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Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

forbes.com

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Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#141

Post by anbotero »

Zak wrote: post #33
hyperman1 wrote: post #30

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites m…

Sites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.

Netflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#142

Post by esskay »

hedora wrote: post #9
skybrian wrote: post #3

This article doesn’t explain what change Google is supposed to be making and they don’t link to anything that explains it either. (There is a link to what seems to be to a policy change for the ads platform.) Does anyone know what they’re talking about?

Read it more carefully (it is easy to miss). They’re going to start using and allowing third party device fingerprinting throughout their ad ecosystem. This is obviously illegal in Europe, the UK and California (no consent), and an unnnamed regulator warns that it intends to take action.

I assume it just won’t roll out to those locations. The EU would take Google to the cleaners (again) if they knowingly ignored EU law.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#143

Post by dghlsakjg »

joedi wrote: post #133
benhurmarcel wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the main reasons why I use (and pay) for another search engine than Google. It just keeps translating everything it can to the country I’m connecting from. Even results from Reddit go to an automatically translated page. Google is really bad at handling multilingual users, or even just users that don’t want to use the language of the place they connect from. Now by default Youtube even translates the a…

You do realize that the fact of paying for any service makes your usage perfectly attributable to real identity, don't you. Something that Google needed to work hard to infer with some level of certainty you actually pay for. And I'd only have so much trust in promises of respecting your privacy given by any business. Everything that can be sold is for sale, event if this meant that it could not longer claim to "do n…

I use kagi for a search engine.

Paying for a search engine means that I am the customer, not the product. While you are correct that my data is an asset for Kagi, it is a one shot asset, vs my subscription, which is recurring revenue.

I can look at the privacy policy for Kagi (https://kagi.com/privacy), and see that I am not at risk of having my searches logged or data shared. I trust them because violating that privacy policy puts them at risk of being sued by me, and by any investors in the company.

As you yourself stated: either company is capable of building a profile. One has promised not to do that contractually, and google, more or less, has promised to do exactly that regardless.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#144

Post by unsignedint »

Zak wrote: post #33
hyperman1 wrote: post #30

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites m…

Sites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.

Selecting a locale based solely on geolocation is absurd, and the reverse is equally true. Just because you prefer a specific locale doesn't mean you're physically in that country. Unfortunately, I encounter this anti-pattern far too often.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#145

Post by lithos »

hyperman1 wrote: post #30

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites m…

I logged in on deployment in the Middle East, and still have Google randomly swap over to Arabic in search and on YouTube. It has been over a decade and a half (since I was there), and I've never once tried to do any browsing in anything but English. To even drive this incompetence further, I was Navy so I have under two weeks time total of be logged in.

Frankly for a company that's a Spyware company, they sure are incompetent.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#146

Post by efilife »

rpastuszak wrote: post #37
red_admiral wrote: post #32

Adblocking google's ad ecosystem so the third-party scripts don't load in the first place should still fix this, if I read it right?

This is getting trickier: - nowadays (iirc) you can serve/proxy those scripts via your own domain (to circumvent ad blocker blocklists) - there are limitations re the number of blocking rules in Manifest V3 It’s cat and mouse at this stage, we’re getting to the point where blocking ads will be as hard/annoying as, say, installing 3rd party apps on your iPhone. Too much of a hassle even for fairly techie users

then uMatrix is the solution, as it has always been

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#147

Post by nurumaik »

hyperman1 wrote: post #30

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites m…

I want everything, everywhere be always in english by default unless I explicitly set another language or there is no english version at all. Even if it's my native language and I'm in my home country

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#149

Post by tatersolid »

mindslight wrote: post #15

Every browser information leak that can contribute to fingerprinting needs to be plainly considered a security vulnerability in need of fixing/mitigation, period. This class of vulnerabilities has continued to get a huge pass, only being taken seriously by projects like TOR browser and then still only the convenient fixes getting backported. I do realize this is a tall ask, as many of these vulnerabilities arise from…

The Accept-Language header predates Google by many years, see https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#appendix-D.2.4

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#150

Post by surajrmal »

RGamma wrote: post #136
surajrmal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fingerprinting or attestation?

Attestation of working fingerprinting.

If you're running your workload on someone else's hardware (eg in the cloud) being able to attest it's not being modified is critical. From a companies perspective, when they run their software in the context of a customers hardware, it makes sense that they may similarly wish to ensure the software is running unmodified. This is how games are able to ensure there is no cheating occuring and banks can ensure malware is not tampering with the bank software unbeknownst to their customer. There are obviously ways for this to be use this for more distasteful mechanisms like fingerprinting, but that's not necessarily enough reason to abandon the technology. There are ways to achieve attestation without compromising privacy, but it does require widespread rollout of the attestation mechanism.
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