PieFedGoogle gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
submitted by
Rimu
edited
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-…
If you can, use Firefox.
submitted by
Rimu
edited
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-…
If you can, use Firefox.
Switching away from Chrome is something that is always worth repeating, but just FYI this happened last September and isn't "new". If you're on Chrome and are only just now realizing this, it's been your reality for the last 5 months.
The scary part is presenting it as a fucking privacy feature with no consequences.
Yeah Google has cleverly re-defined privacy as "give all your data to us and we will protect it from prying eyes".
People love it though. So private and easy and awesome for scrolling.
lmao what the fuck kind of dystopia are we living in
So this means that the internet could have always worked fine without invasive cookies and everything they told us about it being impossible was just a lie.
Cookies serve important purposes for doing things like keeping you signed in as you navigate through multiple pages on a site.
The issue is that most parts of the internet were developed by people more interested in all the cool stuff you could do with it, and not at all concerned about the potential misuse by large multi billion dollar corporations.
You defend cookies in general. But the person youre replying to might have meant third-party cookies by "invasive cookies" ?
I'd suggest a password manager. Its not the prettiest solution but its worth it.
Cookies are a part of the http protocol and the server side design of the websites themselves. You can’t just replace them with a password manager on your individual client.
no a password manager can't replace cookies, Like a JPEG can't replace a 2 hour long film.
I have however forgone cookies for the most part. Great for privacy.
I'd recommend keepassxc, bookmarking and some addons like ublock, no script, libredirect. Most sites still work and the few that don't aren't worth my time
It'd make the world a better place, but a big company would make slightly less money, therefore it's unthinkable to even attempt it.
See also: vehicle emissions standards
In the case of Google, the effect on advertising bringing in "slightly less money" is an understatement :)
Google's utopia is humanity's dystopia.
Chrome got blacklisted by our IT dept because of this.
"Ads are attack vectors."
And mine is making the switch from Firefox to Chrome next year. I'm so fucking mad about it.
Ditto. The security department made the push because too many people were installing unapproved addons like ublock. They are mandating chrome, "for security". LMAO
The irony is that people are signing into chrome with personal gmail and leaking stuff.
You can lockdown user addons in both chrome and firefox via GPO. You can also auto install them with the same policies if you like. Both browsers have enterpise admx files available.
Your security department sounds like they are bad at their jobs.
First time in corporate?
Nah. I work in the field.
Im well aware of bad security teams. Looks like they got one.
Came here to say the exact same thing. It really is amazing to me just how many IT professionals are bad at their jobs.
Tech is a boogie man to many executypes. I've seen plenty of IT pros that were in over their head but smooth enough con men. If they keep coming up with things to throw money at/trim money out of convincingly they have long and successful careers.
I don't think it's worse than any other office job.
Meanwhile, I'm over here unable to find an IT job :')
uBlock Origin is pretty much approved by Mozilla and ads are a big attack vector while Chrome is spyware.
If they use Windows, you can use Firefox Portable of PortableApps.
Change of manager?
Not sure, it's a big corpo so the decision is far from me. Probably bribes or a C level exec that likes Chrome on his home laptop.
Switch to Edge would make sense due to how well it integrates with things like your Entra ID account, choosing Chrome now is bizarre. We also had Chrome as primary browser for years, but now we are pushing Edge as primary browser. Firefox was and still is an option for us as well.
Chrome hasn't worked for months on our network due to this and was removed recently with the latest updates last week
Lfg
Lfg?
Let's Fucking Go
Lesbian for gay. It's online dating slang
Looking for group (usually to play games with)
Nah
Waiting to hear if my company follows suit. Most of our internal tools are built with Chrome in mind, so it would be a big effort to standardize on something else.
Chrome is pretty much the defacto standard for web. If it works with chrome, you're probably safe.
Respect.
Meanwhile my work mandates that we must use Edge. It's fine from a usability perspective but I would much prefer my beloved Firefox at work, especially with the tab groups they have where you can have multiple different sessions
I've been using Edge at work. I literally made the decision as "this is a Microsoft heavy shop, Microsoft is pushing Edge hard, and Bing is kinda good now, so let's see how this goes" and I haven't had a need to switch back.
