Seriously don't know why anyone is surprised that a browser built by an ad-tech company pushes the user tracking tech of that company.
Just use Firefox and have done with it - there's been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.
P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y'all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001/IE6 again.
Dropping chrome is not enough. Switch to bing (Just as good as G), or ddg if you really want. Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket. If you're installing G analytics for clients then choose an alternative (I'm open to suggestions here).
It's really time to disentangle ourselves from google. They've quietly and effectively insinuated themselves across the web. Enough is enough.
If you have your own server somewhere or access to such managed by someone you trust may I suggest using a meta-search engine like Searx [1] instead? That way you get to swat a whole cloud of flies in one fell swoop:
1: no personal tracking or profiling data for the search providers
2: no 'personalised' search
3: search results from several providers condensed into one list, i.e. more results for the same query
You can also use one of the public Searx instances [2] if you trust them enough not to do their own profiling. By default Searx does not use cookies but there are other ways of tracking individual browsers so that is not a guarantee for tracking-free browsing.
Bing is nowhere near "(Just as good as G)". If it was, a lot more people would have already switched. As of now, it's surprisingly behind Google in almost all but the most basic searches.
What's the alternative to Android though? Apple has its own well-documented issues, as well as a rather large price-tag. I just use my phone for maps and some chat services, don't need a very fancy phone. Even the iPhone 7 is listed at £449, which is already £150 more than I paid for my Sony Xperia.
I wish stuff like HP WebOS or Meego was still alive, but as far as I know, Apple and Google are the only serious players in town at the moment :-(
I've found Startpage and its sister site IxQuick to be a good alternative to Google. Same search results with a lot of detritus filtered out, keeps you out of Google's search bubble, and it has built in proxy features.
Instead of Bing, which tracks you for monetization on Microsoft's behalf (though I trust Microsoft with my information more than Google), try DuckDuckGo. It uses Bing as a back end but, like Startpage, proxies the query so your information and identity never hits Microsoft's servers. It's also a much cleaner page code-wise than any other search engine I've seen. It often comes up with more relevant results than Startpage; I find myself often searching both for the same subject so I don't miss what I'm looking for.
It would be nice also for websites to have an alternative to recaptcha. I hate to have to train google's models for free just to access a website. I'd prefer to do some work for data that can be openly accessed (OpenStreetMap for example).
Honestly I don’t think I even do that many actual searches any more, maybe I work too much, or am just odd?
The most frequent services I use, after thinking about it, are:
- local business/food/bars (hours, reviews)
- driving directions
- accessing email to confirm a signup/lookup a receipt/license etc
- events, theater showtimes
- flight prices
- pay bills etc
- check reviews/HN/ random articles.
Most of these I access directly or could be provided by any basic app/search engine.
After reviewing this list, you are left with a few extremely low margin services and a dismal grouping of actual usage, at least seemingly from Google’s point of view.
I’m not saying I’m better than a non power user (mom etc), but are they really worth more? Does clicking on Pinterest links half of the day, or forwarding political/funny emails really have value to 3rd party companies? (Google etc)
Maybe in the short term, there is a circular, ad revenue generation model, but is it really sustainable?
I can't believe that this needs to be said here, but don't use Microsoft products if your goal is to avoid dark patterns and user monetization. Microsoft is at least 10 times more corrupt than google.
I'm stuck on deciding what my primary mail provider will be. I do not mind paying a few bucks a month, would anyone have a suggestion? Regarding drive replacement, I will probably host a nextcloud instance.
Im a longtime ios user thinking of switching to android soon - can you elaborate on android spying? All android devices? How do they spy and what do they gather? I hadnt come across this in my research so far
You might want to take a look at AT Internet, they're GDPR compliant and have been in the business for a long time. It's more of a B2B company though. They have big companies as clients, mostly in France and Europe (BBC)
Is there a good alternative for google photos? I remember I looked for one few months ago after I got a little freaked out by google facial recognition, but didn't find any good alternative.
> Then ditch android which is the spy in your pocket.
