Chrome 69 will keep Google Cookies when you tell it to delete all cookies
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Just use Firefox and have done with it - there's been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.
P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y'all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001/IE6 again.
It's really time to disentangle ourselves from google. They've quietly and effectively insinuated themselves across the web. Enough is enough.
1: no personal tracking or profiling data for the search providers
2: no 'personalised' search
3: search results from several providers condensed into one list, i.e. more results for the same query
You can also use one of the public Searx instances [2] if you trust them enough not to do their own profiling. By default Searx does not use cookies but there are other ways of tracking individual browsers so that is not a guarantee for tracking-free browsing.
I wish stuff like HP WebOS or Meego was still alive, but as far as I know, Apple and Google are the only serious players in town at the moment :-(
I've found Startpage and its sister site IxQuick to be a good alternative to Google. Same search results with a lot of detritus filtered out, keeps you out of Google's search bubble, and it has built in proxy features.
Instead of Bing, which tracks you for monetization on Microsoft's behalf (though I trust Microsoft with my information more than Google), try DuckDuckGo. It uses Bing as a back end but, like Startpage, proxies the query so your information and identity never hits Microsoft's servers. It's also a much cleaner page code-wise than any other search engine I've seen. It often comes up with more relevant results than Startpage; I find myself often searching both for the same subject so I don't miss what I'm looking for.
The most frequent services I use, after thinking about it, are:
- local business/food/bars (hours, reviews) - driving directions - accessing email to confirm a signup/lookup a receipt/license etc - events, theater showtimes - flight prices - pay bills etc - check reviews/HN/ random articles.
Most of these I access directly or could be provided by any basic app/search engine.
After reviewing this list, you are left with a few extremely low margin services and a dismal grouping of actual usage, at least seemingly from Google’s point of view.
I’m not saying I’m better than a non power user (mom etc), but are they really worth more? Does clicking on Pinterest links half of the day, or forwarding political/funny emails really have value to 3rd party companies? (Google etc)
Maybe in the short term, there is a circular, ad revenue generation model, but is it really sustainable?
It seems the only option is iOS and I don't want that...
I can't believe that this needs to be said here, but don't use Microsoft products if your goal is to avoid dark patterns and user monetization. Microsoft is at least 10 times more corrupt than google.
+1 for open source I guess.
To what? iOS spies even more by default (no way to disable AGPS vs. opt in on Android) and doesn't allow using privacy-enabling apps by default (system-wide ad/tracker blocker, real Firefox, Signal, local maps, etc.) unless you hack your phone. Worse, it doesn't let you develop for your own phone without rebuilding weekly or paying a yearly fee for the privilege. Between the two evils of Google and Apple, Google remains the lesser evil by a long stretch.
If you want to use a web browser, then use Firefox.
Until some weeks ago I was less unhappy with Google Chrome than with firefox, but now I am kind of almost equal unhappy with both...
The outlier is (was?) IE, it kept the same interface and configurability while others continued dumbing down (although things are changing with Edge too) and it seems the massively anti-user decisions the other browsers made never really took hold at MSFT until most recently when they began sticking telemetry up the wazoo.
If you care more about user control than web standards compatibility then perhaps IE is the best choice... for now. At least it is more compatible than the "fringe" browsers like Dillo and NetSurf, or even the text-based ones. Opera, before it became another WebKit-shell, might be another good one.
(Disclaimer: No affiliation with MSFT, just someone who has watched these browser wars for a long time and saw this gradual "illusion of choice" take hold. I use various browsers depending on which site it is.)
They were built and grew out of their initial 'don't be evil' culture.
I'll keep Chrome around, like Opera, for browser testing.
Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initially, very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively and the power structures move away from those driving forces.
Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.
Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. It is much easier to bizdev and market a product and engineering led system/focus, though success through this is always forgotten when massive success comes around because engineering/research and development are hard to quantify and put metrics to which the power structures move away from.
Let's hope there are factions of engineering/product focused people in Google that can gain back control.
"Okay, users are confused by how they're logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let's make them one and the same".
"Okay, but once you're logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear"
"Ugh, let's just notify the user that clearing the cookies won't clear the Google ones"
"Yeah, that works".
Come on, we're all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.
Example Use Case: I was contacted by my poor old mother recently who said that she was logged into "The Google" but was seeing the wrong emails! She was horribly confused.
What had happened was that my sister had checked her email on my mothers computer and forgot to log out. My mother was logged into Chrome (as it correctly said on the top right of the browser) but didn't understand that logging in/out of Gmail was a different thing.