I use Edge's different profiles for testing, work stuff and personal stuff to keep them nicely separated and prevent any from bleeding too hard into eachother
"Did any user in the world want a user-tracking and ad platform baked directly into their browser? Probably not, but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won't make people switch to Firefox."
Their idea is that is hides all the user info from advertising companies. Downside is your browser is an ad slot machine.
Which is best?
Tracked or ad machine?
I'm more surprised people aren't talking about the fact that since it's running on the client side, someone would just figure out a way to hack and block all the ads even easier.
This also further consolidates Google's advertising power. Block all their competitors from gathering the information and give them a neutered "topics list". Google still maintains every ability to allow their own products and ad platform to bypass and use the full information.
They are an ad company first. But yep now google will be the main advertiser in town
Because the entire design of it is to mathematically prevent you from having the option to hack or block the ads. THe way to get around it is to... not use chrome.
It hides user information from companies which aren’t Google. The best is not using anything Chromium based.
Extensions require APIs from the browser to work, and Google is going to nerf the APIs which allow for ad blocking. Extensions don’t have unfettered access to the DOM. FF used to be like that, but Chrome never allowed that.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. How does this directly and noticably harm the user experience of the average user of chrome? If it doesn't then there's no incentive for them to switch.
Not everyone knows about this kind of thing or cares. Firefox has to be significantly better in obvious ways and market that to grow their market share.
At least better in obvious ways that normies care about.
I wish I could stick to Firefox but I've been having trouble with looping captchas on there. 90% of the time Firefox works fine but there's still a handful of websites that just refuse to work unless I'm using chrome.
Some websites intentionally change behavior based on your user agent. There are plenty of extensions for Firefox that let you change it so sites think you're using chrome instead. It's wild to me that's even a thing, but ¯\(ツ)/¯
It's also already built into Google Play Services. Remember this when they claim a monopoly is good for "security" reasons.
Amazing how Google and Apple differ on so much, but in this respect they are in total agreement...
Security isnt always good. Look DRM.
Security is a good cop out to justify a lot of bullshit
Indeed it is. Unfortunately though it's also important enough that it means people will go along with fascist stuff if the "security" excuse is used, and people who stand up to it will be mocked and ridiculed at best, or be accused of being cyber attackers at worst.
Does this only affect Chrome or all Chromium based browsers? Are Brave and Edge going to be implementing this too?
Just Chrome in this instance, as it spies for Google. Any anti ad blocking features go though to all chromium based browsers and it is better to switch Firefox. If that browser disappears we won't have a good alternative anymore.
It is better to switch to Firefox. But chromium forks can generally do whatever they want, it's just a matter of maintenance burden. e.g. nothing is stopping a Chromium fork like Brave from running a manifest v2 compatible appstore, but it'll cost money to make, maintain, and operate, plus you have less discoverability as an app developer when using a smaller app store.
Can we be certain this isn't in the obsfucated binary blobs provided by Google? How can people act like Chromium and Chrome based browsers are free from Google BS when most of them still use precompiled hunks of executable provided by Google that we can't see into?
Do they use the binary blobs? I figured MS, Vivaldi, the random Chromium in the distro repos stripped those out or replaced them with their own secret bins before compilation.
Just Chrome
Supporting Chromium is to support Google’s control on the web. You choose.
Lemmy pushes hard for Firefox, but Vivaldi has not implemented this and will likely hold out as long as possible on it.
posted in 9/7/2023, 3:35 PM
All google products are spyware. Although technically they should be called "trackingware".
Why are we posting news from September?
OP: * Wake me up when September ends *
Nobody did. OP just woke up.
The Eternal September.
don't be google
Which is blatantly evil.
eww icky also this article is old
Another beautiful day of ditching chrome for Firefox a long time ago
I used to use the good browser. But then they changed what the good browser was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me.
ITLL HAPPEN TO YOU
Mozilla Phoenix user here. Good old times. Then Firebird came along. Then Firefox... What an odd name change that was, IMO. Firefox. Huh.
Then Chrome came and I jumped on that ship for years until the new revamped Firefox came in 2018, and as it looks nowadays, I won't ever leave Firefox until it dies of death.
Chrome has a pretty sleek design these days, but my conscience tells me I can't use it.
I use Chromium for web development (testing purposes only), but I'm not sure if Chromium is any better. At least I'm not signed in to it.
