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Comment by resonious | Hacker News Reader

I've also seen Google indexing pages with random values in the path that don't get linked to statically (server asks for the URL then redirects to it immediately). I'm pretty sure they index straight out of the Chrome address bar.

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Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.

This may have been part of this issue I found a few months back, as no other explanation for how UUID URLs got indexed was found: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769796

What the heck! That is terrible!

This is why i use Firefox

Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.

It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.

They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...

So why is this not the largest GDPR case in all of history?

> „popularity“

Why are you using weird quotes?

I'll take a wild guess and assume they are of a German or Polish language background. Wait 'til you encounter a French person who accidentally uses guillemets if you want one even «weirder».

Or the Nordics ”like this” or the UK ‘like this’ or Japan 「like this」. Basically every country has their own standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

This is why the <q> element exists which enables locale-aware quotation marks: https://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/questions/qa-the-q-element...

  :root:lang(en) { quotes: '“' '”' '‘' '’' }
  :root:lang(fr) { quotes: '«' '»' '«' '»' }
  :root:lang(fr-CA) { quotes: '«' '»' '‹' '›' }
  q:before { content: open-quote; }
  q:after { content: close-quote; }

There's currently 26 quotation mark varieties by default (in Firefox): https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/intl/locale/cldr-q... which are sourced from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/tree/main/common/main

Correct. Swiss German keyboard.

Thanks!

This is why Chrome begs you to login constantly and will do it automatically when you login to Gmail through Chrome. Everything you do in the browser (bookmarks, settings, address bar) is data about you sent to Adsense. No need for cookies when you control the browser and know who is using it.

Edit: also private browsing isn’t exactly private when you’re logged in to the browser.

Chrome sends home the urls you visit together with the page performance data (and probably more). That's how they build Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for the most popular sites: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux

Something worth inspecting further. We know that Chrome stores and sends the browsing history but this is an interesting vector.

I’d be more surprised if they weren’t capturing this information.

Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.

Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?

They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…

If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195

And it is actually much worse than even that:

https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...

Chromium (vs Google Chrome) usage should get more “duh, obvious” developer support, and it boggles the mind why it doesn’t.

Especially in managed environments where it’s someone’s job to keep systems autonomously updated…

>Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?

For some reason people are downvoting you, but yea, one day we'll likely see a lawsuit where they do exactly that.

There's no reason to think it isn't true. It matches every pattern of behavior observed from every tech company.

Why don’t they also read your gmail and get your bank passwords?

And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…

" Microsoft is scanning the inside of password-protected zip files for malware"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/micro...

The tools in gmail in some sense "read" all your mail in order to classify spam and do things like calendar integration. The extent to which they do other things with the information is .. unclear.

> Why don’t they also read your gmail

Boy do I have news for you.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty obvious that is literally the whole reason that Gmail even exists

Because your bank doesn't send your password to your Gmail because if they did they know Google would read it.

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