441–450 of 463 posts
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I came to the same conclusion 2 weeks ago. Nowadays, I have to solve the captcha 15-20 times before it lets me in. So I have started purposefully making wrong answers-road instead of car, sky instead of cross walks etc. If self driving cars end up crashing, I may have contributed to it. Similar thing happened with YouTube too. They would always show me the same ad over and over. Even if I skip, I would get that ad mu…
Aren't you doing anything weird with your cookies? For me recaptcha is almost always solvable from the first try. Regarding Youtube, usually reloading the page 2-3 times allows me to skip ads, but this trick doesn't work with all videos.
Really it should be the default, and in fact most webpages have no issue respecting those settings, google's recaptcha is about the only thing that actively refuses to cooperate.
Whenever you tap a link in the iOS YouTube app, it starts nagging you to download Chrome, or continue with the old boring Safari... There's a pre-checked switch at the bottom of the dialog that says "Ask me which app to use every time". Now, even if you uncheck the switch and choose Safari, they will only let you off the hook for around a day; after this cooldown period you're "offered" to download Chrome yet again,…
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I've used it for a year without Google play services. The basic OS utilites (camera, SMS, file manager, "phone" app, etc) are part of the Lineage base and don't need play services. You can also install f-droid which has a good variety of open source apps, including mail clients. I even installed Whatsapp (downloaded the apk from whatsapp's website), which doesn't require play services. Now, I don't think LineageOS is…
> I even installed Whatsapp This just switches being tracked by Google to being tracked by Facebook. They now have names, times, numbers, etc of people you talk to/interact with, as well as your rough location via IP, access point, or cell tower (which are shared with people who have location services enabled).
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> Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history? I work at Google but not on Maps, opinions are my own. I don't know if this is why they did it that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason was merely that 99.9% of users opt in to location sharing and the developers didn't feel it useful to spend t…
Well, in particular, if a developer "untied" these things (ie made the app more useful without signing in), and then the ratio of users who do sign in drops, then that is presumably a "bad impact" metric for the developer. Why would they do that? It seems rather obvious that there is little incentive to provide usefulness without tying it as closely as possible to data collection.
That seems about right. Other than services that you actually pay hard cash for (like gce), all other metrics will eventually trace back to some kind of ad/data related metric.
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> 80% of the time, for all online services, users get the choice to opt-out from the tracking That's purely theoretical. My browser is sending to not track headers, I've uBlock turned on, I nearly always reject tracking, yet I periodically delete thousands of cookies. (In case there are bored Safari extension developers who read this and feel the same: an extension that allows to whitelist cookies and rejects everyth…
Try the (very unhelpfully named) Cookie app. It’s a little sketchy looking and the website is poorly designed but seems to work for me. Get the non-app store one. (No affiliation, I’m also evaluating it as we speak) https://cookie5app.com
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I've typed the same postcode into Maps almost every day for the past 5 years - Google, could you maybe help it be the first autocomplete result when I enter it manually?
> I've typed the same postcode into Maps almost every day for the past 5 years That's fascinating. Why?
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Mostly God, e.g. Titus Salt is listed in that article "Salt's motives in building Saltaire remain obscure. They seem to have been a mixture of sound economics, Christian duty, and a desire to have effective control over his workforce. There were economic reasons for moving out of Bradford, and the village did provide him with an amenable, handpicked workforce. Yet Salt was deeply religious and sincerely believed that…
> Now, God doesn't exist Do you have a definitive source for that?
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Try the (very unhelpfully named) Cookie app. It’s a little sketchy looking and the website is poorly designed but seems to work for me. Get the non-app store one. (No affiliation, I’m also evaluating it as we speak) https://cookie5app.com
I ran into that one last year when I tried to locate an extension, and didn't rule out buying it, but I ruled out using it because it didn't seem open source. I get that devs need to get rewarded for their time and so forth. But in this day and age where popular extensions get purchased and repurposed as spyware, I'm not keen on installing anything closed source that messes around with my browser. And it's a red flag…
The blanket 'not open source, so I won't use it' general sentiment (not implying you have this) I see on HN nowadays doesn't hurt Google, it hurts small software makers that don't have the luxury and money to make things 'free*' with five asterisks like FAANG, like you and me, and actually strengthens the larger companies.
The trust issue is a legit one, though. I have the same concerns on that one. However, if I could fully trust it, I would have no problem with it being not open source.
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I do not try to hide my lack of authority, which is why I transparently couch my words with "it seems" and "my guess". I don't need to speak with authority here. If you want to stoke the flames of moral outrage, the burden is on you, not me.
Yeah, but all you said was "if you didn't work on X, you can't have an opinion about X", which is a completely useless and trivially wrong statement.