Google Chrome just rolled out a new way to track you and serve ads
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37427227
Top comment on that one was:
Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL:
chrome://settings/adPrivacy
Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.
Incidentally, I think people working on these features should be ashamed.
IIRC, it's the opposite: Chrome was created to prevent other browser manufacturers (in particular, Microsoft) from imposing their rules on the Internet in a way which affected Google websites.
I'm not fan of seeing which tech giant wins the privilege of imposing their will on me.
They've done a very successful job of masquerading as a cool hip tech company, even coining the totally ridiculous (given the context) "don't be evil" saying.
As a heavy user of both browsers, as far as I can see there is really no downside to Firefox.
In fact, even though presumably there are way more engineers working on Chrome than on Firefox, I guess most of Chrome's engineering effort goes towards benefitting advertisers, not users. While Chrome seems entirely stagnant since I adopted it 4 years ago, Firefox gets a steady trickle of improvements and fixes.
So a huge +1 to the last point. Firefox rules.
Caveats: Sometimes launching apps from the browser only works in Chrome and some demos of bleeding edge experimental Chrome features obviously don't work in Firefox.
Mailgun is one of the worst offenders. when I mentioned to their support that auth among other things was broken in Firefox, their response was "use chrome"
Profiles suck. Performance (specifically around video) has been ass for years. Many useful Chrome extensions don't have FF versions. Just off the top of my head.
She is in grad school, and the online learning platform requires 3rd party cookies to work. With containers, this means enabling 3rd party cookies every where, which isn't good.
I set her up a separate school profile that has a different theme. Only that profile has 3rd party cookies enabled, and she knows to only do school stuff in that profile. It is clunky to say the least, even with the profile extension.
I'd really like to see better support for profile management!
Extensions are complicated because they’re also one of the top sources of compatibility and performance problems. Every time in the last decade or so that I’ve known someone to complain that their browser was broken or slow / using too much memory, uninstalling extensions fixed it. It annoys me because I like the concept but I’m not sure it’s really something developers can be trusted with.
I can also make the opposite argument for extensions. One of my most-used extensions, tree-style-tabs, has no Chrome alternative.
The Dutch national TV (NPO) videos do not play on Firefox for Android [1]. They do play on Chrome for Android and they do play on the Linux desktop firefox. Not sure if its some hidden setting that I need to find or something for the firefox team to look into.
Everybody and their dog want you to download "apps" - I wonder why?
Firefox on android is one of the few defence mechanisms we have.
[1] https://www.npostart.nl/nos-journaal/11-09-2023/POW_05465115
Because apps can collect more data... many apps are just spyware with some function on the top of it ;-)
I had this problem with the British Film Institute's streaming service. I emailed them about it, they replied "please try with Chrome on Windows PC" and I replied "no thanks, please send a refund, I will pirate the film instead".
The other case where I ran into videos not playing was Twitter dot com. I tend not to click links into that site any more though.
Even after installing Firefox you can’t get rid of the Google Chrome web search bar on the home screen, and in-app web views are Chrome, so you’re never really free from Chrome.
I do understand the why of ads, and I’m okay with _some_ ads. On 99% of websites from a Google search you get a sticky top and/or bottom bar, and interstitial ads between paragraphs and they’re a little annoying but not so bad. But then on about 30% of search results one of those sticky ads is an autoplaying video, which means I can’t actually read the content (since 1/3 of my screen is video) and the “X” icon is 0.5mm wide so I can’t close it without clicking the video. Then there’s the email subscribe pop up on scroll, and after 15 seconds you get prompted to allow notifications for this website.
Using the web without an ad blocker feels like you’re being attacked, it’s aggressive and stressful.
I had hoped the ubiquity of ad blocking would result in advertisers going “hmmm, maybe we can drive fewer people to install these things by acting better”, but instead it’s been a race to who can exploit the smaller pool of users for clicks.
I don't think I've ever had the search bar on the home screen for more than a couple minutes after getting a new phone.
My in-app web views are also in Firefox. I'm pretty sure just changing the default browser changes this, though there may be a second setting I'm forgetting about.
This is actually my main sticking point on refusing to try iOs. You can't even install Firefox on an iPhone, their "Firefox" is just a wrapper around Safari.
For the most part, my webviews are in FF (selected as my default browser), but it depends on what app launches the webview. Sometimes it defaults to Chrome.
Also wrong about the launcher, I’m relatively new to Android and hadn’t seen any settings for it.
The in-app views can be Firefox by just setting it as the default browser. Lest we forget, at least Android has an actual Firefox implementation, versus iOS which does not. Not sure what you're talking about, but if you bumped into certain cases where a Chromium web view would be better for compatibility, you can use a Chromium-based fork, like Bromite, Vivaldi, or Brave, all of which can fit the bill.
The only exception I can think of is Facebook, which comes with a highly customized web view meant for tracking users, but it's not using Chrome directly. And on Android it is the custom to also allow opening links in the external browser, and even Facebook has this option (Settings -> Preferences -> Media -> Open links in external browser).
The only edge that Chrome has is the deeper integration on the "Install app" menu option for websites that integrate with SSB/PWA. Otherwise you can safely uninstall or disable Chrome completely (which I do).