To what? iOS spies even more by default (no way to disable AGPS vs. opt in on Android) and doesn't allow using privacy-enabling apps by default (system-wide ad/tracker blocker, real Firefox, Signal, local maps, etc.) unless you hack your phone. Worse, it doesn't let you develop for your own phone without rebuilding weekly or paying a yearly fee for the privilege. Between the two evils of Google and Apple, Google remains the lesser evil by a long stretch.
That’s pretty much the reason Google has a browser in the first place. Most normal users don’t really grok the difference between ”browser” and ”Google” anyway.
If I remember correctly, that's what Google said when Chrome was introduced. Browsers at that time did not adequately support their services, so they made their own browser.
It's sad to see people jumping between the same browsers, when the amount of change between each jump is getting smaller and smaller. All of them are becoming more hostile, just at different rates.
The outlier is (was?) IE, it kept the same interface and configurability while others continued dumbing down (although things are changing with Edge too) and it seems the massively anti-user decisions the other browsers made never really took hold at MSFT until most recently when they began sticking telemetry up the wazoo.
If you care more about user control than web standards compatibility then perhaps IE is the best choice... for now. At least it is more compatible than the "fringe" browsers like Dillo and NetSurf, or even the text-based ones. Opera, before it became another WebKit-shell, might be another good one.
(Disclaimer: No affiliation with MSFT, just someone who has watched these browser wars for a long time and saw this gradual "illusion of choice" take hold. I use various browsers depending on which site it is.)
Shows how powerful Google's brand still is with the software industry. Company was built on it, and now for at least a decade it's been exploiting that brand power to subvert any/all expectations of control over our data. And frankly we're all to blame for having the wool pulled over us.
Another confirmation that engineers and product developers are no longer in control at Google.
Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initially, very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively and the power structures move away from those driving forces.
Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.
Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. It is much easier to bizdev and market a product and engineering led system/focus, though success through this is always forgotten when massive success comes around because engineering/research and development are hard to quantify and put metrics to which the power structures move away from.
Let's hope there are factions of engineering/product focused people in Google that can gain back control.
"Okay, users are confused by how they're logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let's make them one and the same".
"Okay, but once you're logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear"
"Ugh, let's just notify the user that clearing the cookies won't clear the Google ones"
"Yeah, that works".
Come on, we're all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.
Furthermore, I see all this anger about this technical decision affecting peoples privacy, but have not yet seen someone provide a good engineering solution to the problem it was trying to solve.
Example Use Case: I was contacted by my poor old mother recently who said that she was logged into "The Google" but was seeing the wrong emails! She was horribly confused.
What had happened was that my sister had checked her email on my mothers computer and forgot to log out. My mother was logged into Chrome (as it correctly said on the top right of the browser) but didn't understand that logging in/out of Gmail was a different thing.
To blame non technical users for being confused here is unfair at the least. And I'm sure there are millions of them with the same problem.
A technical user who cares about privacy can:
- not log into Google and use an external email client for Gmail
- use Gmail in incognito
- disable Chrome auto log in via the preferences (although I haven't tried this myself some people say it works, although I've seen conflicting info about if this works in future versions of Chrome).
- use Firefox (but if you are still using Gmail I'm rolling my eyes here)
I personally don't think it is too evil that Google cares more about people like my mother than advanced privacy conscious technical users.
Also I can't see how auto syncing ones account with Chrome really damages privacy any more than what is there now? If you are logged into Gmail they have your cookies while you browse the web anyway. If you privacy conscious enough that you log out of Gmail every time you are done, fair enough, but I would suggest not using Gmail at all in that case.
But most importantly I'd like to hear a better engineering solution for people like my mother?
Everybody at Google, for anything they do, should ask a simple question on any proposal ... how does this impact user privacy for those that care?
Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so.
And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don't care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that's not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla.
So I'm not buying that.
Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)
Don't they have anybody from the legal department to oversee the decisions of developers? A wrong decision could cost them millions in fines in these days.
Hackernews needs it’s own version of infowars where people can declare and believe in their most absurd and cynical conspiracy theories regarding tech.
If that is the case, I recommend some basic privacy and security training for every engineer. I believe the root cause at Google is elsewhere though, its goal is to make money, lots of it.
Yet, it coincidentally has the properties to keep your ad tracking identity in tact, so Google can serve you ads based on your online profile. What a wonderful side effect. I'm sure they had no idea that would be the case, just pure luck.
