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Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#111

Post by saghm »

DangitBobby wrote: post #107
saghm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the comment I was responding to? They said corporations don't exist and the individual humans deserve all of the blame. I fully agree with everything you said except for "No one says structure doesn't influence behavior"; I think that's pretty much exactly what the comment I responded to argued.

I don't have access to that commenter's state of mind, but I take it to mean that the "corporation" as a singular entity only exists on paper and in fact acts as a group of individual humans. I don't think that's the same thing as saying the structure having _no influence_, especially since that structure pays people and money influences the behavior of individuals. No influence is a much stronger claim than what was…

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. The context of their comment was whether the corporation or humans are to blame, and the comment I responded to reads to me like saying that the corporation has no blame and the humans have all of it.

Your opinion honestly does seem mostly aligned with mine (there's potentially blame for both the corporation and the individuals, with the corporation's portion of the blame being from influence on the individuals), and personally I find it kind of hard to determine how much the individual deserves since it depends a lot on circumstances we might never know (e.g. if the individual had a really sick family member, I genuinely might find it understandable that taking a job from Google that pays well even if it's doing some weird stuff with browsers; that's an extreme example, but my point is that I don't think whether it's blameworthy or not is a binary). I just don't read the comment I responded to as agreeing with any sort of nuance like that; my reading is that they're asserting that the individuals are fully and solely blameworthy and that the fact that they were operating under the behalf of a corporation is insignificant.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#112

Post by joquarky »

makeitdouble wrote: post #78
rbtms wrote: post #69

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose this allows google to better persist browser identifiers in order to facilitate advertising? I'm not surprised they do this since advertising represents almost 3/4 of Google 's revenue. If anything, why should anyone expect something else? Company in the ads business modifies monopolistic browser to make money with ads and more news at 11. If it's not this, it's going to…

Being surprised or not, and being pissed about it or not are orthogonal. I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.

What I am surprised about is that even with all of this effort that is put into tracking us, the majority of ads that I see don't even fit my demographic.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#113

Post by netsharc »

lapcat wrote: post #75
netsharc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the first screenshot is a totally empty browser window (just to show the address bar) made me lose faith about reading the rest of your writing...

Huh? I can't make sense of this criticism. What "faith" do you need? Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post. For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless…

Faith that the blog poster chose carefully to convey meaning, including with images. A huge image, 95% of it white, just for "I want to show you the address bar" is incoherent communication. Technical issues like "It's because I write the HTML myself" make it even worse, because you hide behind that and can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#114

Post by lapcat »

netsharc wrote: post #113
lapcat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I can't make sense of this criticism. What "faith" do you need? Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post. For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless…

Faith that the blog poster chose carefully to convey meaning, including with images. A huge image, 95% of it white, just for "I want to show you the address bar" is incoherent communication. Technical issues like "It's because I write the HTML myself" make it even worse, because you hide behind that and can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.

> just for "I want to show you the address bar"

I just said that there was another reason: "Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post." So contrary to your claim, I did in fact choose carefully to convey meaning with images.

> you hide behind that

I'm not hiding anything.

> can't even see why it's disrespectful to the readers.

You're right, I can't see why it's disrespectful to the readers. But you speak only for yourself, singular reader, not other readers, plural. I suspect that if we took a poll, we might find that you're the only person on Earth who thinks my first screenshot was "disrespectful". It's such a bizarre cause for offense, I'm truly baffled by that.

Moreover, the HN guidelines say, "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Thus, your comments are disrespectful to HN readers.

Perhaps the sibling comment was correct: I have to ignore your comment if I want to stay sane.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#115

Post by liquid_thyme »

fn-mote wrote: post #87
liquid_thyme wrote: post #41

Chrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger.

[flagged]

It's not, but believe what you want.

Its clear to me that Chrome is a key logger, they bundle it with random software, it spies on the user and collects data on the user, among many other things.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#117

Post by RetroTechie »

jmyeet wrote: post #92

Google is playing a dangerous game here and I think it's going to bite them in the butt. First, some history. One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprie…

> Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies.

Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.

If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.

Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.

A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#119

Post by mitxela »

shevy-java wrote: post #61
liquid_thyme wrote: post #41

Chrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger.

Is it excellent? It feels more to me that the competition does not really exist - or just sucks. And then people largely gave up, letting the adMoney take over everything. I abandoned firefox when a mozilla dev claimed Linux users can only listen to audio via systemd+pulseaudio (unless you recompile firefox but who in his sane mind wants to use mozconfig in 2026 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/…

You should fork Firefox and make an alsa version.

Re: Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

#120

Post by makeitdouble »

joquarky wrote: post #112
makeitdouble wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being surprised or not, and being pissed about it or not are orthogonal. I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.

What I am surprised about is that even with all of this effort that is put into tracking us, the majority of ads that I see don't even fit my demographic.

I think it's due to the lack of proper ads at a price point worth it. For instance your local fishing shop won't win the ad auction for your eyeballs against Binance or Tinder, even if you have absolutely no interest in the latter.
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