They ditched Phoenix because the bios manufacturer had that copy right. There's a whole story behind it.
Firefox in China is also known as a red panda
Ah, so that's the reason. I never bothered to find out. Thanks! Only 20 years later or so 😅
Lol I only found out about a month ago. So I'm in the same boat.
js const google = "be evil";bash set companies = {"only_care_about":"money"}for(Company company : getAllCompanies()) { assertFalse(company.isYourFriend()); }All test cases passed.
I feel among friends...
What's with Lemmy and reposting really old things?
This is the Internet Explorer of forums.
Well, it's OP's fault, unless it's a bot.
For sure. I more mean it happens a lot, so probably that's the kind of crowd that is/was attracted here? Or we have a lot of bots.
I would ask "Whats with Lemmy and telling people what software to use?". I am all in favour of being aware of the pros and cons but let people decide for themselves once they are aware.
WELL I HOPE YOU FUCKS LIKE SOME WEIRD ASS PORN AND SHITPOSTS
I'm on board with this call to action :P
I'm gonna spin up a Windows VM and see how many porn sites and open chrome sessions i can spawn
don't need a VM for that... it's basically my daily challenge 🤪
Printing bumper stickers of this now.
Honestly, in general, this could be my new life motto.
If your version of Chromium has the ability to disable 3rd party cookies then it's not affected by this, yet, but eventually they will program an "alternative" way to provide this data to advertisers so definitely start shopping for a new browser I guess.
Duck duck go has become a pretty good viable alternative to google using it full time now.
I’ve been using it as my main search engine for around a year now. I accidentally used google today to look up “best screwdriver sets” and the results were all ads instead of results with screwdriver set reviews. I put the same thing in DuckDuckGo and immediately got relevant results.
Googled the pirate bay and it wouldnt.
Unless the first link after a link to the wiki, www. piratebayorg.org is the correct place to go..
Duckduckgo first result was the correct result
Odd. I just tried to google "pirate bay" and the top result was correct. Personalized results?
Must be
I use it for everything except maps, there is no real alternative to Google maps as far as I know
Magic Earth is neat
I will check it but I doubt it will be as good for a rural european city as Google maps is.
Have you tried open street map? The geography nerds building that have a surprisingly up to date and high quality map of the rural midwestern region I live in so you might be pleasantly surprised
Which is getting worse now too.
It now searches "related" locations to what you searched for to show you more bought ads for locations instead of what you looked for originally. Get ready for the slow crawl of enshitification of maps now too.
Their maps are pretty bad, there are better alternatives although it can depend on your region. Navigation and POI search wise though they still seem the best to me.
It's just dressed up bing, it's also going downhill
Bing has gotten surprisingly good recently though?
kagi
37 upvotes for a completely off-topic comment. Yay!
Interest of avoiding Google's ad platform which is arguably more invasive you should use a browser in search engine that is not developed by Google thus use duck duck go. I mean it's at least tangentially related.
Only a matter of time when Chromium operating subsystem start to be incompatible with Firefox.
So, all those years creating "web standards" are for nothing, as turned out with too many standards no one is able to implement them, leaving only one existing browser to still operate. We won't even know if websites are compatible with a standard anymore, because Chrome interpretation might me different from any other.
Oh it was for *something*! It allowed Google to take over using Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" philosophy.
What Google is doing now is exactly what Microsoft did back in the Netscape Navigator / Internet Explorer days.
It's almost like the tendency to monopolise is somehow baked into the ruling economic ideology, huh?
Market economies = great. Capitalism = shit. There's a subtle but meaningful difference.
Capitalism is great, it just needs a strong and unbiased referee. Of course that can be said about any political or economic system.
So you're saying strong regulation from some entity that isn't driven by the same motives for profit is needed?
That's my point. You're conflating "market economies" to "capitalism". They aren't the same. Markets existed thousand of years before capitalism.
Just like "capitalism" has been conflated with "market economy", "communism" has been conflated with "socialism". The failed communist states all tried planned economies, which meant no market economies, which are necessary for thriving societies.
Socialism is when the means of production are "owned or regulated" by the government. Strong, well regulated markets are by definition, socialist.
I also sort of slightly disapprove of perpetuating the "well mothing's perfect (so we shouldn't bother trying to fix the most obviously broken bullshit systems despite having solutions)" -notion.
