This not from incognito that’s just one piece.
It’s against the practice of fingerprinting users across products and services.
Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
51–60 of 195 posts
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#52(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
Why wouldn't 49% qualify? And then, 48%? Where do you draw a line and why?
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#53"According to the suit, the company collects information, including IP addresses and browsing histories, whenever users visit web pages or use an app tied to common Google services, such as Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager." I'd really appreciate some more technical details here. Does this include web server logs that record incoming IP addresses? Is the expectation here that Chrome would set a DNT header in in…
Server logs with IP addresses are acceptable to most European privacy regulators if you only use them for a technical purpose such as debugging. And not keep them longer than needed for that. So practically: logs are fine, delete them after a while. If you store the same information in a permanent database and use it for analysis you're in trouble and should have asked permission. The fact that the user uses a privat…
At GDPR presentation that I attended recently in Norway the message was that IP addresses must be masked if they go to a permanent storage. For IPv4 it could be OK to clear the last byte of the address, but in general the message was to save the least amount of information. For example, if IP is used for locating regions, then save the regions, not the IP itself.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#54(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
I wouldn't be surprised if over the years employees have been making canny decisions on the stock markets. Facebook also has a lot of information via its portfolio of services to enable this too.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#55“We strongly dispute these claims and we will defend ourselves vigorously against them,” Castaneda said in an email. I wonder what it is they actually dispute, when the claims are so basic? Most popular websites use GA, so of course Google is watching every single user action across the Internet, regardless of if they have tried to 'opt out' via any methods, laws, processed, etc.
Obviously this article is written for the general public and not in legalese. But this line gives a hint: > The suit includes claims for invasion of privacy and violations of federal wiretapping law. The claims Google disputes is that they are breaking the law. > I wonder what it is they actually dispute, when the claims are so basic. The claims can be summarized basically, but proving that someone has broken the law…
Great response, thanks. The US is definitely a more difficult environment to prove that their privacy violations are not just violations of privacy, but also of law. I wonder if these wiretapping laws are really the best route to go about attempting to prove this.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fact that the user uses a private window or other means to indicates they don't want to be tracked probably makes this a more clear case. That’s a very confusing statement. My server logs don’t filter incoming log entries based on user agent, and certainly not on whether you’re using a “private window” or not. In addition, the goal of a private/incognito session is to be indistinguishable from regular sessions,…
But you're not using the IP addresses in the logs to circumvent the fact that cookies are being deleted by your user's device right? Because it looks like that's what Google was doing, and that's actively circumventing the decision of the user not to be tracked which is illegal in many places.
I don’t use GA on my own websites, or analytics cookies, or tracking pixels, or whatever. But I sometimes use goaccess on my server logs which tells me the number of unique visitors (based on unique IPs) and such. Whether they visited in private sessions or not, of course. So I guess in a sense I’m “tracking” them through logged IP addresses, but it’s completely orthogonal to whether incognito mode is on.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#57(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
"By knowing what people search for and modeling our behavior, they have unprecedented ability to forecast future events. I expect Facebook and other, lesser known companies do the same. I believe it is dangerous for a company to have this ability." I have thought of this as "search-based front-running". How much of it goes on, I would like to know.
> they have unprecedented ability to forecast future events.
Per Matt Levine's "anything can be securities fraud if you don't tell your shareholders about it", then having the "unprecedented ability to forecast future events" and not informing your shareholders about it could be argued as securities fraud in court. Something to think about.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every website does.
Not every website controls: the browser, analytics service across large part of the web, and sometimes the OS (Android/ChromeOS)
Your proposal is for Google to abuse its monopoly positions to provide a better privacy experience for its properties than for others?
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#59(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
Regulations don't make the problem go away.
In fact, it's more likely Google will use the regulation to corner the market with regulatory capture.
Re: Google sued for secretly amassing vast trove of user data
#60(Disclaimer: I have a big personal gripe with Google, but I don't hate the company in general) Something has been on mind for a while. I see lawsuits against Google collecting / selling personal data and ideas to combat its monopoly in search. What I don't see is a discussion about regulating companies that have data on the majority of the population. I know for a fact that Google used search insights to inform strat…
Why wouldn't 49% qualify? And then, 48%? Where do you draw a line and why?
This is the problem with laws, especially when the company that it's supposed to regulate is a top 20 lobbyist/briber.