I have a Samsung S21 Ultra, with 512 GB of storage. I can download torrents straight to my phone via LibreTorrent. The other day I downloaded 3 seasons of Star Trek Picard and started playing them on my TV. But first, I used Firefox with uBlock Origin installed to navigate a Pirate Bay mirror. The entire scenario is only possible on Android.
On my Pixel, I use FF mainly, but also have DDG and Chrome (for Google-specific sites only).
I haven't played with the default launcher, but you can absolutely get rid of it with other launchers (as many sibling comments noted).
As for the chrome//android web view, you can disable the chrome app and 99% of apps that use android web view have an escape hatch option to just open it in your default browser, so that's also a non issue.
I am so ingrained in iOS it’s hard to leave but I really did like the pixel phones and have thought about getting one.
Meanwhile, on pretty much the only competition, you can't even install a different browser, they're all just reskins of Safari. You'd be better off recommending Android...
I have been corrected on removing the launcher and how web views work in this thread.
FTFY
I'm trying to think, are there any downsides to this other than "you won't get custom ads catered to you"?
Like Google can see you requested this off and most of us are logged into a Google user account attached to Chrome. I wonder if they can "behind the scenes" label users who don't let them serve them as customized ads in a "less good" bucket? Too much of a stretch/conspiracy theory? Deny us features? Just spitballing...
I'll check back in a few weeks time to check whether Google has sneakily enabled them without my intervention...
Apple is the only tech company I know that's primarily funded by customers paying for a product directly. That's why I use Safari.
But, IIRC Google pays Apple >30x what it pays Mozilla for keeping their search engine as a default.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
That Apple has alternative sources of revenue are irrelevant for Safari's present and future. Just to give an example — both Firefox and Safari block third-party cookies, which has an impact on Google's tracking, but have you noticed that neither of them block ads by default? They couldn't even if they wanted to, given it has a direct impact on their cash cow. And Safari's ad-blocking capabilities is what inspired Chrome's limitations from Manifest v3, the latter being more capable, actually.
The more important question is: What happens to Safari if Google's payouts to Apple stop? And there's no good answer.
*If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info?
I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. If chrome is able to turn off third-party cookies for a large swathe of people, I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies.
I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
not really, no. From my experience most stuff works fine (the thing that breaks websites the most is webgl and even then, only the few websites that really need it use it)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67645164/cross-domain-lo...
I'm pretty sure Google is making disabling cookies as painful and breakage-inducing as possible to make sure people don't flip the switch.
Is this better than third-party cookies? Yes, probably. Does Firefox and Safari go better without surveilling your browsing history to serve you ads? Also yes!
https://searchads.apple.com/help/reporting/0028-apple-ads-at...
A related reason is my bookmarks are very much a private affair and this method feels much more intrusive. I dread to think of the security implications.
The only upside is that third party cookies will be less of a problem in other browsers, if this new API kills them.
That’s a bit like saying you’d rather have cameras inside your house streaming your every move than have paparazzi at your door.
In the current model, the third parties have to fight and spend resources to get an imperfect profile of you, while you can make their life harder every step of the way. But your browser has access to information those third-parties could never have; it can make a profile from real data without you having the chance to block it.
Both are bad for privacy, but the new method is way worse and has the potential to become even more invasive. What if Chrome decides to share your bookmarks? Or settings from your extensions? Or specific pages you visit, including private GitHub repositories for your company? Or full URLs with sensitive keys in them?
In my mind the metaphor is more like "instead of having paparazzi at your door following around, you show everyone a card saying that you like dogs and video games and the steelers, and you tend to shop at big box stores out of town".
I'd rather know exactly what I'm presenting, which is possible in this model, than have the paparazzi all over me figuring most of it out imperfectly anyway.
well, do you trust this company to only give those advertisers what you think you're presenting?
If you use Chrome, it will use information about all pages you visit, even ones without tracking cookies to categorize you for advertisers.
Google says that will happen locally, but even if you trust them, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. You could even see it as “now I pay the bill for getting myself categorized for Google’s ad business”.
Soon, Chrome also will start blocking third-party cookies to protect you from evil Meta and its ilk (all because Google wants to protect you from them, not because Meta competes with Google in the advertising space, of course)
So, as before, Google won’t be able to see what users do inside Meta’s apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), but now Meta won’t be able to see what Chrome users do outside them.
> but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data
It won’t all stay on your machine; a summary of it will be sent to Google so that they can sell targeted ads to advertisers.
I expect they’ll have quite a few different tags, including age, gender, and location, and shopping preferences.
How about thinking the other way around:
Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
> turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that
Most of what breaks is just tracking for ad serving purposes. I'm fine with that breaking.
Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.
> I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies
As they should, if competently designed.
> … but naively I'd rather …
Call me dogmatic, but I'd rather not be followed around at all, even as a group. I don't trust that the data cannot be de-anonymised in any way, and I don't trust a company that would gain from that to do its best to make sure it can't happen.
I don't know a huge amount about the wider ecosystem here, but I can imagine that if chrome were to disable third-party cookies without providing an alternative, then advertisers will go to fairly great lengths to fingerprint you to build a profile.
Right now my guess is that Firefox users benefit from the fact that it's probably not worth investing all that much in alternative tracking techniques since you capture the vast majority of people with techniques which work in chromium browsers.