Web standards are the literal opposite of that. You're arguing against the web itself.
It's worrisome, but it's not exactly the same.
We'll see whether they get abusive, and whether the Federal antitrust laws will come in and nearly dismantle the company like they did to Microsoft.
It was a power grab not a standardization. They planned this to wall you outta their networks if you won’t let them spy on you.
September news?
Wake me up when September ends?
Security Now mentioned this too:
https://infosec.pub/post/8359932
My question as a total luddite is whether or not it will be possible for Chromium based browsers to maintain a version without this. I use Firefox on all my devices so it's not an issue, but I'm curious about other popular browsers, especially those like DDG or brave that emphasize privacy.
Yes, Chromium, from which Chrome places proprietary parts on top of, is an open source project, so anyone can fork it and remove telemetry and tracking. Most browsers are in fact forks of Chromium - e.g. Edge (which replaces Google's trackers with Microsoft's own), Opera (which puts in trackers going back to a Chinese corporation), Vivaldi (which doesn't seem to do tracking but has proprietary parts so is not verifiable) - or, on the privacy respecting side Brave (which is all open source and doesn't track you once you click opting out on its reporting back to Brave and crypto rewards stuff), Ungoogled Chromium (which tends not to be updated all that quickly) and a few others.
Possibly but they would have to take chromium and fork it
I was just thinking about it and I had switched to Firefox back when I left Reddit over the whole API thing and joined Lemmy.
next up: every page requires shitty chrome or login with google.
then the big shrug and all continue using chrome, iphone, amazon and the other evils.
if you are using any of the above YOU are the problem.
thoughts and prayers. wasch mich, aber mach mich nicht nass.
From the article...
In star Trek, they use sonic showers.
I'm just offering the translation, I'm not the one who made the comment. You'll want to reply to the person that I replied to.
Just... change the shortcut icon???
pretty sure that's a /whoosh
It's getting harder to remain compassionate towards people who keep using chrome.
People who care make the switch so not sure what there is to feel compassionate about.
Its kinda nice they slowed YouTube down first, that got at least 3 people i know into using firefox, though if i still want to annoy them i could tell them to run a invidius docker instead.
Are you serious? You can't be compassionate toward people who use a certain *browser?* It's probably because they don't understand/know/care. 🤷♂️ Educate them.
Nuance is dead.
Long live nuance.
In some ways, it is unavoidable, because chrome is also embedded in Windows, and the electron framework. You can't blame someone for using it that way.
Does anyone know what the implications are for Vanadium?
its just chrome, but if j were used I'd be switching to ff. even it it goes to shit, its open source, so it can always be picked up by the community
Mozilla is making a great pivot to integrate AI into Firefox. Totally what people want. /s
... with features like local-only (i.e. privacy-respecting) language translation. Good.
No! AI bad!
The Librewolf project is up to date Firefox core with some hardening and the telemetry going back to Mozilla removed - good stuff.
I want it, and I want it in a browser that isn't controlled by Google.
Shatter.
Was it ever any surprise they got their way? They're basically unopposed.
The main reason I haven't switch to Firefox is that it doesn't have a "tab group" feature nearly as functional, polishedg and usable as Chrome's.
How dare you have a different opinion! This is Lemmy!
So convience over privacy, got it. That is pretty much what made Facebook rise to fame.
Maybe try Vivaldi? Chromium?
Thanks for the suggestion, I haven't heard of Vivaldi before
Then you don't take your personal data security seriously.
Anyone who trades security for convenience deserves neither.
I'm not sure that quote is especially helpful. We trade security for convenience all the time - if things were *too* secure, we wouldn't be able to do anything with our computers.
We're in a lose/lose scenario here. Google has been inserting ad-tracking and soon will be nuking ad-blockers.
Then you've got Firefox wanting to implement AI soon at the cost of employees.
Is there really anywhere else we can go before both of their shit hits the fan?
I don't think we should equate Firefox's AI plans with other ones.
Firefox's AI will be trained entirely locally with data that you choose to give it, and won't send information back to Firefox.
By the sounds of it it won't be a chatbot either, but rather an aid for finding more sources, pointing out fake reviews, assisting in (offline, local!) translation, etc.
