According to this source code [0], it looks like this is in Chromium as well. Does that mean this affects Electron applications?
[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
261–270 of 642 posts
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a notable and depressing example). Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, a…
Better yet, donate to Brave who doesn't share the same conflict of interest as Mozilla does with Google, as Google is Mozilla's #1 source of income. Best of all you get a browser just as fast, if not faster than Chrome because it's Chrome without all the junk.
But I don't want to participate in dodgy cryptocurrency scams.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#263Wow, I didn't think sensationalist headlines were allowed on HN. I'm guessing mods are asleep or just don't care anymore.
Edit: If the mods are listening, I've come up with an alternative title for you:
"The Evil GOOGLE Has Installed a MALICIOUS BACKDOOR On All Chrome Users Machines To Sell PERSONAL DATA to RUSSIAN HACKERS on the DARK WEB".
This will surely get the clicks now. You can thank me later.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#264Break this company up.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, I never understood that argument. We have a fairly large and wonderful kids hospital that looks for donations and some of my friends said they wouldn't donate because their CEO makes 500k and he should donate his money instead. I had to explain you want to recruit great talent, and that 500k is less than he could make some place else.
The Mozilla Corporation laid off like 70 employees the other day, and Baker's compensation has been inversely tied to the performance of Mozilla.
I doubt it has been tied, as in a contractual goal.
The word you're looking for is "correlated".
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a Firefox user but I'm doubtful about donating to the Mozilla Foundation. They at least endorse some really far-out organizations on the Mozilla Foundation homepage[0], such as Riseup Networks. [0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?utm_source=www.mozilla.or...
Riseup is absolutely with Mozilla's mission statement, though, and all things considered pretty good: "Riseup provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change. We are a project to create democratic alternatives and practice self-determination by controlling our own secure means of communications."
They have an actual anarcho-communist star in their logo and their website features revolutionary imagery and policy statements like "all labor is valued equally" and "the means of production should be placed in the hands of the people".[0]
I'm sure it's a fine organization if you subscribe to their views. I do not, and I'd rather not fund them, directly or indirectly.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
It becomes PII the instant you can correlate that fingerprint with any PII.
This. A bank account number is consider PII. Knowing the bank name & account number will uniquely identify the account holder's name, which is PII.
IP addresses are considered PII under both GDPR and CCPA.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#268If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.
Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
I care. I care that I even if I log off, even if I use a vpn, even if I go into incognito mode, they still can associate my requests with the account I initially logged in.
The problem is any website can do that. Incognito-bypassing fingerprinting is difficult to prevent, unless you use something like uMatrix to disallow JavaScript from everything but a few select domains. This is a collection of random-ish unique-ish attributes. Any collection of such things can be used to track you, like installed fonts, installed extensions, etc. If this were just a set of meaningless encoded random…
Maybe one actually useful non-advertising usage could be reCAPTCHA ?
If you read carefully, it says nowhere than there is the limit to 8000. There is this limit of 8000 only if you disable usage statistics / crash reports.
Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
#270I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/ These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.
Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and sucks.
My biggest gripe is I can’t update it without updating the entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you ever need to unregister a service worker.