Again, I really don't know that much about all this, but my feeling is that this is moving in the right direction, even if it's not the solution I'd ultimately prefer as an individual user.
Never said they were, only that they both using your browser & resources "against your own interests", and this is not a good argument against tracking.
You are right about the bit of the post you noticed though, both do use at least some resources. This system more, but the simple banner still some.
not to mention that if the goal is to remove 3PC, this new ad tracking doesn't solve the auth problem at all.
Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
Once you accept that premise, then it's a matter of balancing privacy, volume of ads, and payments to creators (ad tech companies are going to get theirs). Do you think the majority of people would prefer fewer, better targeted / higher yielding ads as long as it is tracking them anonymously? Or more ads, with worse targeting? Or neither and less payments to creators?
Then there's the Stallmanesqe, crypto-anarchist side of me that says it's my machine and it shouldn't do anything that doesn't directly benefit me. Tracking and ads don't directly benefit me, so my machine shouldn't cooperate in running them and if your business can't survive under those conditions then it doesn't deserve to.
I'm not 100% on how to resolve that tension, but I can't really fault Google for the way they're handling it. (As an optional, yet on-by-default feature that cooperates in serving relevant ads in a way that's more private than cookies but less private than just blocking everything.)
Restrict them all and the money would still flow as the ads would increase sales just as much.
No advertiser wants to go back to dumb ad campaigns like they used to run on traditional media, simply because they're far less profitable.
Which is why they're concerned about the restricted and more general profiles the Topics API will give them. They want even more granular topics[1], and Google can do this at any point once the controversy has died down, and this feature gains traction.
Make no mistake that if this turns out to be less profitable, many advertisers will still resort to cookie tracking, fingerprinting, and any other shady mechanism, as long as the browser and lack of regulation allow them to do so.
[1]: https://searchengineland.com/googles-topics-api-advertisers-...
I have no objection to adverts based on what I am looking at at the time, or more random blanket advertising⁰, as long as they are not too obtrusive or intrusive: flashing ads, auto-playing audio, and so forth, are out.
Unfortunately modern ad tech is apparently inseparable from following us around our online existence logging everything we do, which is on the list of things I consider to be too intrusive.
> as long as it is tracking them anonymously
Yes. But call me a cynic if you will: I don't trust that the proposed system is as guaranteed to be anonymous as is claimed (or at least implied).
> payments to creators?
Remuneration for creators is why I don't use sponsorblock and such. Sponsor segments aid the creators without having to track me wherever I go online.
--
[0] though I am getting tired of seeing adverts for Temu everywhere, anything broadcast en-mass to the point of annoyance¹ well never result in me buying a product or using a service
[1] I could name several others, Temu is just the most recent example
But choices like: free water with punch-in-the-face VS paid water without punching would be better indicators of choice.
When there are few/no options then choice is an illusion.
I hadn't noticed, although I've heard this many times. I mean, I notice some broken pages, but nothing so important that I'd bother working out what's wrong with them.
If it's really that the site is checking that the 3d-party cookie they set really got set, and failing to load otherwise, that's an abusive site that I don't want to use anyway.
Google needs to be broken up and ground to dust --well, judiciously regulated by a democratically-elected legislature, but in the absence of that, I would take anything. I can't believe this is the "Don't do evil" company.
If anything, it is leveling the playing field. All ad networks will get the same interest data, rather than the ones with a higher reach 3rd party cookie having more information.
I'm saying that the specific complaint you had was obviously false.
I don't want either.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:visited
And third-party tracking websites would load their websites up with a bunch of hidden anchors and then through JS read the visited state of these websites to get an accurate fix on a person's identity, or at least of their (relevant) browser history?
And how this modifier was removed ASAP once people realised its abuse potential?
Basically Google thought this was a good idea after all, and is bringing a "coarse-grained" version of it back.
Well, yes, maybe that is the case _right now_, but these are convenient arguments to push the technology through. There is nothing inherent to the technology that would prevent the `Topics` from being split such that 8 billion (current world population) unique combinations of topics exist.
If all topics are completely orthogonal to others, such that the existence of one topic for some user does not give extra information of another topic existing for the same user, we would expect a list of log2(8 billion) ~= 33 topics to suffice as a unique identifier for each individual user, _reported by the browser to every single website that is visited_.
So... obviously there is no technological limitation to this list of topics, it is completely feasible to design a list of 33 (or a little bit more) topics in this way.. so what will keep Google from not introducing more topics (as time goes on and people become accustomed to this feature)?
My point, in the limit, potentially a few years from now, this feature will be "pareto-dominant" of tracking cookies, or rather in all aspects better at tracking users than tracking cookies ever were.
I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website).
We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Not really. You just need to look at any normal billboard; advertisers bought that billboard, even though it knows nothing about demographics or "attribution".
Tracking just makes advertising more cost-effective. To the advertiser, not to me. I'm not an advertiser; I gain nothing from the cheapness of advertising. It makes no difference to me whether an ad is targeted or not; I don't want to see it. Especially if it writhes and wriggles distractingly, or autoplays video.
> If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
beautiful
Wasn't Google's initial pitch that it would provide ads selectively based on the content of the page? All this demographics and individual tracking part in modern metrics seems to be mostly misleading.
