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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

#71

Post by newyankee »

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 still see stuff in Spanish on my phone and have not yet figured out how to reset it. Talking about Google updates like calendar, weather

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#73

Post by foobarchu »

TheBozzCL wrote: post #10
hedora wrote: post #7

So, if I use a device that doesn’t support tracking, and they track it anyway, how do they get it to present the “do not sell my personal information” button? Also, are there any decent plugins that block all of google instead of just the ads? I imagine they’d need to MITM static font assets, etc. I also wonder if / when this means Google will start fingerprinting and tracking tenants’ customers on GCP.

Personally, I went the nuclear route with a Pihole. My devices can’t talk to Google.

This works until you start living with someone who gets frustrated by things like sponsored results not working (completely fair, because they are often highly relevant).

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#75

Post by foobarchu »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #56
CivBase wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The outcome will be that many sites simply refuse to work on any browser that does this. Users will blame the browser for not working and switch to one that is supported. Most people are happy to trade their privacy for convenience - especially since most people don't even realize they are doing it.

How would they know? The point of returning “standard” values, is that you are indistinguishable from any number of legitimate users.

They start blocking any fingerprint that looks like you're hiding it. Similar to sites blocking known Tor exit nodes and proxies.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#76

Post by xattt »

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…

One time, I set a self-checkout machine to French to immerse myself in French training in Canada. This happened to set the payment terminal to French as well, which must have set a bit in the on-card chip.

Now, all my pay-at-the-pump interactions at gas stations are all in French. A website I was purchasing from flipped to French when I entered my card info. There were a few surprise interactions where my language preference was clearly derived from my bank card setting.

I’m just hoping that being classed as bilingual is doing wonders for my “social” score at some clandestine data clearinghouse.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#77

Post by cookiengineer »

jocoda wrote: post #47

We have kernel level anti cheat systems for games. So how about kernel level anti tracking? Browsers use system calls to provide the information used for fingerprinting the device, so why not intercept these calls and lie. Have all users present an identical fingerprints and we're back to pre google times. Yes, we lose some important functionality, but maybe it's a price worth paying? Never mind the other elephants i…

I first read it as a joke, but come to think of it...this would be actually quite awesome for malware isolation and sandboxing. Giving software/apps different fake profiles that look like different identities on the filesystem would be quite the feature.

You would have to have some kind of launcher where you can select the isolated chroot/sandbox you want to run that specific program in.

Implementation-wise this could actually be done with eBPF, as most if not all syscalls can be intercepted and "farbled" (Brave's terminology) there. Features-wise this would probably be a separate filesystem for each program context, plus the things that firejail implements in userspace. Shared libraries would have to be loaded separately into memory, and glibc would have to be changed to not use any environment variables or debugging related function calls.

Welp, maybe docker+xorg is easier.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#78

Post by slowmovintarget »

cbarrick wrote: post #38
Zak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same in the Netherlands. It gave me everything in Dutch, even after I logged in.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#79

Post by mycall »

foobarchu wrote: post #75
FridgeSeal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they know? The point of returning “standard” values, is that you are indistinguishable from any number of legitimate users.

They start blocking any fingerprint that looks like you're hiding it. Similar to sites blocking known Tor exit nodes and proxies.

It doesn't have to be blocking fingerprint, just whatever garbage data that works and the cat/mouse game will continue as usual.

Re: Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks

#80

Post by jjav »

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

> limitations re the number of blocking rules in Manifest V3

Which of course was the whole purpose for google pushing for this v3, to benefits ads and hurt users.

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