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Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

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Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#231

Post by lixquid »

Seirdy wrote: post #193
jasonvorhe wrote: post #161

A company that purchases data from another search engine (that most likely also uses aggregated personal data to deliver results) with just two products (search + browser) compares its app data usage to a behemoth that strives for the most personalized experience possible in exchange for personal data in order to display personalized ads. Google's apps offer opt-in voice search (solving Audio), optional end to end en…

> I really wish DDG would innovate on search, improve their own crawlers & indexing and then attack Google head on by comparing better results with the ad-ridden, SEO-flooded shit show that Google results have become. DuckDuckGo's organic results are proxied from Bing (or sometimes Yandex). Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) just fetches favicons and scrapes data for a few Instant Answers. Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-r…

> Most of DuckDuckGo's non-privacy-related selling points are their instant answers, which in my experience are really good.

And yet has no undeprecated pipeline for submitting non-"essential bug fixes" to[1].

I really love the idea of having an engine that does just a little bit more for me up front, but not if it's all closed off; that's what I'm trying to get away from.

[1]: https://duckduckhack.com/

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#232

Post by koheripbal »

e40 wrote: post #187
leokennis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one good argument for Google, and that is it’s free as in beer. For most people, any price over $0 is a dealbreaker. However, assuming you’re willing to pay for privacy, switching e-mail is super easy. For example, from the Fastmail UI, you literally log in to your Google account and all your mail is transferred to Fastmail. Switching to DDG? It’s 95% as good. Switching to Apple Maps or OSM? It’s 95% as good…

Switching to DDG? It’s 95% as good. I would say for personal stuff (ie, non-programming) it is. For programming, I continually have to switch back to google. DDG is way worse for me. Maybe it's just me, but the types of things I search for just don't work on DDG and I've wasted way too much of my time looking for answers using DDG, only to find them quickly with Google. It totally frustrates me, because I would much…

Even for personal searches, I find myself using the g! operator in DDG about 50% of the time to find what I'm looking for.

Critical operators like "site:" are not available in DDG.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#233

Post by koheripbal »

upofadown wrote: post #213
Crazyontap wrote: post #131

I guess the majority of people on HN already know this more or less. The problem is still this: We still don't have good alternatives to Google's products and services. 1) Android: Google still owns all our phones. Even on rooted phones it hard to remove google services that god know send so many requests containing whatnot to the eeee addresses. Just install no-root firewall and you will be amazed the amount of pend…

Switching from Gmail is basically zero effort. You configure Gmail to forward all your email to the new account. Done. Email is generically really great in this regard. Very little lockin.

Spam filtering is the reason I use Gmail and set it up for my family.

I hate filtering spam, but it's outright dangerous to not have an effective spam/malware filter for my parents and children.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#234

Post by koheripbal »

paxys wrote: post #204

Why is stuff like saving browsing history, doing voice search or autofilling credit cards suddenly a bad thing? Chrome lets you turn all of that off in a single click if you want. I have personally found most of the features on that list to greatly enhance my web experience.

If the data stayed local, I would agree with you. ...but the issue is that they upload it and merge it into a profile of you that they keep, sell to 3rd parties, and is available to governments to inspect.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#235

Post by blaser-waffle »

CivBase wrote: post #197
Crazyontap wrote: post #131

I guess the majority of people on HN already know this more or less. The problem is still this: We still don't have good alternatives to Google's products and services. 1) Android: Google still owns all our phones. Even on rooted phones it hard to remove google services that god know send so many requests containing whatnot to the eeee addresses. Just install no-root firewall and you will be amazed the amount of pend…

I switched to DDG and ProtonMail with very little effort, even after using multiple GMail accounts for well over a decade. I occasionally retry searches on Google if the DDG results aren't good enough, but Google rarely finds anything DDG can't. Android has proven much more difficult to drop, although I'm hopeful that Librem and PinePhone are paving the way for an eventual alternative. I'm still using Android for now…

> I switched to DDG and ProtonMail with very little effort, even after using multiple GMail accounts for well over a decade. I occasionally retry searches on Google if the DDG results aren't good enough, but Google rarely finds anything DDG can't.

Same. Paid Protonmail was quick and easy to get my domains working, and DDG works 90% of the time. I occasionally have to throw things to Bing or Google but DDG is pretty good.

For any readers I strongly recommend buying a domain name and then trucking it to whatever email provider you want. Jonny-C-Doe.com let's you keep the same front end name while changing the back end if, say, you don't like protonmail.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#236

Post by fragile_frogs »

paxys wrote: post #204

Why is stuff like saving browsing history, doing voice search or autofilling credit cards suddenly a bad thing? Chrome lets you turn all of that off in a single click if you want. I have personally found most of the features on that list to greatly enhance my web experience.

