Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
31–40 of 156 posts
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#32Adblocking 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?
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#33A 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.
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#34Google's philosophy seems to be that intrusive tracking and behavioral advertising are OK as long as they only happen on the user's device. The result is a worst-of-both-worlds: To an end user, it will still feel as if you're being tracked, with ads following you around, etc, but no worries, your privacy is safe because the advertiser doesn't have access to the data...
To be clear, Google has the data, and despite acting like they allow opting out from tracking, they do not.
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#35A 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.
When you think that 90% of browsing devices are phones or laptops… beyond any possible comprehension
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#36A 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.
With weirdly sticky behavior too once you’ve left that area. My google sign in prompt was in Italian for over a decade after logging in there once on a family vacation. Only with the latest login revamp did that setting finally get purged. Everything else was always english, profile set to english etc.
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#37Adblocking 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
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#38A 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.
This was so annoying when visiting Poland recently. I don't speak Polish.
Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#39A 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.
There's a trend in commercial software where folks keep adding epicycles on epicycles, often based on barely stat-sig wins in A/B tests, to the point of systems becoming completely impenetrable. I bet this was a result of that.
Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks
#40A 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…
> Why are we sending out all this info.
You are generalizing. Google and big providers do that, usually (US)services that need to cater to the whole world. But a huge part of the normal web still uses and _needs_ preferred language. No one wants to be forced to use geolocation.
Just one very common example are info pages for sightseeing, they are usually available in all languages that people commonly visit from and just work if you browse to them. Not to mention that geolocation would be useless anyway in that case.