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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

#221

Post by mikeleeorg »

For people who didn't read the article but want to opt out of this tracking:

To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls 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.

Links from that paragraph:

* Activity controls: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

* My account page: https://myaccount.google.com/

* Delete past activity: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/465

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#222

Post by eridius »

compiler-guy wrote: post #182
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…

The other examples in this thread are useful, but here is another: Google wants to serve you "effective ads". What does that mean? It wants to serve you ads that you see and take some new action or think something you didn't before . In other words, Google wants to manipulate you to do things you otherwise wouldn't do. It is very much in Google's interest that you spend money with its advertisers, think things its ad…

The entirety of social discourse and information sharing is to influence behavior. Personally, I don't agree with your unstated assumption that having someone else influence your behavior is automatically bad. Hell, you're doing that right now with your comment.

That said, there are plenty of other reasons to value privacy other than not wanting to be served effective ads.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#223

Post by alanh »

eridius wrote: post #220
Kunix wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I, for one, am an enthusiastic paying customer of Fastmail.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#224

Post by mikeleeorg »

barnassey wrote: post #162

More and more changes that do not bode well for google, first they changed it to where they can track what numbers you dial, then they tried that with your google chrome history and tabs if you synced it to your account and now this? People wondered why i stopped being a google evangelist after 2014.

Do you, or anyone else here, know of a good, privacy-conscious personal information management system? Other than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or Apple?

Having a system that manages such critical info in a seamless way is huge. I'm acutely aware that free services are not truly "free," so if there is a good alternative that has a reasonable premium subscription plan, I would seriously consider it.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#225

Post by mikeleeorg »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #224
barnassey wrote: post #162

More and more changes that do not bode well for google, first they changed it to where they can track what numbers you dial, then they tried that with your google chrome history and tabs if you synced it to your account and now this? People wondered why i stopped being a google evangelist after 2014.

Do you, or anyone else here, know of a good, privacy-conscious personal information management system? Other than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or Apple? Having a system that manages such critical info in a seamless way is huge. I'm acutely aware that free services are not truly "free," so if there is a good alternative that has a reasonable premium subscription plan, I would seriously consider it.

Ah, I just read further in this thread, and it looks like a number of alternatives are already being shared. https://www.fastmail.com/ looks pretty interesting.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#226

Post by stonogo »

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?

Which years were those? Google has been putting ads in search results since at least 2000. Are you talking about 1998-2000?

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#227

Post by temp_0xcafebabe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #200
bogomipz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on DDG when you said: "it requires a little more effort when looking for certain things" What type of things?

Not OP, but: 1. Older results. DDG's recent ( 2. Books and journals. Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Ngram Viewer are phenomenally useful tools, no doubt about it. There's no single resource which can substitute for them. Worldcat (library search) is good, if you've got access to various search databases (usually via an academic library) that's useful, and content access itself is possible (with questionable…

I'll certainly agree with #3 in general being less well answered by DDG. It seems to me to be mostly with compound terms and having to manually use +'s and "'s to enforce terms.

Given there's no tracking (feels a bit odd saying that nowadays with any kind of seriousness), do they monitor which queries people use !g for, and try to optimize their engine for these?

One feature I do like though (I'm not sure if Google etc offer this nowadays), is they'll often provide the top-answered StackOverflow answer in response to a query above the search results. That has proven handy a fair few times, esp. for some of the shorter answers (e.g. arcane command lines, git invocations etc).

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#229

Post by problems »

__jal wrote: post #55
problems wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately their results are pretty abysmal. https://www.startpage.com/ or ixquick is a better option in terms of results.

Startpage is nice, too. I personally really like DDG, though. I think people react that way to it because it is more literal, a la Google several years ago. I prefer that; I'm used to it and find that Google frustrates the hell out of me when I'm looking for something specific because of all the 'help' and the heavy bias towards recently changed pages. There have been times when I simply couldn't find things with Goo…

Interesting, usually the searches I find Google is better at are very literal, but also very obscure things. Like when I'm trying to find a specific error message or obscure (often outdated and unavailable legitimately) pirated material. Maybe it just amounts to having more stuff in the index.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#230

Post by ebalit »

dredmorbius wrote: post #200
bogomipz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on DDG when you said: "it requires a little more effort when looking for certain things" What type of things?

Not OP, but: 1. Older results. DDG's recent ( 2. Books and journals. Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Ngram Viewer are phenomenally useful tools, no doubt about it. There's no single resource which can substitute for them. Worldcat (library search) is good, if you've got access to various search databases (usually via an academic library) that's useful, and content access itself is possible (with questionable…

Automatically proposing the best bang query would be awesome. It should be doable to predict the best bang from the query.

Google does something like this when it shows images or scientific articles on top of other results.

DDG could even predict that it needs to fallback to Google in last resort.

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