To blame non technical users for being confused here is unfair at the least. And I'm sure there are millions of them with the same problem.
A technical user who cares about privacy can:
- not log into Google and use an external email client for Gmail
- use Gmail in incognito
- disable Chrome auto log in via the preferences (although I haven't tried this myself some people say it works, although I've seen conflicting info about if this works in future versions of Chrome).
- use Firefox (but if you are still using Gmail I'm rolling my eyes here)
I personally don't think it is too evil that Google cares more about people like my mother than advanced privacy conscious technical users.
Also I can't see how auto syncing ones account with Chrome really damages privacy any more than what is there now? If you are logged into Gmail they have your cookies while you browse the web anyway. If you privacy conscious enough that you log out of Gmail every time you are done, fair enough, but I would suggest not using Gmail at all in that case.
But most importantly I'd like to hear a better engineering solution for people like my mother?
Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so.
And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don't care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that's not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla.
So I'm not buying that.
Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)
People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' model
That is to say, it's organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the 'specs' have been written, hands are tied.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue compared to all the other tracking they do and things like "Project Dragonfly".
That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.
It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.
Now it's obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what's left to do now stinks. They can't hide behind the "search" and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the "fair and balanced" search expert.
Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.
You can't blame them, their user base is in free fall.
If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft).
But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what's to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss.
I'm also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture/process is fairly dead by now.
No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom.
I'm guessing most of Google's growth will now come only from Acquisitions.
The engineers not being in charged happened a long time ago.
To wit: the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was never an actual engineer.
He actually learnt the ropes of his job at McKinsey.
Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail.
I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not...
For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.
Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn't become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability).
Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you'll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they're not engineers. So you'd be amazed at how little most people would care about what's happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)
Microsoft didn't create DOS
I agree with the problem but not the cause. I don't feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street's myopic expectations of growth every quarter.
It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it.
MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.
I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.
In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what's basically an ad? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass
And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.
That's were google is heading its efforts :)
IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.
80 years ago if you had a car then generally you'd need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you'd probably have is the tyres wearing out.
People don't want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.
The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks/programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they're currently using, because they're the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.
This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.
Their gain?
- Less of a monopoly status.
Their losses?
- The privacy concerned.
- Ad-blocker users.
- Over-opinionated users.
Good move, for them.
Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.
The internal name for the feature is "DICE" (desktop identity consistency feature)
There is a build flag to disable the feature: ENABLE_DICE_SUPPORT
Even YouTube's stuff are left, that's crazy.
I lost all trust in public cloud after Snowden, but somehow remained convinced that yes, Google reads my email, but that's about it. I migrated everything but email to a selfhosted solution, and simplified things a lot. Recently i've also migrated mail away from Google.
These past years have sadly proven (to me) i was right. What makes me even more sad is that the common user has very few options to avoid it. To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn't track you, neither on Mac OS or iOS, but there's a steep price, one that most consumers are not ready to pay. Linux may be ready for the desktop, but it's still a long way away from my parents installing it.
My best guess that Chrome works this way would be due to combining the sign-in cookies with the general cookies of the browser (e.g. 1 cookie store instead of 2).
So when you log in to Google, you log in to Chrome - and vice versa. For non-technical users this is a convenience feature, though for many it does come with privacy concerns.
Judging by the comments re cookie clearing, there is some part of the login still separate from that, but as it re-establishes itself the cookies come back and you stay logged-in to Google.
Is this perhaps preventable by having a "Guest" Chrome account? What happens then?
Because Google has been screwing up so much, by this point they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
> My best guess that Chrome works this way would be due to combining the sign-in cookies with the general cookies of the browser
Why keep Youtube cookies, then? https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044286636991877120
As it is, I think it's quite transparent. You get new cookies. It shows you their age. They're new. You're still logged into your Google account.
Solution: Log out of your Google account.
The implementation details around cookie recreation don't matter if users are still being tracked. Especially bad if this lets them track you on third party sites that contain Google Plus buttons or advertising iframes.
By ensuring users always remain logged in to the browser they gain a strong advantage over other companies that track users. Users attempting to remove tracking cookies shouldn't find Google ones permanently bundled with the browser.
The intent was likely to aid convenience and avoid users being unexpectedly logged out, but combined with Google automatically logging users into the browser this is a sign that the Chrome team is paying less attention to user privacy than they used to.
Perhaps users who regularly clear all cookies will start using guest accounts instead. Myself I'm more concerned about the general trend of unexpected behavior.
