Live data from Hacker News

How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

eff.org

141–150 of 205 posts

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career. > and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I…

Wikipedia is not funded by ads for example. Lots of other sites neither. So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.

But how many Wikipedias can there be?

They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them.

If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get?

Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#142
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more evil do you want Google to get before it’s problematic that they control the portal through which most people interact with the web (both browser/engine and search)? And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already?

> And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already? Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now. 3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed. I’ve settled on using Brave.

I like Brave, but I cant recommend it to my less-than-techie friends because of the bullshit that you have go through to disable (VPN, Wallet, advert related stuff, etc), which confuses people and gets in the way.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#143
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do ads without tracking.

True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about. I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, " " is not a privacy violation.

Newspapers ran for decades without any tracking, and they had to make and distribute physical objects.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#144
post #46

If you care at all about privacy and the future of a free Internet, this really should be that watershed moment that makes you take your head out of the sand. Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.

Hear hear. Of course, on my workstation Chrome is "the recommended browser for internal applications" and firefox is a developer special request which is not allowed to support add-ons

The chrome add-on system has the ability for the management organisation to set a whitelist for your corporate computer.

I don't recall this to be the case for Firefox (that may have changed by now?). So you can only use vanilla Firefox in a corporate managed profile.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#145

If you care at all about privacy and the future of a free Internet, this really should be that watershed moment that makes you take your head out of the sand. Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.

What does a "free" internet look like without ads? Serious question, because right now ads pay for a lot. Ads are why we have reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like. Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student. If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'l…

But ads aren't going away. Maybe eventually all tracking goes away (probably in the EU first), but ads never do.

And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.

And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.

Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#146
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont have any degraded experience of "google services on firefox"; sounds quite false. Of course i dont have my browser feeding into google 24/7 like folks do with chrome now (but even that "feature" is still relatively new). People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to…

Google did start advertising chrome, but the speed of chrome (and stability) was not fake and it won over the early adopters. Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise. May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.

There's a feature I use heavily that I cannot get in Chrome: Multi-Account Containers[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#147
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is not funded by ads for example. Lots of other sites neither. So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.

But how many Wikipedias can there be? They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them. If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get? Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?

I don't have the number offhand, but Wikipedia did exactly that kind of startup competing with online encyclopedias.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#148
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already? Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now. 3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed. I’ve settled on using Brave.

I like Brave, but I cant recommend it to my less-than-techie friends because of the bullshit that you have go through to disable (VPN, Wallet, advert related stuff, etc), which confuses people and gets in the way.

Yeah I agree it is annoying, but ultimately browser dev needs to be paid for somehow.

Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.

Re: How to turn off Google's "privacy sandbox" ad tracking, and why you should

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That helps, but It's still meaningless if your machine has Intel or AMD CPUs running Windows or macOS.

In that case I'm glad to say I'm a happy MX Linux user. I get your point about the OSs especially windows, but what privacy issues are there running intel/amd CPUs?

Intel/AMD CPUs have Intel Management Engine/Platform Security Processor:

Having full access to your computer's memory, display, network, and all input devices.

Post reply on HN