Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google

Post by Wowfunhappy » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 1:39 PM UTC

phh wrote: post #20

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to? The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?

Don't you need a proprietary firebase SDK in your app to use it? Do you know what data are included in the requests? I would argue that anything as simple as IP + UA/OSidentifier can be of interest to Google

Post by eru » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 1:52 PM UTC

nom wrote: post #13

kornhole wrote: post #10

A common explanation I get from people with poor digital hygiene is that they do not see how it is affecting them. Making the imperceptible perceptible is a great concept for more innovations. I have sent the kids in my house logs for their devices from the DNS blocker I have running on our network, but it was too much for them to digest. Perhaps I should work on a visualization tool of all the data that shows impact…

Maybe you could make a game out of it. The one with the least amount of request each (or whatever metric works) gets rewarded in some way and give them a dashboard to check progress. Not sure what negative side effects that could cause though, but i see some positives like using less social media, or learning how to cheat the system in clever ways.

Post by Wowfunhappy » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

TakeBlaster16 wrote: post #24

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to? The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?

At a minimum they could build cohorts of people who use your app and use that as a bit of information for ad targeting. The SHA-1 thing is a complete non-sequitur, but since you asked, small amounts of data run through unsalted SHA-1 can be brute-forced very easily if someone cared find out where you are.

Post by akie » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 2:11 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #16

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're not interested in the blobs, but in the people accessing them But if they don't know what the blobs are, how does this help them? What can they tie it to? The latitude and longitude coordinates of my current location have an sha1 hash of 0950e97d3a2e4839e39ad27deb2e852d498100ae. Is this useful information?

In isolation, no. But given enough other actors that use the same firebase + can be tracked by adsense, they can infer connections useful for targeting you.

Post by 4m1rk » Mon, Aug 22, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

jnsaff2 wrote: post #5

nousermane wrote: post #2

Or alternatively, you can send all the traffic destined to google, into dev-null instead: U=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berthubert\ /googerteller/main/goog-prefixes.txt for i in $(wget -qO - $U); do ip route add unreach $i done ...but you'd be surprised how many of seemingly unrelated places on the Internet would break without google.

Yeah, their captcha is everywhere for starters. Obviously a lot of other deps too.