy today. What really bothers me isn't the privacy its them using that data to create a completely unfair advantage to continue the oligopoly that is quickly consuming all markets. I used to be such a capitalist but as of…

I do too. People tend to want decentralised alternatives partly for privacy, partly for competition, partly for resilience (hurricanes, wars). Lots of arts people I speak too also talk about cultural diversity - the lack of competition is part of that. Capitalism has always been regulated. More than 10% of any market used to mean a monopoly. It should still. There's nothing wrong with capitalism. What's wrong is the…

Do you have a reference on that 10% = monopoly definition?

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#213

Post by artificial »

akerro wrote: post #6
atrilumen wrote: post #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?

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] htt…

Excellent list, here's one you may not know about which locally hosts 3rd party libraries (such as jQuery) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes... to plug that hole while restoring some enhanced functionality. This alone got me back on Firefox.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#214

Post by yason »

I sometimes wonder if why it is generally held that marketing sucks and advertisements are evil because they're so random, badly targeted and thus crappy.

I basically wouldn't mind seeing advertisements if they were relevant and spot on. And that probably hasn't been possible until all that big data is cross-indexed with user identities.

It may be that ads are considered bad because good ads happen once in a thousand.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#215

Post by urda »

This is yet another reminder that it's important, especially for HN readers, to continue to give support to groups such as Mozilla and their Firefox platform. The more widespread Google and Chrome usage is, the more Google can push these changes with little to no resistance.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#216

Post by RodericDay »

blowski wrote: post #149
RodericDay wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

!year gets you some of the way there

That doesn't work for me. I can do `!syear` or `!gyear` to filter on Google or Start Page, but not with DDG results.

if you type

    !year girugamesh
vs.

    girugamesh
you definitely get two different sets of results, one general, and one discussing the term in retrospective (with urls denoting /2016/ for example). I think they don't highlight it well, but the filtering is definitely going on.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#217

Post by tdb7893 »

initram wrote: post #153
tdb7893 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really bother me if the internet knows that I recently bought a nice soldering iron on Amazon or that I play D&D with my friends. I kinda view the internet as public and I don't really have huge privacy concerns about information I put in public.

Other people have legitimate concerns about others knowing what they bought on Amazon or do with their friends. In some jurisdictions, buying what seem like normal products to you and I is illegal. Some people live in areas where others knowing they are gay, transgendered, conservative, atheist, etc. will get them fired or literally killed. It's great that you don't have to worry about that. But others do, and it's g…

That's fair but I don't think that how other countries react to what people do in public it should affect how companies act in mine. Ovarall yt's hard because it's unreasonable to expect someone to just not use internet services that are so convenient but it's also unreasonable to expect companies to ignore all this lucrative data that we are literally giving to them. Currently it's a Catch 22 that I've made my peace with but I understand if other people haven't.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#218

Post by mikeleeorg »

the_watcher wrote: post #210
aikah wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe I think Google always was an ad company, using technology to push ads and never a engineering company using ads as a source of income.

Have you forgotten the years they went providing Google search without a single ad?

So then would you say Google was a search company and is now an ad company?

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#219

Post by eridius »

ForHackernews wrote: post #104
artursapek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently moved to using https://mailbox.org/ to host my email under a personal domain name. I've been very happy with their service. (not affiliated with them whatsoever)

I've been happy with https://fastmail.com/

I second the recommendation for FastMail. Excellent service, they even support push email on iOS (AFAIK they're the only company outside of Yahoo to have that for IMAP), and I love all the work they're doing to try and push email forward (such as JMAP).

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#220

Post by eridius »

Kunix wrote: post #154
omouse wrote: post #37

The marketers and advertisers have finally won. Google hasn't been an engineering company for the last 5 years maybe, but this confirms it. It's like Facebook, they're beholden to the non-developers and non-software engineers who frankly don't care about other people's privacy and only see the dollar bills. So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.

> So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking. I find it to be not that easy to find good alternatives. In the long run good products require money, and money is massively flowing at advertisement currently. That's why the big players are Google (ads), Facebook (ads), and I suspect that's why Microsoft is starting to massively collect user data (from Windows 10). Building good competi…

It's not easy to find good alternatives if you require that your email be free. If you're willing to pay for email (and really, if email is important to you, you should be paying for it) there's a number of excellent providers. I recommend FastMail, but I've seen people talk about a few other good ones too (though I forget the names).
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