For decades, ads were sold based on media analysis – and it worked well. There is nothing that says that it would work unconditionally with tracking only. You may even miss your most important potential customers entirely with tracking, since your product may be lacking general exposure. You may be also missing a broader cultural feedback, which is what sells most products in the end. (Most ads try to assign a cultural vector to the product, or to associate a product with an existing one, this is a major mechanism. You may require a certain amount of social resonance and common references to achieve this. It may well be, that this dysfunctionality of targeted advertising is what gave birth to the phenomenon of the influencer.)
Why is this actually effective? When you bought a toaster (which is a likely reason why you visited the listing), why would ads for other toasters still be relevant?
Obviously the result looks stupid to us as consumers which is quite memorable. I suggest it is a by-product of intentional choices. IMO this is a better explanation than "oh this company is just too stupid to do it right, but also they are all knowing about everything you do and are just so doggone evil." Maybe they are that evil, but I am sure they have learned how not to overturn their apple cart and this is an obvious result of that.
"We will always automatically exclude recent past purchasers of your promoted products."
So there's some notion of this data being available, at least internally.
As shit as showing you ads for the thing you just bought is, it may be the best ROI they can manage. Which is pretty damning for the whole enterprise.
I expect most people research before buying a specific toaster.
Those advertisers, they think of everything. :)
Also, with this data, they can potentially build a better model than Amazon's recommender model. Most consumers have a pattern when buying and there's a lot of money in figuring it out.
I've had 3 other phones since then. Ads just show what they can. Still better chances for a click than random.
The odds of buying a toaster a year later might be higher than it sounds.
There might be other cases where you bought one and is really happy about the benefits and want your friends to enjoy too but may be they can buy a different brand/price/featured ones to compare experience.
There are lots of possible such cases ad and sales people think up.
Src: worked in adtech for few years and yes am not proud.
I have firefox too.
What is core?
I like this analogy; pineapple on pizza is just like a browser that runs a crypto miner.
No it doesn't.
Look, I'm not into crypto. But it takes me about two clicks to turn off everything crypto-related in Brave (the main stuff that people complain about is opt-in and turned off by default anyway). The same amount of effort that it takes me to change Google as the default search engine in Firefox.
In both cases, those default settings are there because both browsers need SOME source of revenue. But in Brave's case, at least they are diversifying into different sources, such as a search engine and a Zoom-like video conferencing product. Whereas Firefox's entire existence is dependent on the Google dependency.
Nothing against Firefox. But I get far fewer (if any) website compatibility issues with Brave, the extension ecosystem is far better, and the ad-blocking is far superior (with Firefox I see YouTube ads on my phone with every ad-blocking extension I've tried, whereas with Brave I see no ads with the built-in blocker).
It just blows my mind that Brave gets dismissed by the HN crowd, on the basis of "crypto associations give me bad vibes", while Firefox's association with Google is completely hand-waved away. When my goal is to avoid Google, I get more bad vibes from Google. But that's just me.
Fairly easy to understand, for many Crypto is synonymous with 'bad actor'. Which isn't exactly without merit given the number of schemes, scams and outright law breaking elements that have surrounded the topic.
It doesn't matter if its legitimate, people will still understandably have issues with it.
Or at least, messing with the user's URL [0] to inject your affiliate code is a pretty bad, single strike kinda thing for me.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
Brave is objectively the best mainstream privacy browser.
[0]: https://github.com/privacytests/privacytests.org/issues/166
The tests are open source, objectively verifiable.
Author's employment status is being just used as an excuse to refute objective information imo.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/111027233991200762
"ars technica: we don't know how they did it but google chrome now extracts a pint of blood every time you log on
chrome user, dizzy from blood loss: I swear to god I am like this close to switching to firefox
another chrome user, on the verge of fainting from severe blood loss: no need to resort to that, just switch to [insert today's trendy chrome fork here] and be smart like meeee"
Google's entire business model is predicated on the fact that they and only they know who I am. As soon as they sell "me," they lose the value of my (so-far) collected data. They have to sell me in bundles, anonymized, otherwise they make no money in the long run.
That being said, it's been proven over and over and over that behavioral ad sales don't actually result in more clicks or sales for the advertiser.
I've been using FF with some privacy extensions and settings as my personal browser for a few years now, I'm definitely not going to change that now.
Make sure you go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy and review and re-disable those.
Or switch browser, which I have done on my personal machines.
Just get Firefox
There are excellent alternatives to Chrome. I encourage everyone to adopt one.
* PrivacySandboxAdMeasurementEnabled
* PrivacySandboxAdTopicsEnabled
* PrivacySandboxPromptEnabled
* PrivacySandboxSiteEnabledAdsEnabled
Firefox + uBlock Origin (too lazy to use uMatrix) + privacy badger (because why not) + multi account containers + User agent switcher (for sites which want something else and refuse to load on FF, e.g. bing chat)
> By far the most private browsers are specialist non-tracking browsers that prioritise no tracking, such as DuckDuckGo...
wha???
> Tracking technology can arguably benefit us as well. For example, it could be helpful if an online store reminds you every three months you need a new toothbrush, or that this time last year you bought a birthday card for your mum.
Wha?! The technology google is deploying wouldn't even support that. Frankly the level of personal invasion required to achieve this...
Was this just like a bit of biting sarcasm or something? Dry wit that flew over my head?
