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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites make similar errors, especially the biggest ones

So I wonder: Why are we sending out all this info. Fingerprinting is the only actual use. The number of sites using it as it should is minimal. Lets just stop giving it. They don't need a list of audio or video devices. They don't need my installed fonts. They don't believe my language settings when I whack them over the head with it. Let's just fill in defaults everywhere. Maybe provide a whitelist for legitimate sites.

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Sites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.

When you think that 90% of browsing devices are phones or laptops… beyond any possible comprehension

With weirdly sticky behavior too once you’ve left that area. My google sign in prompt was in Italian for over a decade after logging in there once on a family vacation. Only with the latest login revamp did that setting finally get purged. Everything else was always english, profile set to english etc.

I’ve just had an issue where my google searches were stuck defaulting to Sydney, Australia after being there for one week.

I think that is a pretty safe assumption from Google. People die trying to leave Sydney.

This was so annoying when visiting Poland recently. I don't speak Polish.

Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.

Prime video is amazing for this; in Germany but only dubs available? Admit defeat that the orig audio is somehow not available but not even English subtitles?!

With video I think that it’s sometimes a licensing thing. As in, the streaming service licenses subtitles from a third party and the rights are limited to specific countries.

That's a weird one. It's common for people to prefer the original audio, and most Germans understand English.

Germany has a very strong culture of dubbing essentially everything. Just finding any showing of a film in its original language at a cinema is very difficult outside of major cities for example.

Same in Spain. Often only the Spanish dubbed audio is available making the content useless to me.

With the increase in ads on streaming platforms I've just reverted back to piracy. The enshittification has gone too far.

Same in the Netherlands. It gave me everything in Dutch, even after I logged in.

Ha, I even started to receive spam mail in Polish (kind of "we got your webcam, give us money"). They're clearly using the collected data and are subject to the same problems.

Wait, how would that work for scammers?

Scammers can also buy aggregate information, just like advertisers

There's a trend in commercial software where folks keep adding epicycles on epicycles, often based on barely stat-sig wins in A/B tests, to the point of systems becoming completely impenetrable. I bet this was a result of that.

Agreed. I live in Finland, but my preferred language is English. Many many sites send me Finnish by default, although Google directions will always be in Swedish.

I seem to have to "change results to English" on google searches at least once a week when it forgets which language I've setup and used for the past ten years!

Now that google is offering translated Reddit posts my flow on my iPhone when I google something is

Google -> Reddit -> open translated post in app -> share in app with browser again -> click on show original.

I’ve never ever let any involved websites actually use my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit.

If you set the language to something that isn't the default anywhere, and isn't standard for your country (so for you, English followed by Danish would do) Google seems to respect the preference.

But you add a lot of entropy to the privacy violators.

And geolocation is often wrong. Half of IP locators locate my VPS in one country, a quarter in another country, 1000 miles away, and another quarter in a third country, 1000 miles away from the first two.

Yeah I live in Spain but don't speak the language so well. It's super frustrating when I get redirected to Spanish versions of sites. Sometimes they even redirect me back to Spanish after I deliberately choose English.

Netflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

Selecting a locale based solely on geolocation is absurd, and the reverse is equally true. Just because you prefer a specific locale doesn't mean you're physically in that country. Unfortunately, I encounter this anti-pattern far too often.

One time, I set a self-checkout machine to French to immerse myself in French training in Canada. This happened to set the payment terminal to French as well, which must have set a bit in the on-card chip.

Now, all my pay-at-the-pump interactions at gas stations are all in French. A website I was purchasing from flipped to French when I entered my card info. There were a few surprise interactions where my language preference was clearly derived from my bank card setting.

I’m just hoping that being classed as bilingual is doing wonders for my “social” score at some clandestine data clearinghouse.

A while ago a LinkedIn request from a Chinese person hit my inbox. I reluctantly pressed Accept Connection (in the email) only to find out that my LinkedIn language setting had changed to Chinese.

Now, I don't speak or read Chinese and couldn't immediately find a way to change the setting back to English. Could probably find it on the internet but .. Oh well, I don't really use LinkedIn so it's just stayed that way now.

That is some genius move by LinkedIn...

