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Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

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Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#261

Post by notlisted »

pessimizer wrote: post #163
__jal wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to start thinking of web forms, solicitations for email address, etc. like people used to think of the Columbia House record/CD club. There may be an instant-gratification payoff, but you'll regret it at leisure. Or, would you take a free sample to munch on if they first presented you with a 34-page legal agreement?

People rarely regretted joining Columbia House, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here. They really did give you a billion records for a penny, and all you had to do was opt out every month (or opt in, they had a lot of really good records in that catalog in the 90s at least.) They relied on people repeatedly forgetting to opt out, not the blatant subterfuge of modern business models. http://www.avclub.com/art…

Funny you should say that, because I loved Columbia House. Not just the cheap initial CDs, but the "surprise" CD picks they sent my way (94-99). Come to think of it, most of my CD 'collection' came from CH. Once listen.com launched (later Rhapsody, now Napster), I never bought another CD again.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#262

Post by echion »

dredmorbius wrote: post #203
drieddust wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that for other services but I do not see an easy alternate to Android. People are moaning about Microsoft tracking with Windows 10 which is mostly on home devices. In reality Google is worse, they are tracking us 24x7 via our smart phones.

I am using (and hating hating hating hating hating) Android. I've been watching for alternatives. 1. Cyanogen Mod: This inherits too many of Android's fatal flaws. 2. FirefoxOS: Oh well. (It's dead, Jim.) 3. Ubuntu Mobile: It's still alive, though small. 4. Windows Mobile: Not my thing. I may head to a small-form-factor notepad. I really like the concept of a folio-format tablet + bluetooth keyboard, though nobody se…

https://jolla.com/jolla/ is still a thing

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#263

Post by hyperdunc »

kotajacob wrote: post #253
FUCK__GOOGLE wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm moving off gmail today, gonna just register my own domain and set up a server somewhere. I think that and hangouts are the last ways they got me, looking forward to deleting my account. It's so strange to be old enough to see the same mistakes of the AOL days repeated again at a much larger scale. I don't want your garden, I want my privacy, thanks.

Everyone's talking about switching emails, but realistically how difficult do you think it will be. Changing it for all the services you use and informing everyone? Or are you just planning on setting up forwarding for a while... (Asking because I'm trying to make the switch myself)

I switched to Fastmail about 2 weeks ago and their POP retrieval feature made it really easy to get all emails from from my old account. I just updated my email address with a service when first using it after making the switch. And I reply to emails from my new address.

I was looking into ProtonMail and Riseup as well. There are lots of good alternatives to Gmail.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#264

Post by manigandham »

XJOKOLAT wrote: post #242
manigandham wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not engineering vs advertising. Developers are not some kind of perfectly pure and moral people, and engineering is not an end in itself, it's always to serve some other purpose. There is no such thing as a tech/engineering company.

"Don't be evil" ... ? It's not about developers being perfectly pure and moral, it's about an organisation holding themselves up to a standard that they have set themselves. And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed.

What exactly is that standard?

Google is a massive company that provides immense value to billions, and they do much of this for free (monetarily to you as the end user) while providing advertisers a great platform that allows for efficient matching of products to consumers. That is a fine standard for a company in my opinion.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#265

Post by ifhs »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #147
yojex wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain your use case with Sandstorm? I find their homepage to be ambiguous/not really sure what they're offering.

Yeah, so I do all my documents and spreadsheets and stuff on Sandstorm Oasis, which is their managed offering. I can do a bunch of other stuff on it, and it's easiest to figure out the extent of it by just trying the demo yourself ( https://demo.sandstorm.io ) and checking out the apps and stuff. But in my case, I mostly use it like I used Google Docs and Trello before, that I can easily control my data on, and migra…

Curious: why use the managed hosting if you are a privacy enthusiast? Or are you just a sandstorm enthusiast? Why? Became nits not Google? Just curious since your every comment is about it...and it looks like you are wearing Google glass...

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#266

Post by nialv7 »

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.

Off topic question: If I was to find a job right now, what's the best "engineering company" I can work for?

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#267

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #178
sambobeckingham wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG don't track your IP or log activity against you. Bang searches are simply redirects as far as I'm aware and thus !g is equivalent to typing straight into Google. But if you're using Google through DDG you're probably missing the point.

Using Google through DDG is useful because of the bang searches. It's actually faster for me to get to, say, image, scholar, books, ngram, or maps (though I prefer OpenStreetMap) searches from DDG than it is through Google's own web interface. It's faster to do that, in further irony, on Firefox rather than Chrome (on Android), because Chrome/Android doesn't allow specifying DDG as a default search engine. (I prefer…

[deleted]

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#268

Post by faktorialas »

jsingleton wrote: post #129
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just switched to FastMail this past weekend, and I recommend it. For an app suite, I recommend Sandstorm.io.

I've heard good things about both https://www.fastmail.com and https://protonmail.com so would be good to hear your experiences after a bit more use.

Protonmail doesn't have pop/imap/external app use. I've heard it's coming in the following months.

It's great apart from that, but this is a fairly big negative if you want to use a bunch of email accounts. There are some other negatives as well, but apart from this, it seems ahead of the pack.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#269

Post by faktorialas »

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…

People that are politically interesting (for states and others) have obvious reasons to protect their privacy. You need politically interesting people to fight for your rights.

You want to protect your privacy so that in the event that you become politically interesting, they don't have a backlog of your data. Furthermore, you want to protect your data to not be dissuaded from any (even subtle) actions that you might take if you weren't affected by a chilling effect.

You want any person who hasn't been previously cognizant of the dangers of privacy to not have that hang over his head, in case he becomes politically interesting (even not on purpose, like could be the case with whistleblowers), or become politically interesting, like an activist, journalist, etc. Any free society needs this. To do this, everyone needs to have privacy.

Finally, even for the first group to have privacy, everyone has to have it. It's not something you can just give to specific people.

I'm assuming you know that there are plenty bad things can be done with data, if someone is willing. I hope that's evident. Not mentioning what criminals could do with it, or how corporations can abuse people with it. As they routinely do.

Re: Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking

#270

Post by faktorialas »

tdb7893 wrote: post #217
initram wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is, you're not making a transactional choice. You're not just choosing the internet for you, you're affecting the internet for everyone.

I also think assuming that you know this can't hurt you yourself is naive, but it's just easier to point to people in more vulnerable spots.

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