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Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

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Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#82

This appears to be the same as this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227 Top comment on that one was: Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL: chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages. Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.

I use Chrome at work and Firefox on personal devices (including my Android phone).

As a heavy user of both browsers, as far as I can see there is really no downside to Firefox.

In fact, even though presumably there are way more engineers working on Chrome than on Firefox, I guess most of Chrome's engineering effort goes towards benefitting advertisers, not users. While Chrome seems entirely stagnant since I adopted it 4 years ago, Firefox gets a steady trickle of improvements and fixes.

So a huge +1 to the last point. Firefox rules.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#83

> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum. fuck off

Let's have an advertising company also have a monopoly on the web browser. What could possibly go wrong?

You all voted for this.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#84
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make much sense in case of a toaster, but if you bought a pen (or socks, SSDs, lightbulbs, etc.), you may buy some more after you tried it and liked it, or maybe you will try another brand.

That's a good point. Now I'm curious if they have some internal tagging that differentiates between these two kinds of products.

I guess it's more like a continuum than two discrete categories. On one end of the spectrum there's a family house, on the other, there's toilet paper. That's why they repeat ads even for a toaster.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#85
post #36

Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if yo…

This means that your browser starts spying on you, whereas currently, ‘only’ sites do.

If you use Chrome, it will use information about all pages you visit, even ones without tracking cookies to categorize you for advertisers.

Google says that will happen locally, but even if you trust them, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. You could even see it as “now I pay the bill for getting myself categorized for Google’s ad business”.

Soon, Chrome also will start blocking third-party cookies to protect you from evil Meta and its ilk (all because Google wants to protect you from them, not because Meta competes with Google in the advertising space, of course)

So, as before, Google won’t be able to see what users do inside Meta’s apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), but now Meta won’t be able to see what Chrome users do outside them.

> but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data

It won’t all stay on your machine; a summary of it will be sent to Google so that they can sell targeted ads to advertisers.

I expect they’ll have quite a few different tags, including age, gender, and location, and shopping preferences.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#87
post #29

Just stop being a helpless victim and get rid of this evil corporate spyware and switch to a privacy-respecting browser like Firefox, or even better LibreWolf https://librewolf.net/

I know the goal of LibreWolf is privacy, but logging out of everything on every session was enough for me to deal with the 'privacy' problem. Maybe because I have adblock, but I just don't get these ads other people talk about.

Logging out doesn't clear tracking cookies, adblock might. (uBlock origin user here as adblock had some dodgy company take it over iirc)

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's have an advertising company also have a monopoly on the web browser. What could possibly go wrong?

You all voted for this.

Which major political party will stop this if I vote for them?

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#89
post #36

Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies? *If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info? I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if yo…

> Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies?

How about thinking the other way around:

Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?

> turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that

Most of what breaks is just tracking for ad serving purposes. I'm fine with that breaking.

Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.

> I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies

As they should, if competently designed.

> … but naively I'd rather …

Call me dogmatic, but I'd rather not be followed around at all, even as a group. I don't trust that the data cannot be de-anonymised in any way, and I don't trust a company that would gain from that to do its best to make sure it can't happen.

Re: Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads

#90
post #14

https://getfirefox.com

You won't regret it and you won't miss anything. Who cares if Chrome is 2% faster on some obscure CSS parsing test? At least you aren't participating in your own psychological manipulation and are resisting WEI.

> and you won't miss anything.

I would very much miss AppleScript support. It’s the number one reason I (and many users of my tools) don’t touch Firefox. Fortunately, Webkit browsers (Safari, Orion) have got that covered. Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are a more common choice.

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