Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 213 posts

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#91

Post by akerro »

Sylos wrote: post #90
akerro wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, Firefox Sync encrypts your data with a password-derived key Didn't they drop it like 9months ago and moved to Firefox Sync?

About 2 years ago they started moving from randomly generated keys to the e-mail+password approach. Do you mean that? https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo... The new system is still end-to-end-encrypted, though...

I think that's what I meant. Why is the new system better than the old one? There was a lot of FUD on reddit around it and I stopped following the news. Thanks for update.

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#92

Post by unholythree »

blowski wrote: post #82
wyaeld wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the right thing for customers, or for shareholders?

Like all profit-making businesses, they try to balance the interests of both in the short term to maximise shareholder value in the long run. A few Hacker News users being opposed to this doesn't make Google evil. A lot of people don't care, and I've met some who think it's a good idea.

Even alot of people not caring doesn't inherently make it the right thing.

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#94

Post by [deleted] »

swsieber wrote: post #64
drdre2001 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any other ideas of how browsers are going to make money? Without charging their customers?

Nope - we thought that wasn't quite needed since they were being set up as a public service, not a monetization platform. We need a project like the Linux kernel, except for a good browser.

[deleted]

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#95

Post by fauigerzigerk »

timothya wrote: post #83
dochtman wrote: post #79

Meanwhile, Firefox Sync encrypts your data with a password-derived key so that Mozilla can't even see your browsing history. Consider your choices.

To be fair, Chrome has exactly that feature to, and let's the user choose what they want.

But Google has created a perverse incentive here. They give me a ton of choices, so many and so vaguely explained that I couldn't possibly understand what they really mean and I get suspicous of everything they offer me.

So what I do is disable everything without even thinking. Later when something isn't working as expected and it turns out it's because of one of those privacy settings, I start to think about whether or not I really need it.

So effectively, they give me an incentive to summarily reverse their opt-out strategy into an opt-in one. I suppose that's fine with them because most people won't do even that.

However, they should be aware of the fact that this is the second easiest thing to do after leaving everything enabled.

Over time, they may be creating a popular culture of "disable everything" just like they created a culture of ad-blocking (where "they" is the whole advertising industry in this case, not so much Google itself)

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#96

Post by timothya »

Sylos wrote: post #87
timothya wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Chrome has exactly that feature to, and let's the user choose what they want.

Is Chrome's sync not a blob? I tried to find information about it online, but the official documentation [0] is less than helpful to say the least. I'm guessing when they say "stuff", that's a euphemism for blob, but fuck if I know, maybe they are just trying to be hip in their documentation. After all, it's also business time, in case you didn't know. Currently downloading the Chromium source code, to see if that's…

I think the official documentation is what's found in the help center; this page contains a lot more information about using a custom passphrase for your sync data: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en (top result when searching for "chrome sync encrypted").

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#97

Post by pietroalbini »

dochtman wrote: post #79

Meanwhile, Firefox Sync encrypts your data with a password-derived key so that Mozilla can't even see your browsing history. Consider your choices.

With Firefox, you can also self-host the sync server on your machines, which is totally awesome.

https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#98

Post by pas »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #66
sesutton wrote: post #25

The way the screenshot is cropped is misleading. The actual page makes it clear this feature is opt-in. If you're logged into a Google account and haven't already made a choice on the page you can see it at http://www.google.com/settings/ads .

It's explicitly not "opt-in" since the default setting is turned to "on" (tested with multiple accounts) without any prompting. Opt-out is better than nothing, but it's a pretty suspect move to say "oops, you were accidentally opted in to something that would make us money without your permission." I'd respect them a lot more if they came right out and said "let us sell your data or start paying for our services." Th…

It's in the ToS, and it's their entire business model, that they do things you might like that makes them money, so you don't have to pay with money, you pay with data derived from the usage of their services.

I think it's not just your data. It's not completely theirs either. Your search history is very important from a privacy standpoint, but it's still just data about how a particular user account, session, IP address or browser GUID used their services. It's not data you have explicitly uploaded (let's say like you do with YouTube or Photos).

The whole problem is the infrastructure they have in place. It's not transparent, and thus we don't know who gets to drink from their firehose of [meta]data.

It's a very good and hard ethical question (problem) to judge this trade-off. (Short term gain for our civilization, since we get awesome services for free - as in the population just uses it and generates the data, so it's endogenous growth, - but in the long term we increase the risk of having to face an efficient totalitarian surveillance system.

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#99

Post by pas »

0xmohit wrote: post #65

Welcome to the world of context-sensitive search. Not that it's new, but it appears that the context has now been expanded to include the entire browsing history, just not the session. [One should really consider using Firefox, and DuckDuckGo for search.]

Why?

The benefits could outweigh the cost (of increasing the likelihood of someone subverting Google into a brutally efficient totalitarian surveillance system).

Re: Google will use Chrome browsing data for ad tailoring

#100

Post by zimbatm »

akerro wrote: post #91
Sylos wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 2 years ago they started moving from randomly generated keys to the e-mail+password approach. Do you mean that? https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo... The new system is still end-to-end-encrypted, though...

I think that's what I meant. Why is the new system better than the old one? There was a lot of FUD on reddit around it and I stopped following the news. Thanks for update.

The line of thinking was that people are used to email+password (as oppose to what was before). I think that was the right move.

The system is still end-to-end encrypted, if you reset your password it will also reset the storage (by definition).

Post reply on HN