Don’t want Google tracking you? You have almost no choice, according to a study | Hacker News Reader

Don’t want Google tracking you? You have almost no choice, according to a study

washingtonpost.com

46 pointsrbanffy17 comments

Archived copy without GDPR nag screen (oh the irony):

https://web.archive.org/web/20180825120220/https://www.washi...

How hard is it to "fuzz" this? I regularly look up weird things ("anal fissure", gout, knee problems), and have my kids use my google account every once in a while just to keep things loose. Also, my home network blocks a lot of ad-related domains.

It would seem that you could enlarge your search footprint to where it would be nebulous, include lots of garbage, and it would become useless.

why not go in the opposite direction? you don't need a google account to perform searches, so why not block google cookies (or use cookie autodelete) and do all your searches over a (shared) VPN?

I have a hard enough time getting Google to not stall in loading or redirects because they don't recognize me when using Firefox container accounts and things auto load in a different account. Or at least I did for a while until it seems the containers in question got enough history to be seen as legit (or were linked to my account...).

Google has expectations of what they get when providing you their service. If you aren't going to provide those juicy details when requesting search results, they just might make getting those results harder.

Are you using tor by any chance? I use cookie autodelete (equivalent to creating a new container every time I close all google tabs) and I only occasionally get captcha challenges. This is on VPN, so when that happens I just switch to another region and it works fine.

No, not using tor, and the problem wasn't actually CAPTCHAs as much as 10-20 second delays on page loads.

I try to use DuckDuckGo for a lot of my searches, although sometimes get frustrated and end up using the !g shortcut - but most times it's good enough.

The needle remains in the haystack.

If you add an overwhelming magnitude of noise to a signal, it looks like the signal disappears. But really you've just increased the number of samples required to filter out that noise (eg timing attacks using decryption oracles over a WAN). I doubt the situation becomes any friendlier as the dimensionality increases. And your noise isn't really even uncorrelated - why are you generally interested in medical things?

But the explanation is likely better analyzed in the context of open-world assumptions rather than closed. ie you'll just get ads (and eventually, insurance rates) regarding anal fissures, so as far as Google and the rest of the commercial surveillance complex is concerned, you're equivalent to a person earnestly involved with anal fissures. The concept of Poe's law doesn't invalidate their techniques.

The study on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17817334

It's not very hard if you know what you are doing.

- Phone with Lineage OS without Google Apps - Install apps with Apkpure since you don't have Google Play - Startpage as search engine - Disable accepting third party cookies

Done. No Google in your life anymore.

... until you send the next email to an @gmail.com address. Or open a page with AdWord ads on it. Or Google Analytics. Or Google-hosted JS libraries. Or Google-hosted fonts. Or an AMP page. Or...

^This.

Is it really worth the effort if you have to conduct your online life like a spy in a foreign land?

Where any mis-config or 'you missed a step' could expose you.

Your logic is basically "unless you can avoid Google seeing any trace of you online, just let them see every single thing you do".

There is a world of difference between using Google applications running on your phone and using their search engine compared to some of my email ending up in their servers.

Any ad blocker blocks their scripts, that's why its in my list below.

But if you don't see the difference, I can't explain it any better than I just did.

> @gmail.com address

Doesn't need to be, tons of people use G Suite. you'd have to be checking MX records.

Yeah that’s not hard at all....

Or you could not buy a phone with an OS supported by an ad targeting company.

I would no more want my phone built by Google than Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com