This article seems off.
OH THEY MADE AN ANDROID BROWSER.
ok. In my defense I did consider "DuckDuckGo made a browser"? and googled it before I posted this comment, but I did not find any results. Your comment made me dig deeper to find the Android one.
I still think that sentence is a bit stilted though, it's got some department of redundancy department vibes. But I yield the point on that one.
2: 'Arts & Entertainment/Acting & Theater',
3: 'Arts & Entertainment/Comics',
...
132: 'Computers & Electronics/Consumer Electronics/Home Theater Systems',
...
208: 'Home & Garden/Gardening',
...
What is it about Chrome that makes it so much better than alternatives like Firefox, Safari, or any Blink engine variants that aren’t spyware?
It's been discussed to death so many times already.
If you want to know how an average user will see your site, you should probably be testing with a default profile, with no adblocker. You could leave the browser signed out of your Google account, or have a separate one just for this.
No PC operating system that I know of aside from ChromeOS bundles Chrome, yet people still download it and it’s still dominant.
What makes you think the outcome would be different if given a choice?
Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser.
And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
Did it not help FF to gain initial market share?
> Besides especially on mobile, I would be pissed if when I first used my phone I would have to use my (hypothetically limited) cellular data to download something like a browser.
No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway (and in fact as the first thing after initial setup), and the reason is the incredible bloatedness and lack of scope of browsers.
> And even if you don’t use Chrome on Android, you’re still using Android - by Google.
This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen (payment, school, administration, health care, and so on); no idea what that has to with using Android or other Google products.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/windo...
While there were early signs that the browser ballot screen was influencing browser usage in the EU, with Mozilla attributing some European Firefox growth to the selection page, long-term trends strongly suggest that it was next to useless. In spite of equally prominent placement on the selection screen, Opera's share even within Europe appears to have declined over the last five years. So too have Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chrome, however, has experienced significant growth.
> No difference from the status quo then as you have to download multiple browser updates per month anyway
I can’t speak to Android. But iOS updates (which include Safari updates) don’t happen that often and at least users have a usable browser at initial launch on both iOS and Android. You can choose when to update
> This is about the web as an open platform relied upon for essential public services by any citizen
I don’t know, maybe because the original submission is about Chrome’s privacy issues, not about the “open web”?
This isn't "zero effect", though. It might've been just the initial kick-off for FF's success, bringing users, bug reports, and developers. "Long-term" Chrome dominance isn't telling us anything here; in fact, Chrome's success is also in part a consequence of the browser selection screen.
Chrome’s growth in the US grew because of bundling with other apps and because of advertisements on Google’s home page
The entitlement mentality towards user behavioural data is wild
Whats the deal with that? The only extension I have installed is Ublock mobile.
Otherwise, the most likely answer is coincidence.
Time for anti trust to step in.
Unless you switch browsers - e.g. Firefox has blocked third-party cookies for a while now.
On Chromium 117.0.5938.48, it sends me to the settings home page.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-oppos...
fuck off
Online stores can (and do) remind us about this stuff via email. No third-party tracking cookies needed – you're already a customer of theirs. If they want to get in touch, they already know your order history and contact details.
Or, you know, we can add our own reminders to a personal calendar.
The article gives instructions on how to turn this off and concludes with the classic warning about being the product.
At no point does the article claim cookies are required for “good” automation.
> Offloading cognitive effort, such as reminders like these, is a great way automation can assist humanity.
Does that pass for journalism? I really don't want to read the rest of the article.
I read the article; it's actually one of the better pieces I've read in that domain (tech news for the general public) IMHO. People say those things (take-downs) about everything on HN. Don't trust the threads - why would you trust anonymous people writing one-sentence hot-take rants, some of whom probably also didn't read the article and are just repeating things.
The Internet tide isn't a reliable indicator of anything, any more than the tide at the beach.
"Academic rigour, journalistic flair"I think it passes for a press release disguised as a news article.
Google didn't write a press release that raises questions - insightful ones that I hardly ever see in other coverage - about their privacy practices and recommends competitors such as Firefox and Brave.
It was great. I'd give it to lay-people who were interested, and as a technical person I don't need to read more.
It can be better solved with a calendar notification. No privacy violated and you can add your own information to your notification: you liked this toothbrush, your dentist recommended that toothbrush, you didn't like this store, blah blah.
Is there value in that? Sure. Does that mean that value must be extracted by a business? No.
Regardless, that's a debate to have with Chrome devs. It's already in the browser and the article is reporting on the browser.
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product - the last sentence makes it clear that the author sees privacy as the problem, not tracking.
I wouldn't assume that; I would donate what you can. I've been to two pay-what-you-can theater performances recently. How can I not give those people - who value every dime, who many others stiff, and where you know 100% goes to a worthy cause - more than the corporate productions, who couldn't care less about me or community and where the money goes to some billionaires and shareholders who couldn't care less about art and look forward to AI and cost-cutting layoffs. The last thing I want is the local artists, who do it for the art, to not see people's love and appreciation or to stop.
Around 5-10 years ago, IIRC the maintainer of a relatively well-known Linux distro moved home to (Minnesota?) because they had no health insurance and couldn't afford the Bay Area (or something like that, my memory is sketchy).