I would get pretty mad if chrome wouldn't autofill my credit card information

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#237

Post by LinuxBender »

donaldo wrote: post #200
abandonliberty wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any price over $0 is a dealbreaker. The user pays for Google in the end, just not consensually. It's a closed loop. All the money ultimately comes from the users. Product or politics, all advertisers are expecting to get some return. Unfortunately it's in human nature to not want to pay. Search needs to be a utility that we all fund to make it the best tool for society.

Are we talking about the same Google? I don’t remember them taking money without my consent.

That is the genius of the design. The trick is, you give millions of people "free" email. Scraping emails aside, the real money comes from anyone that "needs" to email a large number of gmail/yahoo users. So if I am a business owner and 30% of my customers are using yahoo and 50% are using gmail and I have a lot of customers, the volume of email I will be sending to those companies is rather large. After a point I will have to buy into a whitelist/approve-list to get around throttling or being flagged as a spammer. Google/Yahoo don't know that you are my customer after all, so they have to prevent actual abuse of their system given the massive number of email accounts they host.

So I have to recoup that cost. I pass that cost onto all of my customers by mixing it into the cost of goods and services. If you buy things from me, even if you are not a subscriber to google/yahoo, you have in effect paid for those services. This is somewhat invisible to the people with those email addresses but does actually affect them, if only a little bit.

Google would tell you that you can simply start with a low volume and ramp up slowly. In reality this is simply not practical for most businesses. This gets into discussions around queue-per-domain management and rate-limit-per-domain, but quickly falls apart when you have to notify a large number of your customers on a time sensitive transaction that is out-of-band from their web browsing experience. A modern work around is to have a cell phone application for notifications rather than email assuming you let your own customers choose that over smtp in their profile. Another work around is to use an email campaign provider that already pays into the whitelists, but then I have to give your email address to a potentially shady company that may cross-sell / cross-market to you.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#238

Post by solosoyokaze »

greggman3 wrote: post #206
solosoyokaze wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under no circumstance do I want my browsing history being sent to a server. That's a pretty black and white issue being violated here. Extremely anti-user.

It's not remotely "anti-user". I want my browsing history sent to a server. I want that history available from all my devices. I suspect most users want that as well. I love it that on Chrome iOS I see history from my desktop Chrome. Even Firefox has this feature. Nothing "anti-user" about it

It's extremely anti-user. There is zero reason for this data to be passed unencrypted to Google, other than for them to spy on you. It would be trivial to implement syncing in a way that didn't expose all of your browsing habits to a spyware company.

It's a complete violation of privacy.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#239

Post by karinakarina »

Bancakes wrote: post #227
karinakarina wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Startpage employee) Privacy policy hasn't changed and that's legally binding. "Marketing messages can claim almost anything, but a privacy policy has legal status." - Robert E.G. Beens, Startpage CEO and Co-founder If you have questions, let me know.

Yes, are you aware billion dollar corporations get away with leaking terabytes of information, so a smalltime ad company will get away with leaking data over time? Are you aware someone has to manually pursue startpage? If I can't ssh into their servers and have a look-see or run my own instance, then their claims are unverifiable.

You're completely right, Big Tech gets away with a lot - including collecting/selling a ton of data to make profit. That's because their revenue model is based on behavioral advertising. For Startpage it's always been based on contextual advertising. And, you don't need personal data for that.

And, it happens that System1 is interested in "capturing" that revenue from contextual advertising.

"System1 is interested in Startpage's ad revenue, not its data," the company said. "The reason a company like System1 openly owns other search engines and consumer tech products like Info.com and Mapquest is that they want to capture that ad revenue that is slowly shifting to private search engines. There has been a steady increase in people using private search engines and therefore a steady increase in their revenue. It is a growing market that they feel will continue to thrive and grow." (https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4017337/privacy-focused-sea...)

That being said: At the end of the day, it all comes back to trust. Even with OSS, you have to trust that they won't change the code. And, you should use products that you trust to best protect your privacy.

Re: Google finally revealed how much personal data they collect in Chrome

#240

Post by valiant55 »

bjornstar wrote: post #222
valiant55 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've submitted multiple corrections to Google Maps and all of them eventually were fixed. I even got a same day response one time, with the longest taking about 3 weeks. I haven't made any corrections recently. Have you attempted to submit feedback on the Maps site?

As counter anecdata, I've reported a concrete coatings company claiming to be inside of a post office. I've reported it several times over the course of several months and nothing has happened. See for yourself: https://goo.gl/maps/LvAZXpSJgURoUqYk8 And with the blackhole that is Google support, what's the point in feeding the beast? We're all better off using Open Street Map and not rewarding Google for their poor b…

Their website lists their address as a PO box which is probably causing problems. Some automated process added the business to Maps and the only solution might be for the business to take action and claim the listing on maps and update it.
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