I can understand it if someone's sending out something like a Google Doc collaboration invite, especially to a non-GMail address, the email will be in the Google Docs UI language of the sender. But LinkedIn has your profile with all your preferences!

What next, a colleague shares the link to a location, you open it in your car, and your car UI turns into Chinese?

Funny, my friend in Wallonia complains about the opposite, he wants Google in French and gets it in Dutch.

I struggle with this often, but http://www.google.com/ncr does the trick and allow to choose the language later if necessary.

Yes. The browser innocently gives away tons of information for surveillance capitalism corporations to leech.

It is a if the web and browser developers lived in an innocent world

The largest browser is owned by a surveillance firm

Why anyone would use Chrome blows my mind a bit. Brave is a superior browser in every single aspect of a browser and as of rn - you do not see ads on the Internet.

It's such a no brainer, I can't comprehend it.

Are you OK with Brave using Chromium as their base?

Brave is still Chrome, you’re just kidding yourself.

Because Brave is just trying to build their own ad-network under the guise of being "privacy" oriented. It is a conflict of interest trying to get profitable selling user data while also claiming to block it. When first installed the their own ad and crypto stuff is enabled-by-default. Then throw in a few nefarious incidents, such as the affiliate link-hijacks a few years ago, and it is hard to trust them.

No browser is safe from capitalistic rot at this point.

Ads in and of themselves don't mean a browser isn't privacy-focused. In fact the most privacy focused one I can think of, Duckduckgo, is monetized by ads. All of Duckduckgo is. They're just not personalized.

I use Ungoogled Chromium (download from Github) that has all the tracking code removed. Only downside is updates are not automatic but otherwise runs flawlessly.

Yes but chrome has not created new user tracking standards. Every web browser leaks a lot of information

I want everything, everywhere be always in english by default unless I explicitly set another language or there is no english version at all. Even if it's my native language and I'm in my home country

This is one of the main reasons why I use (and pay) for another search engine than Google. It just keeps translating everything it can to the country I’m connecting from. Even results from Reddit go to an automatically translated page.

Google is really bad at handling multilingual users, or even just users that don’t want to use the language of the place they connect from. Now by default Youtube even translates the audio automatically, it’s unbearable.

And I have declared the languages I speak in my Google profile. It doesn’t seem to matter.

You do realize that the fact of paying for any service makes your usage perfectly attributable to real identity, don't you. Something that Google needed to work hard to infer with some level of certainty you actually pay for. And I'd only have so much trust in promises of respecting your privacy given by any business. Everything that can be sold is for sale, event if this meant that it could not longer claim to "do no evil".

I use kagi for a search engine.

Paying for a search engine means that I am the customer, not the product. While you are correct that my data is an asset for Kagi, it is a one shot asset, vs my subscription, which is recurring revenue.

I can look at the privacy policy for Kagi (https://kagi.com/privacy), and see that I am not at risk of having my searches logged or data shared. I trust them because violating that privacy policy puts them at risk of being sued by me, and by any investors in the company.

As you yourself stated: either company is capable of building a profile. One has promised not to do that contractually, and google, more or less, has promised to do exactly that regardless.

I still see stuff in Spanish on my phone and have not yet figured out how to reset it. Talking about Google updates like calendar, weather

> Why are we sending out all this info.

You are generalizing. Google and big providers do that, usually (US)services that need to cater to the whole world. But a huge part of the normal web still uses and _needs_ preferred language. No one wants to be forced to use geolocation.

Just one very common example are info pages for sightseeing, they are usually available in all languages that people commonly visit from and just work if you browse to them. Not to mention that geolocation would be useless anyway in that case.

It would be nice if Google actually used the preferred language. They don't give a shit. I'm still getting maps and other stuff in local language based on IP.

I logged in on deployment in the Middle East, and still have Google randomly swap over to Arabic in search and on YouTube. It has been over a decade and a half (since I was there), and I've never once tried to do any browsing in anything but English. To even drive this incompetence further, I was Navy so I have under two weeks time total of be logged in.

Frankly for a company that's a Spyware company, they sure are incompetent.

So true. It's funny how the article mentioned "privacy enhancing technologies" - how about instead, we get rid of the disgustingly huge quantity of technology devoted to removing our privacy?!

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