Also don't forget the sh-t-ton of abuse open source maintainers take.
2. There are services that you pay for where you are not the product
3. All services that you don’t pay for you are the product.
So the first step is getting people to pay for the service
Even in the US, the median cost of an Android phone is less than $300 and then you expect them to pay $200 for a browser?
Besides, it’s never just a one time purchase. Is that one time purchase going to get you security updates and if so, for how long?
I can eat junk food cheaply every day, I pay the price later.
Let them eat cake?
Meanwhile over in "lets not cede all control to corporations" land, did we forget the the internet was actually funded by the government in the first place? Have we already tossed away ideas like the rural electrification project?
Who is going to pay for the browser?
Do you really want the government controlling how you access information?
You've already given that power to corporations, and corporations have far fewer regulations on actually performing said control (as in they are able to control you far more).
You are so deep into Reganomics "government is bad, corporations are good" that you don't realize these large (near) monopoly status corporations are effectively their own governments in amount of power and control they have.
I have a lot more power not to use Chrome or Android than not to be under the rule of a hostile government.
Whether it’s the religious right who are in control of one party or Tipper Gore going after rap music in the other party, do you really want the government controlling the web?
Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
Enriching these large companies will ensure you live under a hostile government too. Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Next I expect to hear something out of you about private water companies and roads as the solution to all of our problems.
> Once they are big enough to rent seek, they become the primary lobbying power, and you're back in the exact same position of being under a hostile government.
Can any of the corporations with power put people in jail or confiscate your property for disagreeing with them? Can they get you fired for teaching something that is “too woke”. Did you not see what the governor of Florida did with Disney because they had the nerve to disagree with him?
Are you really okay with giving government that power?
Show me the steps that would need to happen for Google to harass me for walking down the street because I don’t look like I belong in my own neighborhood.
You attempt to go to your local grocery store. They use 'Google Identity' which they are perfectly allowed to as a private business. You are accused of sending spam by Google (who the hells knows why, they never explain anything) and you are barred access.
Being the staunch libertarian you are, you leap over the public roadway afraid of catching communism if you touch it and go to the grocery store across the road. It turns out they are using 'Amazon Identity' and via an information sharing agreement with Google (private businesses can share information about you, right?), and you're also denied access to that store.
You'll go to another store, right.... Oops, turned out after we got rid of monopoly laws there are only two different stores in your community after consolidation of the industry. Luckily for you there is a toll road that you can take a 30 minute drive to another place that uses a different set of identifiers to let you in.
We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!. Have you forgot the history of the Pinkertons, or are you just blindly ignorant of that part of US history?
This is what police will do today to people who disagree with them
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/08/23/us/marion-county-record-n...
> We busted monopolies and company stores years ago because businesses harassed and murdered people left and right!….
I’m sure I need to be more worried about Google murdering people than some yokels claiming they were doing a “citizens arrest” where the prosecutor covered up video taped evidence…
https://www.wtoc.com/2022/12/28/timeline-former-brunswick-da...
But I guess I should be more worried about Google putting a cookie on my computer…
Not that I would ever personally use Chrome
Even better, we had your magical word where the police didn't exist in the past... It was not a pleasant place unless you were the strongman. The police state was just as bad back then, or bully state.
Yeah, you can choose between Google or Apple. Hooray.
It's practically impossible to avoid Google if you value having a social life. Enough people have tried.
> Reagonomics was about thinking the government is incompetent. I think the government is hostile.
Oh yeah great, so it's even worse than Reaganomics.
At least a government csn be kept in check by a construction and can be changed by elections.
On the other hand, corporations have no obligations towards you at all. It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
That’s cute in theory. But the way that the electoral college is designed, the Senate with two votes, gerrymandering etc that doesn’t work out too well in practice.
Democracy works fine if you’re in the majority - well not actually see all of the caveats above - but that doesn’t work if you are in the minority - any type of minority.
> It's the entire point of private enterprise that they can do what they want and don't owe any responsibility.
I could argue the same about law enforcement, imminent domain, civil forfeiture, and getting harassed because I “look suspicious”
We already pay a price to have regulatory watchdogs intervene when companies cheat the market and or distort the rules and impact society as a whole, so it wouldn't be unprecedented either.
We could write PHD thesis about why, but we can take a meta look at it: there's reasons they became dominant in the first place, and those reasons need to disappear before it's easily replaceable (of course additional reasons will pile up the longer the browser stays dominant)
I certainly don't feel like I am the product when I use Wikipedia.
Do you think large corporations will donate to support Chrome developers who get paid at the level of Google employees?
People aren’t willing to donate to support Firefox. It’s funding mostly comes from Google.
> Ignoring the fact that this is not how it works - there are plenty of services where you pay and still are the product
That refutation of their statement is not how logic works. They made a !A -> B statement ("not pay" -> "you are product"). Your statement, ! (A -> !B), which is equivalent to B -> !A is orthogonal to their statement.
The article seems pretty reasonable to me actually. It establishes what a cookie is, then contrasts that with what Chrome is doing, then explains the tradeoffs and Google’s claims, then gives the reader options to make their own choice.
Seems like good journalism to me.
reads like so much sleeper propaganda for The Selfish Ledger style abuses.
I don't think any discussion of the trade-offs between privacy and tracking is complete unless the horrifying abuses of tracking are also discussed, like government contractors spying on people without cause.
