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Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

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Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#351

Post by pb7 »

mafuy wrote: post #251
thu2111 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes). Firstly, if tracking u…

Most people use default settings and have no idea about the software they are using at all. "everyone would hate it" assumes people know about these things, but they do not. Don't use this as a point. ad 3), you make it sound as if it was one xor the other. This is sometimes the case to some degree (like checking urls for phishing sites), but far from always. ad 4), it is not my problem as a user that you have troubl…

>hundreds of thousands

Millions.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#352

Post by wayneftw »

Shaaaaaaare wrote: post #323
wayneftw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actu…

Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser. By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.

I enjoy ranting against Mozvillains though :) They're not a browser, they're just very annoying preachy people who need to be refuted and since I have no problem doing it, I feel that I am doing God's work.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#353

Post by f1refly »

wayneftw wrote: post #160
DangerousPie wrote: post #15

If 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.

The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actu…

I think Mozilla is a horrible leadership spending money on all the wrong things and I'd rather lose my job than donate to them. But, in all fairness, they're still way better than both Microsoft and Google. At least Mozilla isn't actively trying to make my life worse every single day.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#354

Post by dawnerd »

wolco wrote: post #135
dawnerd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about people like me that are paying google (quite a lot actually)?

I don't understand your group. The company that offers everything for free for the price of privacy and you also give them money? If I was paying for a service that didn't respect my privacy I wouldn't give them my identifying payment info as well. Your fingerprint is connected to all of the credit data providers. If you didn't pay they had to guess or connect you another way.

Same reason people use amazon/aws or microsoft/azure.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#355

Post by shadowgovt »

fmajid wrote: post #267
mega_dingus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... which is crazy unrealistic, since it's "PII" that can only stay "private" by collective agreement of every node in the network, but no accounting for the reality of network architecture in passing law, I guess.

Maybe a deep expectation of anonymity while accessing a worldwide network of cooperative machines is something people should stop telling the public they should expect?

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#356

Post by gruez »

adriantam wrote: post #289
pdkl95 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is impressive doublespeak. > This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information > a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy) They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined wit…

> They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal accoun…

>Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of entropy, what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13 bits then Google suddenly able to track what they were not?

At the very least, having those 13 bits of entropy along with a /24 subnet allows you to have device-level granularity, whereas a /24 subnet may be shared by hundreds of households.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#357

Post by chatmasta »

pb7 wrote: post #347
chatmasta wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter: speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.

Agreed. Although Firefox is probably better for general purpose browsing if you are a non-dev power user, especially one who cares about ad blocking.

The integration is a good point.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#358

Post by yohannparis »

ainar-g wrote: post #275
Kiro wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is horrible for HTML5 games. Dealing with all sorts of issues to the point where I've more or less given up and just tell my Safari players to use something else.

Some of my front-end colleagues like to tell me that Safari is the new IE 6. Not in terms of the market domination (that's Crhome for you), but in terms of dragging the front-end back with unimplemented features, quirks, and bugs. The amount of hacks they have to add just to support Safari is uncomfortable.

No, they are confusing developing for Chomium first and not testing on all browsers.

Safari is behind in terms of W3C features. But implementing unsupported features does not mean you are hacking to support Safari. They should look into the progressive enhancement principle and CSS @support feature.

Re: Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID

#360

Post by dang »

Shaaaaaaare wrote: post #323
wayneftw wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying. I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actu…

Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser. By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one. That just makes the thread worse. Doubly so for personal attacks, which are a bannable offence on HN.
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