I have switched to Firefox and have used this as an opportunity to begin my transition away from GMail.
Because based on their history big tech companies (possibly with the exception of Apple) lost any benefits of a doubt.
When they screw up like that I now assume that it's intentional and unless they run into a massive pr disaster or an EU fine of a couple billions they give exactly zero fucks about their users.
> Brief correction: Cookies seem to get removed and re-created immediately. At least the cookie content and creation date seems to change. Nonetheless: After hitting the "remove all" button you still don't end up with an empty cookie jar.
Sync kicked in, noticed a mismatch between your current setup and the one you had set up many years ago while testing the “sign into chrome” process and set your setting to the one in the cloud.
It’s caught me out a couple of times too.
I don't (and never did) log into Chromium with my Google account however, so no syncing is happening.
Has anyone tested this behavior if you aren't signed in, or have disabled the google/chrome login equivalence?
Everyone here is blaming marketing but somebody pretty technical came up with that.
Imagine little indicators that show which identity providers you are logged into, like Facebook, Google, Twitter, .... You could do this by passively reading the site cookies in an extension (are you allowed to do that nowadays in extensions?). Even better, if you are not logged into, say, Facebook, block third party cookies from their domains so it's harder for them to track you.
I think I have a good idea for a weekend project...
I.e.
"if you are logged-in to chrome, it won't delete google cookies because it need it for you to be logged-in to chrome (because of some UX excuse, like user confusion why it's logged-out from chrome).
If you are logged out of chrome, it will delete everything."
If it works this way, I would be willing to give them benefit of doubt, since there is reasonable UX reason to do it this way (given that logged-in to chrome now equals to logged-in to gmail). I personally would expect that deleting cookies will not log me out of chrome.
A few days ago I posted an article about how the EU proposes a new law that could give up to 6 years in jail for social media posts. A discussion got started but for some readon the post was immediately “flagged” and that put an end to all discussions and upvotes on it. Yours, I notice, was “dead” so probably flagged as well?
Privacy implications aside, and boy are they some big ones, Google should be worried about this leading to accusations of abusing the monopoly power of their browser.
Imagine if Google started delisting sites with Facebook Partner Network ads on them...
The ease of switching is completely irrelevant.
All browser have had the ability to do that, for many years now, if you install a PDF printer driver. Adobe was the first with a commercial one, but I'm sure there are free ones now.
Imagine if “rm” just decided to occasionally set aside files instead of removing them. The “star” in “rm star” means “remove everything”, not “remove, asterisk” where at the bottom of the page the asterisk lists exceptions like some kind of marketing weasel. Sheesh.
We want competition.
Now I kinda hope Mozilla will make an official addon like Facebook Container but for Google services. We're being tracked too much, and it's time to fight back and making it easy to the average user to do it is the only way to change that.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
That was the only hangup I had to move over to Firefox.
Most things work on Firefox, or there's a similar plugin.
Still looking for a few:
* Flix Assist - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flix-assist/jeeccn...
* WhatFont - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc...
And... Lighthouse.
A few of the plugins I used on Chrome don't quite have perfect matches...
* Create Link - Chrome Web Store || https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/create-link/gcmghd... -- haven't found a Firefox addon that lets me copy URL + Title via keyboard shortcut.
Also looking for a way to change Firefox's default Apple + Shift + 5 to not try and take a Firefox screenshot, as Apple + Shift + 5 is my Skitch shortcut.
Really good part is that it's possible to create a shortcut to a site/service from a particular user session in Chrome and launch that shortcut as a headless standalone window that looks like Windows native app, not a browser. The shortcut is connected to the user session it was created from. So, for example, I have Gmail icon on my desktop and taskbar that launches a dedicated window to access mail without even starting Chrome browser session for Google user. Simultaneously I have Chrome opened with another, not Google, user/session. Problem solved--check mail, calendar, whatever in one sandboxed environment and browse the web in another one.
That was the time I started actively avoiding Google services, and I still do. This incident is a good reminder of why I do so.
Every time a user clears their cookies your site will be at a disadvantage if your business depends on ads or account login, not Google.
I have downgraded to Chrome 68 and disabled auto updates.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/D0dB6j...
Disabling any browser's auto-update is one of the worst computer security ideas in 2018.
Be a good netizen and reactivate those auto-updates or simply uninstall Chrome.
Since Firefox 60 you don't need Chrome for that, so I'm back to Firefox. Firefox isn't perfect, and that was OK because there was always Chrome. Now it starts to feel like it is Firefox or nothing, which isn't ideal.
Is this just the nature of the beast?
