This site is so obviously trying to sell everyone VPN software for affiliate revenue. The aggressive SEO structure is a pretty clear tell. So color me skeptical in terms of their advice.
Alternatives to Google Products
371–380 of 527 posts
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#372> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market. Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing his…
Google has what I think is the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads). I don't think this stops Google from collecting your viewing history. If it did, Youtube recommendations wouldn't work at all, because they would know nothing abo…
When logged in I have history disabled, and YouTube being kind of usable, with a lot of stupid content promoted, but at least not too much weird fixation on things I watched 5 years ago. When logged out I get the full fixation experience where I half the suggestions are aggravatingly repetitive personalized suggestions.
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Has it become some sort of fashion statement to be ignorant about privacy? Whenever I discuss this topic people seem to almost take pride in giving their information to Google, Facebook and the thousands of other companies they have no clue about. I think it's cognitive dissonance rearing its ugly head again: those people have tied their identity at some level with the use of the products and an attack on e.g. Google…
I find I'm having trouble arguing in a meaningful way with people who don't share the same concerns regarding the privacy of their data. I'm running out of arguments - no matter what I say, they'll respond with a shrug. "So what? I don't have anything to hide." "So what? They are a big company, surely they won't abuse my data." "So what? How has Cambridge Analytica affected me?" And for the ultimate capitulation: "So…
The best distillation I found was that this is all a version of the "Nothing to Hide" argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
There are some points to counter with in the article. Bruce Schneier quotes Cardinal Richelieu: give me 6 lines written by the most honest man and I'll find something in there to hang him by. Has the benefit of historical perspective!
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
By the way, what does GDPR say about fingerprinting? Is it legal? (Asking because the EU explicitly made cookies an opt-in technique, but not sure if they considered fingerprinting).
The EU did not make cookies an opt-in technique. The EU made irrelevant cookies opt-in. Cookies that are essential for the functioning of the service do not need a notice. If you require user accounts, you don't need to show a cookie notice. If you implement a shopping cart without user accounts, you also don't need to show a cookie notice. Unfortunately most websites don't understand this simple idea and show the co…
Probably most websites use Google Analytics or an alternative.
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Bing a fair amount and I like it. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what sorts of things you are trying to find and having trouble with. Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions for how to get more out of your Bing experience.
It’s a matter of taste but I prefer the Apple/google clean and white UI with little else distraction than what you are trying to achieve over Microsoft’s “portal from the 90’s/let’s fill every bit of space”. Whether it’s bing or Windows, something as stupid as showing you a different background picture every time means you always have to deal with a new visual, which means more effort to find your way. It’s the same…
I’m surprised to learn an it professional regularly finds their way to a search engine home page. I would assume you’d just type your query directly into the address bar? This seems to work for every major browser at least, unless I’m mistaking?
I actually use Bing, and I see the oddity that is their homepage once a month, if that.
(And I think bing is fine for about 80% of searches. The rest I use google, which manages for another 10%, and for the remaining tithe I have to do something archaic like think about how to properly format a search query. Party like it’s 1999.)
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#376While the advice here is quite solid, when I went to figure out what their favicon was doing(it had partial transparency, apparently due to downscaling blending opaque and transparent parts), the first thing I saw was a big block of code that appeared to enable tracking by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Linkedin. (It was a sharrre function with enableTracking set to true on each). Not entirely relevant, yet consid…
Yep, they're using a jquery plugin called Sharrre to add social media buttons and have overridden its default off setting for "enableTracking - allows tracking social interaction with Google Analytics".
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those can uniquely identify me So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it. If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight. As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.
Assuming there's 4k possibilities for width and 2k for height, that's 8 millions possibilities right here. Compared to ~2 billions of people accessing the internet, the odds of having a unique one seems really really low.
It's one of many different data points that can be used to identify you though, and if you aren't full screen at a standard resolution then it's a very good one.
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#378We've been working on something that has yet to be added to this list, but I feel it's worth mentioning. It's a self-hosted OS alternative to Google Analytics, much like Matomo (formerly Piwik) but less focused on developers and way more opinionated in terms of what data is visualized. It's called Fathom Analytics[1]. Eventually we want to provide a paid hosted option much like what Ghost is offering to make sure we…
Hey wanted to know that I'm super excited to see/use fathom -- I've been using Piwik (now Matomo) for a while, but found that it kinda did too much, envisioned myself writing something like Fathom to scratch the itch, glad I don't have to! :) It looks like fathom has just the stuff I want to see in a nice stripped down view
Hey, that's awesome, we plan not to disappoint.
We'll be setting up a public roadmap over the next few weeks so your feedback while we built this would be very much appreciated!
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither. It's an option in the preferences.
Is that option enabled in default installation of firefox? Sorry, I must have specified that in Safari ITP is enabled by default, and this is important for non-tech people.
No. It hasn't been enabled by default in my experience. It isn't the exact same as the Safari technology. Firefox lets you block "3rd party cookies" or "all cookies" from the privacy pane of preferences. I've always "set it and forget it". The assumption is that many tracking cookies will come from 3rd party websites.
Re: Alternatives to Google Products
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox has been able to clear cookies like that for years without any extensions.
Firefox has an option to block all third party cookies in the manner similar to Safari 1-10's default behaviour. And like everything else, it lets you clear all cookies at once, or manually look through the cookies to clear them. It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.
> It does not have a feature analogous to safari 11+'s tracking prevention.
I never said that it did... I wrote that firefox has had the ability to block cookies automatically for years, which it has had. My response was not a comparison between the browsers but a statement of one particular feature that was mentioned. I simply said that what had been stated by the gp was also available in Firefox.