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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

#321
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "tied", which would imply a contractual relationship...

That's malarkey. Tied is not exclusively used to imply a "contractual relationship," and that's (if anything) a minority-usage of the idiom of tied to/with.

I think you probably should have used 'associated with' instead of 'tied to' as when discussing remuneration contractual ties is not a minority usage of the idiom.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#323

If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.

The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actu…

Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser.

By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#324
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out" That sounds like all A/B testing...

Firefox's testing (aka studies) are opt-in, not opt-out.

Firefox telemetry is opt-out, however.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#325

So, an extremely unique identifier for tracking purposes, that effectively no one knows exists, and no one knows can be changed at all? With an obscure white paper that allows Google to claim they comply with the law because "they totally offer a way to change that and they even published that information to the web for anyone to find"? Gotcha.

Reminds me of this.

"There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now"

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason for only sending this header to Google web properties and not all domains?

Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps? I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the defa…

I can think of a hundreds reasons why they do this. It doesn't make it right in any of those.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#328

If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.

I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options.

Edit:

I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN.

See these other comments of mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#329

Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim" level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine monoculture?

Don't forget Electron! Like Atom, VS Code etc

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#330
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's malarkey. Tied is not exclusively used to imply a "contractual relationship," and that's (if anything) a minority-usage of the idiom of tied to/with.

I think you probably should have used 'associated with' instead of 'tied to' as when discussing remuneration contractual ties is not a minority usage of the idiom.

I'm not Kick, but while you're correct that "associated with" would've been better for clarity, no reasonable person would assume that "inversely tied" describes a contractually mandated drop in performance for an increase in pay (my other comment here links to dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, both good references for this discussion). Couple that with the generally accepted usage of 'tied' and the usage by Kick was correct, if perhaps ambiguous to a narrow population.
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