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Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

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Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#241

Post by kick »

coldpie wrote: post #226
kick wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a notable and depressing example). Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, a…

> Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. These seem at odds with each other. If you want Firefox to be used, how do you suggest its development be paid for?

They're already getting more than enough to fund development with the Google deal, which they've shown no willingness to let up on, despite it seriously compromising user privacy. Donating to Mozilla at this point is just encouraging organizational bloat.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#242

Post by jkepler »

Am I correct to understand that this backdoor tracking of individual users applies to the standard Chromium browser (i.e., the non Eloston ungoogled-chromium) as well as the Chrome browser?

If so, its incredibly consistent with Google's surveillance capitalist business model.[1] Wow. I'm thankful for Firefox.

--

[1] "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", by Shoshana Zuboff, reviewed here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveil...

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#243

Post by kick »

alharith wrote: post #177
kick wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a notable and depressing example). Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, a…

Better yet, donate to Brave who doesn't share the same conflict of interest as Mozilla does with Google, as Google is Mozilla's #1 source of income. Best of all you get a browser just as fast, if not faster than Chrome because it's Chrome without all the junk.

While Brave not taking the "Search deal with Google" route is commendable, you shouldn't donate to it, either.

Venture-funded for-profit startups don't need donations, and again, donations will be more heavily felt by the people maintaining the software you use every day that isn't created by behemoths.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#244

Post by cdubzzz »

autonomuzw wrote: post #174
DangerousPie wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks. I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.

Yes, there is definitely a performance advantage especially on mobile. see for example some benchmarks for brave browser, and also a couple of recent tests for desktop browsers. [0] https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology... [1] https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/ [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-... [3] https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browse…

The conclusion of the linuxreviews article doesn’t really make a strong case for any major difference between the browsers —

It is hard to declare an absolute winner. Brave and Chromium, seem to be the overall winners but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox are not bad choices if you never visit pages with fancy WebGL or WebAssembly ever. Chromium may be the best choice if you watch a lot of video on a laptop if your distributions Chromium package has the hardware video acceleration patches.

Lots of “ifs” in there for all conclusions.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#245

Post by meowface »

sildur wrote: post #181
clSTophEjUdRanu wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I care. I care that I even if I log off, even if I use a vpn, even if I go into incognito mode, they still can associate my requests with the account I initially logged in.

The problem is any website can do that. Incognito-bypassing fingerprinting is difficult to prevent, unless you use something like uMatrix to disallow JavaScript from everything but a few select domains.

This is a collection of random-ish unique-ish attributes. Any collection of such things can be used to track you, like installed fonts, installed extensions, etc. If this were just a set of meaningless encoded random numbers, then it's essentially a kind of cookie, but that's not what it is. This is (claimed to be) a collection of information that's useful and possibly needed by some backends when testing new Chrome features. It tells servers what your Chrome browser supports. The information is probably similar to "optimizeytvids=1,betajsparser=1".

So, the only question is if Google is actually using this to help fingerprint users in addition to the pragmatic use case. It certainly could be used that way, and it's possible they are, but they have so many other ways of doing that with much higher fidelity / entropy if they want to. If this were intended as a sneaky undisclosed fingerprinting technique, I think they would've ensured it was actually 100% unique per installation, with a state space in the trillions, rather than 8000.

Yes, this could be so sneaky that they took this into consideration and made it low-entropy to create plausible deniability while still being able to increase entropy when doing composite fingerprinting, but I think it's pretty unlikely. Also, 99% of the time they could probably just use use Google Analytics and Google login cookies to do this anyway.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#246

Post by coldpie »

kick wrote: post #241
coldpie wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. These seem at odds with each other. If you want Firefox to be used, how do you suggest its development be paid for?

They're already getting more than enough to fund development with the Google deal, which they've shown no willingness to let up on, despite it seriously compromising user privacy. Donating to Mozilla at this point is just encouraging organizational bloat.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree (which is fine!). I'd rather continue donating to them to show there are funding sources outside of advertising, which is a business model I despise.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#247

Post by jeltz »

fortran77 wrote: post #60
marriedWpt wrote: post #38

Ahh the good ol HN "stop using Google and start using Firefox" advertisement. It's a bit odd to see this in every Google thread. Btw, Firefox is too slow.

It's not odd at all. It's what the folks at Mozilla do. They jump in to every thread to push Firefox and Rust and make people think it's more widely used/better than it is.

I think most people who advocate Firefox are not Mozilla employees. I am for sure not one, I do not even like Mozilla, but they are a much lesser evil compared to Google. And I think having multiple competing browsers is vital for preventing the internet for becoming a walled garden owned by some big corporation.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#248

Post by kick »

coldpie wrote: post #231
Spooks wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I never understood that argument. We have a fairly large and wonderful kids hospital that looks for donations and some of my friends said they wouldn't donate because their CEO makes 500k and he should donate his money instead. I had to explain you want to recruit great talent, and that 500k is less than he could make some place else.

Right. What people actually want is some form of income equality, which would bring executive level salaries in line with their actual worth. You're not going to achieve that by starving non-profits of executive talent in the meantime.

I respect you a lot, but how is what Mozilla's doing in regards to that at all respectable? It's not "starving them of talent" to not increase Baker's pay as Mozilla is laying off employees? She's been there since (almost) the beginning, and the performance of Mozilla has gotten worse over the last decade.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#249

Post by throwaway41968 »

thu2111 wrote: post #213
glyxbaer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..). Working at that company has always been a dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture. Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil th…

Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes). Firstly, if tracking u…

Your points are sound, but I'm puzzled by your last line:

>It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.

The way I read it, it seems as though it's unfair that they get away with doing questionable stuff when "others do worse". Why yes, if you have nefarious intentions but no power to act them out, people are going to throw less "vitriol" at you than if you do act them out.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#250

Post by mega_dingus »

tjoff wrote: post #232
skybrian wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you have enough bits you can come up with a fingerprint, but that's not what PII means.

It becomes PII the instant you can correlate that fingerprint with any PII.

This.

A bank account number is consider PII. Knowing the bank name & account number will uniquely identify the account holder's name, which is PII.

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