Go to Chrome://settings/adPrivacy to turn off the spyware that in Chrome | Hacker News Reader

adPrivacy to turn off the spyware that in Chrome

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88 pointswslh37 comments

It doesn't look like this was covered much by the mainstream tech sites, but the official page is here,

https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy-on-the-web/

I just checked it myself and at least for me all the settings are set to "Off" by default.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, it's likely I mindlessly turned these Off when first time encountering the notice by Chrome when this was first released (see the comment thread below).

These were all ON for me. Turned them off.

ON for me, but Chrome automatically popped up the settings page to tell me about it and let me turn it off. Still, I might have to start looking at other browsers.

This could be what happened to me and I never noticed it, so I don't want to give the impression that this is "Off" by default because it looks like it isn't.

Mine were also off (Win11). I also usually turn off anything like this, but I don't recall doing it recently.

OFF for me, but I fully expect to play whackamole with a stream of future sneaky updates turning them ON 'to improve my browsing experience'.

>it's likely I mindlessly turned these Off when first time encountering the notice

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who does this. "Do you want to enable-" No. "Help Contoso by-" No. "Personalise your experience by-" No. "Sign up for our-" No. "Try our new-" No. "Let's get started with a brief unskippable tutorial." Sigh.

Both Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium seem not to have such a configuration page, they redirect to chrome://settings/.

Can someone please explain how this is spyware. Thanks

"Topics of interest are based on your recent browsing history and are used by sites to show you personalized ads"

"Sites you visit can determine what you like and then suggest ads as you continue browsing"

Chrome collects data on everything you visit and sends that info to its "partner" sites when you visit them. IMO, in a properly regulated environment, this should result in jail time for everyone involved.

This appears to be a Chrome "field trial". I believe that you can block field trials in Chrome by blocking the domain tools.google.com. I don't even have the chrome://settings/adPrivacy page.

Mine was on by default for my work browser. This is hot garbage

Why would you fight this fight instead of just using Safari / Firefox?

Because Chrome has way better security sandboxing than either.

Firefox has containers which is vastly superior.

I believe madars meant app/process sandboxing which is different to what I think you mean with Firefox containers. Chrome is safer and has stronger sandboxing and exploit mitigations.

Chrome cares a lot more about PWAs. WebSerial, WebUsb, etc. aren't supported on firefox.

Are they not supported on the many Chromium browsers out there? This ad Privacy thing didn't show up on Brave browser on Android.

I use Firefox personally but Chrome for work.

Funny how companies dont mind workers sharing company data with others via browsers but make us sign ndas.

Or, you know, go to getfirefox.com and download a better browser.

The browser that shows ads on its starting page? The browser that comes with "Pocket", that you can kinda hide but never turn off completely?

Imo dismissable ads are worth it when the browser doesn't sell your data. Then again, I only look at the FF start page for like 2 seconds at a time

about:config extensions.pocket.enabled to false

Or just delete the xpi from your filesystem.

All the ad crap is trivial to turn off.

That's the one. The alternative is one that tracks every site you go to and sells that data for a profit. Easy choice in my book

I turned off the Pocket recs in the settings once and never saw them again. Let FF advertise: at least they don't use app updates to quietly reset app permissions to default the way many others do.

By this definition any browser history feature is "spyware." Actual spyware would steal the browser history instead of keeping it device local.

Read the actual words that it actually says. Sites can pay Google to get a profile of you, based on your browsing history, sent to them when you visit their website. Who's keeping anything local?

What are you talking about? Your history is saved locally. Websites call document.browsingTopics() to get topics that the user is interested in.

So if a website, which already has way too many ways to identify you, calls document.browsingTopics() to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills, or knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that? You don't consider that spyware? That's just as bad as my browser having a back button?

What crime would the DeSantis administration prosecute me for if I were male and interested in dressing in feminine attire?

Ask Google

I did--without finding a concrete answer.

That's some remarkably-poor googling skill. It took me a single search query to figure out what he was talking about.

And no, I'm not going to tell you what I found. It's fun watching the topic get dodged.

>to see that some of your recent topics of interest are pregnancy tests and abortion pills

Those aren't topics. https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/... https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...

>knows that you are male and sees that you've been recently interested in dresses and panties, and this website happens to be a far-right-leaning activist website, and decides to dox you, or blackmail you, or forward this information to Ron DeSantis's administration for possible criminal prosecution, you're all good with that?

If you want to keep topics a secret you can just block them. Topics also have a chance to be randomly replaced. If you see a user's topic is /Shopping/Apparel/Women's Clothing/Dresses it could be there by chance. It would also require the site to take out a bunch of ads on these women clothing sites hoping that one of your future website visitors would see your ad.

>You don't consider that spyware?

The real thing you should be worried about is third party cookies. They don't have any of these privacy features that topics has and they can collect a lot more data. Both of your examples are possible with third party cookies, but not with topics. Google is trying to phase out 3rd party cookies sometime next year.

> Those aren't topics.

Don't worry, they'll keep the first version mild, and in a few years they'll update it with more granularity.

> The real thing you should be worried about is third party cookies. They don't have any of these privacy features that topics has and they can collect a lot more data. Both of your examples are possible with third party cookies, but not with topics. Google is trying to phase out 3rd party cookies sometime next year.

This is basically saying "we'll screw you over, but that's ok because we promise to stop screwing you over this other way". It only shows how massive their conflict of interest is.

If chrome was developed by some honest, unrelated company, they would not include this kind of spyware (because it doesn't benefit the user[1]), and also try to block 3rd party cookies.

[1] I guess they could optionally include it if users would prefer seeing more personalized ads, but it would be something opt-in that doesn't try to trick you into enabling it, like Chrome does. But realistically they wouldn't even bother to develop something like this.

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