My two main issues with AI are unethically sourced training data, and hoovering up personal information when you use it. Neither are a problem for Mozilla's AI plans. This is how AI *should* be done.
Well this is the thing here. We're in an era of time in technology where we DON'T want people having as much of our data. Whether it's for good or bad use, we just don't want it. How hard is that for these companies to comprehend?
The internet was fine without this sort of thing. We were fine without AI. Why complicate it at all?
Firefox is open source, bullshit can be excised if necessary
Maintaining a browser is crazy hard. If Firefox goes to shit, it would require some serious foundation to maintain a good fork.
Yes, and expensive. This is often overlooked when people just say don't worry it's FOSS. The enshitification happens slowly, and by the time there is outrage about how bad it becomes the last non intrusive fork might be several years old and take even more work to modernize. I'm not giving up all hope, but you are correct, it would be a very ambitious community undertaking to keep such a thing competitive with the plethora of evil browsers out there.
I chose my wording accurately, I never mentioned maintaining the whole browser
Librewolf
We need a federated browser.
Deleted by author
WE NEED A FEDERATED BROWSER.
Like Tor?
TOR is a forked Firefox.
You mean Tor Browser specifically.
Firefox needs to ship with IPFS & IPNS built in, then we'd have a Distributed web. Which is I think what you're asking for maybe?
Sure, lets do that.
HTTP?
Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are descent alternatives.
EDIT:
Vivaldi (based on Opera, but FOSS and not Chinese) is still good.
I didn't realize Brave inserted referral codes, TIL.
No. No they aren't.
Brave is shady af and iirc Opera got bought by some Chinese spyware company.
I only listed Opera b/c Vivaldi is based on it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)
Vivaldi is absolutely a descent FOSS product, but will agree with the Opera sentiment and have edited my post more accordingly.
I'd argue Firefox is the descent alternative.
There are a plethora of sources out there of good reasons not to use these browsers. But seriously, Firefox is an excellent browser, treat yourself to better privacy 🦊
I only listed Opera because Vivaldi's based on it, but that's about where it ends. Vivaldi and FF are the only two I use tbh.
Each of which depend on chrome and google's decisions.
Idk why you're being downvoted. All of these browsers are chromium browsers.
"...and is now banned in the EU."
Seems like a quick hop to chrome://flags allows one to disable this. chrome://flags/#privacy-sandbox-ads-apis
Ads aren't evil though. They are the main method of making people know about new things. Intrusive and privacy-defeating tracking is.
And nowadays, most online ads are intrusive and privacy-defeating tracking, so you know
Yes, absolutely. As far as I can tell, Privacy Sandbox could help with that.
You know what really helps for privacy? Adblockers.
The big problem with Privacy Sandbox is who is implementing it. I was on the fence about it for similar reasons until I saw who came out against it. Mozilla, the EFF, etc. all heavily condemned it, so I knew it was safe to say its bad (limited time, unlimited desire for knowledge and all I did not have the time to do a deep dive on Google's newest way to get people okay with invasive tracking)
I’m really confused, everyone seems pissed about this, but if you understand what they are up to, it actually is a very privacy focused way to allow for interest based ads. Like I get if you understand that and feel like all interest based ads are evil, sure. But at the same time the ‘free web’ is built on advertising. Nobody is offering an alternative.
Advertising existed fine before the tracking part became an entitlement.
I love Firefox when it works, but half the time it can't access any sites while Chrome does. It's like Firefox can't see the network.
Very rarely I face a website I can't open on Firefox because it's not compatible but half the time is surely a gross exaggeration
I don't mean half the websites don't work. I mean half the time Firefox won't load ANYTHING. It basically stops working with any DNS for a few hours at a time.
DNS is an operating system level service. Your computer is screwed, not the browser.
Chrome might be fixing it up by using Google DNS behind your back.
Firefox uses its own internal cert database which could create a similar effect.
Firefox supports DNS over HTTPs or a similar protocol that escapes my memory at the moment which could very well mess with its ability to handle DNS
I have had this issue a few times and find that usually there is some weird update or something behind the scenes and a reboot of Firefox lets it start loading again. I'm not techy enough to know why but I have found that closing all tabs is mandatory maintenance for Firefox every so often.
Netscape Navigator has the same issue!
I think that depends heavily on the pages one might frequent.
Most of the time i comfortably get by using netsurf...