191–200 of 642 posts
I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out. What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty brazillion employees it can test new features on.
Isn't that what most A/B testing is?
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This is impressive doublespeak. > This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information > a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy) They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined wit…
>Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service. Wat? You mean to tell me they can identify you if you log into their service? Am I missing something here? Who cares?
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This is a meaningless cliche. Just because users of Google products don't pay in cash to use them doesn't change the fact that Google has to attract the users to their platform in the first place, and keep them there.
No, Google has paid to be the the default in most cases.
I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out. What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty brazillion employees it can test new features on.
See the fiasco where they broke Terminal Services last year as an example of what can go wrong even when doing experiments on the whole user base.
Also consider how to measure the usage of web features Google's own websites don't use, but are popular on e.g. intranets in Korea.
A/B testing isn't bad, it's a good thing. People are notoriously not very good at giving feedback. Experiments and usage statistics let you get the ground truth about what they really value, and what's really working.
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This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad in its definition of PII; it denies even innocuous feature-mode-distinguishing headers intended to allow for bug-identification of massively-distributed software installs. If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "better software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better software quality."
Me too. Then a breach happens and someone with a straight face tells you: "we take your privacy very seriously", asking apologies, because the breach used some of your data to push some political campaign or to bother you with spam/extortions because that night you were watching some porn. Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works. Otherwise upper leve…
If you demand a perfection-of-function guarantee from something as complicated as a web browser, you'll never get a web browser with more features than the ones released in the '90s (and I'm not even sure we'd be that far along by now).
If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "the software ever having the features I want to use" I'm also going to lean towards "the software ever having the features I want to use." And we know this is true for users in general because of the number of users who had Flash installed back-in-the-day in spite of the fact that it allowed a total bypass of the browser security model, because it had features that the browser lacked otherwise.
Not endorsing this, but according to https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat... > We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before it’s launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations he…
This is impressive doublespeak. > This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information > a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy) They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined wit…
Except for everything you do on your browser. I'm so glad I haven't used Chrome for almost three years.
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i think their business model is just fine: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/9to5google.com/2020/02/03/alp...
There's a certain irony of linking to an amp site on Google's domain as part of a larger discussion about their business ethics.
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Side question: I've been trying to switch to firefox as my main browser but one thing is holding me up. When I'm using a private window, cookies are not shared between private tabs. I can see the advantage to that behavior, but is there a way to share them so that I can be logged into the same site in multiple private tabs? Unironically, I haven't had any luck googling this problem.
If you open a new tab from an existing tab, your session persists across tabs. So, for example, middle clicking on the Hacker News logo will preserve your HN session across tabs.
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This is impressive doublespeak. > This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information > a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy) They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined wit…
>Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service. Wat? You mean to tell me they can identify you if you log into their service? Am I missing something here? Who cares?