Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

Post by reaperducer » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #194

reaperducer wrote: post #46

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.

Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless. 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 thi…

Post by Lio » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

reddit_clone wrote: post #325

TheRealPomax wrote: post #9

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"

Post by euske » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #461

d1zzy wrote: post #362

TL;DR I think whoever posted that is trying to bury the UA anonymizing feature by derailing the discussion. What I'm seeing is an RFC for anonymizing parts of User-Agent in order to reduce UA based fingerprinting, which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing! Then I see someone comments how that could negatively impact existing websites or Chromium-derived browsers, comments which are totally fair and make…

I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed. Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are how they make money. And like all businesses, they are competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money off this change. Their…

Post by labawi » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #490

labawi wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox, chrome, linux ... all are full of unnecessary complexity. The point being - we need daily patches to keep it from falling apart. I have links (or lynx) on an old SuSE, maybe even a Mandriva CD. Would they be massively pwnable?

Hard to say, but not necessarily a great example; exploits on software are a function both of attack surface / complexity and installed userbase (i.e. nobody bothers to see if lynx is pwnable because a zero-day against that browser will be worth, what, twenty bucks to gain access to the five people who use it?).

Post by AsyncAwait » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

rvnx wrote: post #395

gruez wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of entropy, what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13 bits then Google suddenly able to track what they were not? At the very least, having those 13 bits of entropy along with a /24 subnet allows you to have device-level granularity, whereas a /24 subnet may be shared by hundreds of households.

They have more than 13 bits of entropy https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/metrics/entr... Look how the function is called, high-entropy source :)