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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

#341

Post by marriedWpt »

basscomm wrote: post #149
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.

> Btw, Firefox is too slow. Ahh, the good ol' "Firefox is too slow for me to consider it" statement. Is there any evidence that Firefox is slower then Chrome other than old lingering memories of Firefox being slow ten years ago? I have used both Firefox and Chrome and I can't subjectively tell that one is significantly faster or slower than the other. To be fair, I only have a handful of extensions and rarely have mo…

The difference is extremely noticable. So yes.

I can open up 2 tabs and Firefox is still loading the page.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#342

Post by lern_too_spel »

falcolas wrote: post #291
lern_too_spel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You complained that it was hosted on Google specifically. I tested that Chrome specifically copies the canonical URL and not the location bar URL when I share that AMP page, which doesn't fit your narrative. Also, the reason the AMP page is faster is that it prerenders above the fold from a SERP, not due to total page weight.

AMP is, hosting aside, a problematic project when it comes to Google's business ethics. And the differences in rendering speed were negligible, to my eyes. IIRC from the dev tools, it was about 1/10th of a second difference to get readable content.

> And the differences in rendering speed were negligible, to my eyes

Reread my previous post. You didn't load it from a SERP. That's what AMP is useful for, instant loading from link aggregators.

> AMP is, hosting aside, a problematic project when it comes to Google's business ethics.

How, especially considering that Google's browser does not share AMP URLs? Is RSS a problematic project? How about GTFS or microdata? All three give the user a better experience at the expense of the publisher.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#343

Post by Yhippa »

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…

> 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.

I think people here might be shocked at the amount of surveillance going on in the most basic web apps. Lots of telemetry like you describe and other ambient data is being captured all as part of the terms and agreements you probably clicked through with the website. Google is not alone in this.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#344

Post by dontblink »

alleyshack wrote: post #300
dleslie wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object. And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.

Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.

Seems to equally apply here though. Many people are perfectly fine with targeted ads in exchange for free useful services. I would even propose the majority (otherwise these services wouldn't be popular in the first place!).

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#345

Post by pb7 »

deeblering4 wrote: post #53

I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/ These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.

+1. Safari is great. Super fast, great on battery life, and has most, if not all, of the extensions you would look for.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#346

Post by robin_reala »

StevePerkins wrote: post #327

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?

Seems to be Chromium judging by some issue comments: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/ccd149af47315e4c6f...

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#347

Post by pb7 »

chatmasta wrote: post #270
deeblering4 wrote: post #53

I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/ These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.

Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and sucks. My biggest gripe is I can’t update it without updating the entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you ever need to unregister a service worker.

For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter: speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#348

Post by tbomb »

DangerousPie wrote: post #15

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 love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#349

Post by sub7 »

The sad part is that most times Google violates your privacy, it's just some PM who thinks having some data will be super important and in most cases they're wrong.

Caveat here is that in 99.99999% cases it's also the case that nobody ever looks at your individual file but the fact that they could is bad enough.

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