In a small company every manager can weight more factors. As it gets bigger and specialization grows a manager must reduce what it considers to focus on more specific tasks.
In a small company, a development manager can weight privacy concerns and use it judgment to change features. In a bigger company the development manager must delivery whatever it reaches him as a request, only the privacy department can make decisions regarding that.
Btw, can someone recommend a good alternative to Google Maps API?
If you had told me a few years ago that Google was the reason I wasn’t buying an Android phone I wouldn’t have believed you.
Given how google is embracing and building for totalitarian markets, such as China, as are its peers in the tech space - I think this is maybe a way to warn people to get the hell away from Google's products.
The outrage begins but only for .000001% of users. Google could not care less.
I haven't switched like most people here say they have, I have made an effort to install alternatives and use them. A better way to protest is to begin supporting Firefox in other ways such as writing your web apps and extensions.
This is starting to look like early-00s Internet Explorer all over again, just with a different BigCorp behind the wheel.
Still need to buy a few things to make self-hosting email and my personal site practical, but hopefully that'll all be set up in a few weeks as well. Bye Google.
And no, even this won't stop me using Chrome. You know what will? If I can identify it's causing BSOD on my system, like I've seen 2 yesterday.
Job well done chrome.
Really? I've been using it for years and I haven't felt a problem. But this could be a bug, and it'd be a good idea to report it.
However... what's probably happening here is that the cookie is being deleted but then created again immediately afterwards because something in the user's browser is connected to a Google server and that makes a new cookie if it detects the old one has gone away. The message in the tweet is informing the user that will happen. Arguably that's a reasonably useful notification - it stops the user mistakenly believing purging their cookies will log them out.
EDIT: Or, more likely, Google are actually storing the user's logged in state in localstorage or something, so clearing cookies won't log you out because there isn't a cookie.
No they didn't. It's right at the bottom here.
I think we are looking at the public face of something significant to have happened in Google search (and AI) and this attempt to start plugging all the gaps in our browsing habits is so that Google have as good as 95-100% understanding of human habits.
Foil hats on everybody :)
Chrome 69 - Fucking users right in the face
Or like Microsoft still does with machines with handwriting / touchscreens?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-touch-security-wai...
It is their new game theory play:
1/ Start making people think you are super ethical (don't be evil)
2/ Gain traction
3/ Change rules and take advantage of inertia. People are lazy to change browsers.
They do not need their first adopters anymore.
I am trying to stick to duck duck go and a safari/firefox combo. The browsers are fine. But, its hard to give up that !g search. I worked in the ad-tech space in the past. Google's tech is amazing, but, the price we pay for all this free stuff ... scary/creepy.
duckduckgo.com qwant.com
It hasn't been ever since Gmail, Google Calendar, Chrome and Android took off.
At best, you can claim misleading advertising (which, is often handled by the fair trade commission or something similar, and often has to show damages before they can award anything).
Let's not pretend that developers are powerless.
I highly recommend talking to many more people on H1B and if even a few doesn't fit your preconceived notion, kindly stop this bashing. It is people you are dealing with.
These are skilled workers, with options, that happen to be foreign.
Not foreign workers that are just skilled enough and grateful enough.
Sure, they'll hire someone else. But that's not the point. The point is sticking to your ethics.
http://www.google.com.somedomain.com
Looks a lot like "google.com" to me.
If google is this bad, I wonder what microsoft is really storing. I wonder what ISPs are storing. Also, this type of news doesn't give me much confidence when it comes to android either.
Also, I find Firefox UI sluggish to use, relative to Chrome UI.
You consent to being tracked -> google gets money off of tracking you -> google can pay more engineers to work on chrome and make it faster -> you get more tied into chrome’s performance quirks and ecosystem -> google gets more money by tracking you -> and so on...
If that sounds fair to you, then none of google’s actions should bother you (probably). But for me personally, I switched over to Firefox a long time ago when I noticed that chrome was becoming increasingly user-hostile in design.
If you just want to browse without your existing cookies, I suggest opening a Guest Window. Just open the "Current User" menu and then "Open Guest window". That way you don't have to delete them at the end.
This is assuming you're in good faith trying to delete cookies, and just can't figure out how.
Thought the whole point of a private tab was to completely isolate a browsing session, now you can never be certain your Google credentials are not being shared in these private sessions or even contaminate my non-private sessions.
Going to have to use another browser for my work sessions from now on.
If you mean "Incognito mode", then that's always happened. You need to close all tabs.
Exactly the same for FireFox's private browsing.