The last line of the article for me is different: “We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.” (Emphasis mine)
Which in context:
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
Is a very clear pro-privacy statement to me. This is our data and is owned by us and we should revolutionize how we think about that.
But bad actors are a much harder problem than computer vision or AI or recommendation engines or just about anything else non-adversarial. It's why discovering climate change 50 years ago hasn't led to a solution since. It's why we can't just educate people out of misconceptions, we have to actively fight against people trying to keep them wrong and make them wronger (and it's why institutions have lost so much trust that this becomes possible).
The only defense against this is virtuous people in power, but our system has done an incredible job - somewhat intentionally - of making sure that they aren't. Investors aren't lining up to support someone who'll make 10% less profit to avoid some horrible externality.
you only believe that because it was advertised, by the company who is the number one for advertisement, who would have though?
i workedv with JavaScript performance at a top10 alexa site when that was talked about. chrome and firefox (and ie, heh) were always close. but all the chrome promoters focused on the aspects chrome was better... which changed monthly btw. today chrome string concatenation was fast. tomorrow firefox using string array mergers, etc.
anyway, just created an account to point this wrong assumption out, even if it was posted as a joke. and i did have to solve a challenge (captcha) by the very advertising company we are talking about. sigh.
on edit: admittedly this was because I was too lazy to change, but later on that laziness started looking like moral backbone!
And every time I mention this, I get a ton of excuses, from people that should know better, that they can't leave Google. Boo woo.
There might be exceptions, but to the large majority of other lazy tech users, this is on you. Enshittification doesn't happen in a vacuum. You are passive actors to a shittier web.
Chrome is installed by default on the handheld computer system most people use, with AFAIK over 50% market share. Given that unfortunately more and more people are using handheld computers as their main or even only computing device, this is very relevant.
> Everyone that uses Chrome, went out of their way to download it.
Wasn't one of the drivers for Chrome's popularity that it came bundled with other desktop software people downloaded and installed? These people didn't go out of their way to download and install Chrome, that decision was made for them by someone else.
> government should stop people from using their own free will?
I believe those who want government intervention want it on the browser manufacturer side, not on the user's side.
And if that 50% (actually 40% in the US) didn’t have privacy invasive Chrome installed - they would still be running Android which is made by the same company.
Rather, if the authorities were to do anything, they would regulate to redress the imbalance and give back power to users to control how corporations use their data. There is no voluntary solution as it is, and the state says it exists to protect our rights.
I might even be so bold to say it is necessary because advertising is a mental health problem.
Additionally, the monopoly is enforced because of the manipulative brand recognition. Chrome = Google = The Internet in many people’s heads. It is difficult to break this hold without intervention, but if it could be done that would be great.
It’s a poor excuse that most people think Chrome is the internet. When they are connecting to the internet do you really think they think they are connecting to Google?
Hell yes.
Those benefits don't require us being stalked around our entire online lives: the online store already knows when I bought a toothbrush¹. Unless they are trying to argue that telling every retailer on the planet when I last bought a toothbrush, or other healthcare products, is a good idea?!
Same for the birthday card if I bought one online. This example is even worse: potentially not just tracking my personal information but that of another person too, much like Facebook's “shadow profiles” for people who aren't even using the service themselves.
If I were a millionaire, and still as bitter at the world as I am while currently not being one, I might have a PI follow that writer for a bit, so I can helpfully send reminders, to illustrate how badly ill-conceived this take is…
That’s not a healthy fantasy. The “following” part is especially creepy. There’s a contact the author link on the site. If you care to contact her it’s just a couple clicks away. No reason to hire a stalker.
Why are you so angry at the author and not at the people who actually made Chrome do this?
/s
But; there is now the robot equivalent of a PI stalker in your browser. It's not a person, but it's still reporting all your browser activity. Except for the 'physical human', that seems like a pretty similar analogy, right? Because for me, it's equally creepy.
You should really re-read the article. It does not support the change to Chrome or the tracking that Google does.
I can call out that danger without supporting widespread user tracking.
That’s not an ok thing to say or believe.
1) The author doesn’t support what Google is doing.
2) The author isn’t tracking anyone.
I think that was the point. It's an analogy for what the article is talking about. The behavior of Chrome is legitimately creepy.
I'm not advocating this approach. But it's not entirely off base.
Further this is a pro-privacy article. The author seems to have a good grasp of the situation and has communicated it well to a general audience. It even concludes with how to turn the feature off and a call to reconsider how your data is being used.
But I do understand the temptation.
- The author is defending analogous behavior
- Therefore the author is ok with this behavior
- Therefore the behavior is ok to use on the author
It's not actually ok, but nobody actually did it either. They just made a snarky comment on the internet to make a point, which has a much lower bar than actually doing the thing.
There are better ways to make a point than sharing a fantasy about having someone stalked. It’s a joke until it isn’t.
My reading of the thread is that this is the fundamental presumption of the thread.
I think your differences with the OP go deeper.
> It’s a joke until it isn’t.
My reading wasn't that it was necessarily a joke, but making a point.
Sort of like threatening to put a camera in the bathroom of someone who says they have "nothing to hide" when discussing the patriot act.
It makes the point in a more visceral way than a simple argument ever could, and gets the point across quite well.
