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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

#141

Post by denton-scratch »

esteth wrote: 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…

> but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that.

I hadn't noticed, although I've heard this many times. I mean, I notice some broken pages, but nothing so important that I'd bother working out what's wrong with them.

If it's really that the site is checking that the 3d-party cookie they set really got set, and failing to load otherwise, that's an abusive site that I don't want to use anyway.

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

#144

Post by mulmen »

notoverthere wrote: post #38
alexvitkov wrote: post #24

> 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

This isn't even a realistic use case of tracking. Nobody needs tracking cookies to get reminders about buying birthday cards. Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details. Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calend…

I don’t think the article makes the case that tracking cookies are required. It only claims that automated reminders can benefit people, which is far less controversial.

The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.

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

#145

Post by kjkjadksj »

xg15 wrote: post #115
tgv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's against the guidelines to be dismissive, but there really is no other response. Especially when you left read the follow-up sentence: > Offloading cognitive effort, such as reminders like these, is a great way automation can assist humanity. Does that pass for journalism? I really don't want to read the rest of the article.

It's actually worth reading the article to the end, because otherwise you'd be missing the amazing final paragraph: > Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds. Ignoring the fact that this is…

I don’t pay for bash yet I have plenty of excellent tooling in it thats free, and I’m not the product. Software can be released freely just like a poem can be. The people who develop popular software like one of the functions in bash I use for free probably aren’t hurting for work I’d imagine.

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

#146

Post by bee_rider »

smarkov wrote: post #45
mlnj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistently working as the better browser. Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience. Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data. Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants. Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign wh…

Web browsers don’t need innovation or vision at this point. They are just the medium for displaying content.

If we kept trying to innovate paper, it would just be annoying too.

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

#147

Post by hskdhdkshs »

sh4rks wrote: post #143

Unrelated, but the other day, I searched something on DDGo on Firefox mobile in private mode, and a few hours later, I see a targeted ad related to that search. Whats the deal with that? The only extension I have installed is Ublock mobile.

that's the usual targeting we know and love since early 2000s. we are talking about something worse.

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

#148

Post by programmarchy »

mulmen wrote: post #103
dspillett wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fuck off Hell yes. Those benefits don't require us being stalked around our entire online lives: the online store already knows when I bought a toothbrush¹. Unless they are trying to argue that telling every retailer on the planet when I last bought a toothbrush, or other healthcare products, is a good idea?! Same for the birthday card if I bought one online. This example is even worse: potentially not just trackin…

> I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is… That’s not a healthy fantasy. The “following” part is especially creepy. There’s a contact the author link on the site. If you care to contact her it’s just a couple clicks away. No reason to hire a stalker. Why are you so angry at the author and not at the people who actually made…

But there could be benefits to being followed by a PI. For example, if the author forgets to brush their teeth, the PI could remind them.

/s

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

#149

Post by lrem »

bjackman wrote: post #82
starbugs wrote: post #19

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 i…

Mozilla claims over 700 of their 750 employees work on Firefox. It's a bit harder to find out the number of people working on Chrome. The founding director remarks that there were 40 engineers working on Chrome mobile in https://mdwdotla.medium.com/some-thoughts-on-running-success.... That's obviously just a slice of the whole team. Search results suggest a range of numbers between 23 and 500. There appears to be about 12k in the whole department building Chrome, Android and the other software shipped to users. From all that you can extrapolate that there likely isn't a huge disparity between number of engineers on both browsers.

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

#150

Post by sph »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #83
HeckFeck wrote: post #51

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.

All the annoyed people in this thread, reading this post from their Google Chrome window.

And every time I mention this, I get a ton of excuses, from people that should know better, that they can't leave Google. Boo woo.

There might be exceptions, but to the large majority of other lazy tech users, this is on you. Enshittification doesn't happen in a vacuum. You are passive actors to a shittier web.

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