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Comment by ixwt | Hacker News Reader

I get a 0.7 on my computer on Firefox. If I use the same website in Chrome (which is signed into a Google account) I get a 0.9. I guess it's a [0,1] scale?

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I'm guessing their a-listers came up with something like this:

    // TODO: add impressive-looking math
    if (signedin && trackedEverywhere) {
         return 0.9
    } else {
         return 0.7
    }

I think we give Google way too much credit for their talent. This is the same company that didn't feel like finishing their website for two decades and subsequently stole $75 million from their users even when Google knew [1].

The same company that somehow still doesn't reconcile amounts owed and just keeps the money when they randomly-ban users and hide behind fake support emails, but they did feel like paying $11 million to keep that away from scrutiny [2].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-emails-adtrader-lawsu...

[2] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/

Google consistently gives me the impression of a company that (I suppose) has tons of smart people in it, but has badly broken management & incentive structures leading them to constantly do bafflingly stupid stuff at both large and small scales, even by the standards of a bigcorp, to the point that they survive only because they've got one hell of a golden goose.

Good info. Thank you.

And in keeping with recent revelations on Google's manipulation of search results, I think they have really gone beyond the pale. I un-archived my old iPhone two days ago and went back to iOS after the James O'Keefe/Project Veritas revelations. I now cannot, in good conscience, use anything Google. I always knew about the tracking and all that because, after all, they are an ad company. I'm now in the process of moving all of my domains over to Fastmail, which I've used since 2002. I'm using Qwant, Startpage, and DDG for search. FF for browser with many about:config tweaks and several add-ons.

You know Project Veritas is a load of shit right?

Please explain. Even without the revelations from PV, it's patently obvious Google, et al are biased. Anyone can see it. Silicon Valley is a bloody echo chamber. If the videos by PV were not damning in the least, why did 4 different companies take them down and remove the accounts of PV?

Sunlight is the very best disinfectant. People have a right to know if searches are being manipulated to one side.

If I sign out of my google account in Chrome it drops from 0.9 to 0.7.

I could have sworn I'd never signed in to Chrome using my google account, but I guess I must have mistakenly signed in to gmail or something.

I use FF as my main browser, only ever drop back to Chrome sporadically, or when I really want tabs to be completely isolated (there are some annoyingly CPU/power intensive stuff I do from time to time, and I can just renice Chrome while I get on with other stuff.)

> I could have sworn I'd never signed in to Chrome using my google account, but I guess I must have mistakenly signed in to gmail or something.

Chrome 69 tricked users into signing into the browser, myself included - https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-chromes-automatic-sign...

That was the last straw to uninstall Chrome from all my devices and I've been a happy Firefox user ever since. Well, except now reCAPTCHA hardly ever works.

I believe that's a "feature" they added a while back, auto-signing you into chrome as soon as you was logged into gmail.

The GP post's IP address or other fingerprint may be validated from other Google properties they might have visited, so I wouldn't put so much stock in the 0.7.

Honestly... if it's the same team that did ReCaptcha 2.0, this is a team that pulls out all the stops. Per https://github.com/neuroradiology/InsideReCaptcha ... they implemented a freaking VM in Javascript to obfuscate the code that combines various signals. There's a lot going on here that's likely highly obfuscated and quantized before it's displayed to us.

EDIT: non-paywall link for [1] in the parent post: https://outline.com/aA7HS5

I get 0.9 on Firefox which is my main browser and 0.7 on Chrome which I use only for hangouts.

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