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Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#12I mean duh, but also this seems like a fairly weak gotcha. Cookies != Tracking, they can track you just fine without cookies, and they can use cookies without tracking you.
> Cookies != Tracking, they can track you just fine without cookies
That's probably true, but not what the articles reporting:
> 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted out of tracking
So essentially, it's ignoring user preference directly, not just in spirit.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#13Hi, I'm Dr Tim Libert, founder of webXray who did this audit. Happy to answer questions from YC'ers. [Note, stepping away for some mental health exercise, stressful day!] I also want to push back on Google telling the press our California Privacy Audit is "is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how [Google's] products work". I'm the former head of Cookie Compliance at Google and I have the federal court filing…
No questions to ask, just wanted to say thank you for your work. I'm sure it's not easy and definitely less stressful to just leave things be. Thank you.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#14Luckily almost all modern corporate tracking is done through javascript execution + cookies. The days of parsing actual webserver logs are over for the most part. After all, it's only the browsers that execute javascript code and provide profitable personal information about the human behind the browser that matter. People with JS off are not providing sellable information and therefore classified and treated as if t…
The issue is, even with all the browser protections, you still create an account anywhere or buy something an input your name/email address/shipping address, your "hashed data" immediately gets sent to meta/google as a conversion with "this guy bought a cat toy", and you start getting ads for cat related stuff everywhere. They don't even need to "track" you properly for this stuff to work and it seems there's no way…
I don't experience that though I have friends who use smartphones who describe it. So I think a lot of it is via javascript. I doubt every retailer, or even a significant fraction, has their backend sending that type of data to $megacorp. But maybe I'm just lucky or shop weird places or it's because I use a new email address @superkuh.com for every account sign up. Or maybe I'm just not seeing the targeted ads for my $superkuhprofile that do exist because I have almost all ads successfully blocked. Perfect is the enemy of good anyway, all mitigations help a bit. And blocking JS is a huge mitigation.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#15I mean duh, but also this seems like a fairly weak gotcha. Cookies != Tracking, they can track you just fine without cookies, and they can use cookies without tracking you.
The report is specifically ads cookies and includes links to primary source disclosures on the websites of the companies mentioned. We did not count things like DDoS cookies, login tokens, and the like. We operate with unparalleled precision in our domain.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#16Hi, I'm Dr Tim Libert, founder of webXray who did this audit. Happy to answer questions from YC'ers. [Note, stepping away for some mental health exercise, stressful day!] I also want to push back on Google telling the press our California Privacy Audit is "is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how [Google's] products work". I'm the former head of Cookie Compliance at Google and I have the federal court filing…
> I'm the former head of Cookie Compliance
If the Internet didn't turn out the way it turned out, this could have been the greatest job ever.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#17Hi, I'm Dr Tim Libert, founder of webXray who did this audit. Happy to answer questions from YC'ers. [Note, stepping away for some mental health exercise, stressful day!] I also want to push back on Google telling the press our California Privacy Audit is "is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how [Google's] products work". I'm the former head of Cookie Compliance at Google and I have the federal court filing…
No questions to ask, just wanted to say thank you for your work. I'm sure it's not easy and definitely less stressful to just leave things be. Thank you.
This is a phenomenally stressful day, I pissed of Google, Microsoft, and Meta in one shot, and they will come after me again. We do it because we believe in our product, and we'll stand the test anybody - even BigTech - puts us to: https://webxray.ai/
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#18And in modern times: everybody, including big companies trust the AI APIs from
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic etc. etc.
sure... the contracts saying often there is no saving or learning from the AI API usage. But it's at the end like a "trust me bro" promise.
There is a saying on the internet:
The generation that refused cookies is now giving AI permission to read their emails, scan their local files, and manage their bank accounts.
It seems many have given up...
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#19Hi, I'm Dr Tim Libert, founder of webXray who did this audit. Happy to answer questions from YC'ers. [Note, stepping away for some mental health exercise, stressful day!] I also want to push back on Google telling the press our California Privacy Audit is "is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how [Google's] products work". I'm the former head of Cookie Compliance at Google and I have the federal court filing…
Thanks for speaking out publicly - especially as an Ex-Big Tech employee who knows the internal workings of these companies - and actually trying to do something about this.
I personally felt many times being tracked by Google or other big tech companies showing me something relevant to previous search queries even though they were made on different platforms and using adblock extensions (ublock origin). So their active tracking is definitely very elaborate.
Re: Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out
#20they have no fear of the current financial incentives, there has to a punitive quantity involved, and the mentality of any regulators has to catch up with present day. fines that amount to a daily expenditure account, do nothing. fines have to have potential to do real damage to, or destroy noncompliants, if there is going to be any deterrent. contempt, is obvious, the chance of jail should exist in actuality, rather…
If you read the report this is why I say network traffic with a Sec-GPC: 1 (GPC opt-out) should return a 451 automatically instead of a cookie, and how the Meta Pixel code can wrap a GPC conditional around execution. That's why they are terrified - fines don't matter, code does.