Top two readings on my end are that this is either a person who really didn't want to write this article that was ordered to, or someone who is trying to be maximally defensive of google without actually lying (possibly someone with nostalgia for the 2000-2005 era when they were the internet's good guys).
You have simultaneously completely missed and directly stated the point I was trying to make. Yes the following part is creepy, and that is exactly what the author is extolling the benefits of in an online context.
Maybe for you² or I the collection of personal & habit data poses little risk when³ it leaks out. My life is too boring and on the beaten track to have much juicy to hide! But there are people for whom the collection and subsequent leaking of data about their habits could be significantly harmful. I do not trust that this system is safe from un-de-personalisation. And from a more selfish & mercenary PoV, if Google are going to use my device to serve their business plan⁴, they aren't doing it for free.
--
[1] no, it won't, if I was going to learn the lesson I would have done so on one of several past occasions…
[2] I presume
[3] not if, when
[4] by blocking third party cookies in their browser and replacing with a system they control, they would gain an advantage over other ad-tech businesses
> Lastly, it’s good to remember nothing truly comes for free. Software costs money to develop. If you’re not paying towards that, then it’s likely you – or your data – are the product. We need to revolutionise how we think about our own data and what value it truly holds.
You made some edits. It’s strange to me that you seem to be interpreting my position as somehow ok with what Google is doing. I am not ok with that. I don’t think the author of TFA is either.
These things don't change unless someone important becomes a victim, otherwise its just collateral damage.
a nod to a fragment of well known manifesto. The sooner we ban all forms of such tracking the better we will be as society.
i think it's an absolutely disgusting invasion of supposedly personal communication spaces. My ex "works" (cold messaging people on linkedin) for a startup that does this and i genuinely don't understand how otherwise lovely amazing people can throw their morals under the bus like that and willingly dedicate 40+ hours of their lives week after week to making the world a shittier place.
If not, I don’t think the comment is appropriate.
Upvoted, of course. You summed up everything we have to say about it in just two words, in perhaps the best possible way.
Both Chrome and Edge are just hostile towards my browsing experience. Chrome keeps on rolling out new settings to pilfer my browsing data. Edge will just kill all of my settings to anything Microsoft wants.
Arc and Firefox are working reliably at the moment but Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime.
Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it. I don't know what's going on at Mozilla but they seem to lack any vision, they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...
> Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox
> Mozilla [...] seem to lack any vision
> they're just existing as an option without trying to be the best option
It's not Firefox hate, it's disappointment in Mozilla.
Just because I'm criticizing something doesn't mean I hate it. I want it to be better, and that's something Firefox needs if it wants to get out of the bottom in terms of usage.
Most of it is a performative rant, sort of like a stand-up comedy routine. The target is just material for the routine; nobody takes the comedian too seriously. Every HN thread has it.
If we kept trying to innovate paper, it would just be annoying too.
Sure their sales team is extremely aggressive in corporations and bribe/take out to expensive concerts/sportsball games to sell Power Automate/Office crap.
But from a consumer level, there is almost no reason to use Microsoft services in 2023. Maybe if you are a hardcore gamer and need 60kfpsUltra the day a game is released.
And I was a big fan of Edge when it came out as an alternative to Chrome. There's always an arc (pun intended) where the product goes the profit-at-all-costs direction and chooses to exploit it's users (looking at Chrome/Edge). I will move away from Arc the moment it chooses to do so without allowing me an alternative way to support them.
Firefox sucked, weirdly slow.
>2022+
Firefox is just a normal browser. Although, FF on linux was buggy with Spotify. Had to use chromium.
will happily pay any eventual battery price on the laptop
On Android, they also do things right (ok, subjectively) and keep the address/navigation bar on the bottom, so I don't have to stretch to reach the most-commonly used UI elements.
Made the switch around 3 months ago to Firefox and it's been great.
I don't miss anything from Chrome and it's a really solid and fast browser. Mobile iOS could be a bit faster but it's okay.
Desktop Version is the best browser out right now (in my opinion)
Mobile Firefox in iOS is just a wrapper of Safari's Webkit. I use it as I like the syncing features.
Neither Chrome or Safari ever have these issues for me on iOS.
I would very much miss AppleScript support. It’s the number one reason I (and many users of my tools) don’t touch Firefox. Fortunately, Webkit browsers (Safari, Orion) have got that covered. Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are a more common choice.
One might think the introduction of Shortcuts would be the best time to retire AppleScript, yet Apple made it possible to run shortcuts via AppleScript and one of the standard tasks allows you to run AppleScript from within.
That sounds pretty useful! any chance that script is on gist.github.com or elsewhere?
https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/automations/automat...
The person who has to access a site that takes advantage of that parsing trick every day, I assume.
That having been said... This is an ecosystem thing and if everybody were to switch to Firefox it would be Chrome that had the weird rendering bugs because people would be testing on Firefox first and wouldn't be using layouts that Firefox didn't handle cleanly.
“The intent of the Topics API is to provide callers (including third-party ad-tech or advertising providers on the page that run script) with coarse-grained advertising topics that the page visitor might currently be interested in.”
https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics#the-api-an...
Seems like a bad business move to me.
Maybe because I have adblock, but I just don't get these ads other people talk about.