That feels like whitewashing part of the blame that applies to engineers and product developers. We don't get to say "oh it's those pesky money people, how dare they", while drawing a salary from the same pockets.
Engineers losing control to money types and bureaucrats is a gradual process. It is not that one day Google strikes out the second word from its unofficial motto ("do not be evil"). Engineers might dislike each small step in that direction, but it is not enough to make them pack up and move (house, family, kids, etc.). Pretty quickly they are tamed by both money people and the bureaucrats -- still appreciated and paid, but as brains to be tasked, with no ability to influence company policy.
People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
They disagree with the direction the company is going so they ... quit? They apply at some other company comparable to Google, uproot their family, move across country, and get a job somewhere else?
I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
Yeah, they do. That's exactly how it works with real (certified, legally-enforced labeling of) engineering. That is, civil engineers push back against (excessive) safety-cutting to save money while drawing a salary from the same companies that want to implement such design changes. They only differ in how effectively they have organized to prevent being overruled.
Exactly, there are plenty of other companies to go working for. People working for Google at best accept a compromise, at worst are actively working against their customers (should I say users?)
That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
Yes we do. Just like Tesla employees get to critizise Musk for his Twitter market manipulation while still working their day job and drawing a sallery, and Americans can criticize Trump whithout moving out of the country.
Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
The idea that technical people are all impeccably ethical is not very plausible. Consider the scientists who promoted the claim that smoking was harmless long after it clearly was not, the engineers who concocted VW's diesel-emissions fraud, and the developers who produced Madoff's fake accounting. And, of course, this particular deception is hardly the first fall from grace on the internet.
I don't think anyone is seriously promoting that idea. The implication, rather, is a more modest proposal: That, of a company's staff, the bean counters and executives are at least on average more bottom-line-motivated and hence more likely to push for changes that will pull in cash at the expense of honesty, privacy or consistency with user expectations, when compared with the technical types.
This is simply too naive. We need regulation to stop global tech monopolities shamelessly exploiting their dominant position, be it Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and so on. I doubt this can be done properly on any other level than national.
Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn't have Intellectual Property laws?
People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.
It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.
Only market forces can alter the course now. A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way that helps their bottom line and has been calculated to not trigger a massive PR backlash among the general public. The rank-and-file Googlers tasked with enabling these misdeeds have a simple choice: remain complicit or refuse to work on these products and accept the potential consequences.
>>A decision has been made at the CEO level to aggressively use Google’s grip on the browser and search engine markets in any way
Now it's obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what's left to do now stinks. They can't hide behind the "search" and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the "fair and balanced" search expert.
Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.
Perhaps the (you won't be signed out of your Google account) language was something an engineer or product developer insisted on. Perhaps they figured that was their part, and that it's up to the rest of us to take 10 minutes and switch to Firefox so data-driven Google knows this was a bad idea.
Mozilla are winding down their efforts to make Firefox competitive. They are not planning to make a full servo browser anytime soon and they are transfering resources to VR and other things. This is disapointing.
You can't blame them, their user base is in free fall.
>>Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.
If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft).
But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what's to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss.
I'm also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture/process is fairly dead by now.
No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom.
I'm guessing most of Google's growth will now come only from Acquisitions.
Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail.
I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not...
For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.
Isn't it native to assume all the Engineer oppose to this ? Some, maybe many will be happy to work on this. This is not an illegal thing that is enforced and has severe punishment.
> Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase.
Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn't become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability).
Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you'll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they're not engineers. So you'd be amazed at how little most people would care about what's happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)
> very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively
I agree with the problem but not the cause. I don't feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street's myopic expectations of growth every quarter.
> Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.
It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it.
MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.
Yup, same. Switched to ff and bing. Was surprisingly frictionless. Next week I'll be off gmail too. Up yours google. The week after, I'm getting rid of my android phone.
I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.
In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.
Honest question: How can you trust FF when they less than a year ago silently modified installers for a small % of users, to include tracking - which then sent all browsing data to a 3rd party?
For me the performance was not quite up to the mark and had to switch back to Chrome. I guess someone (big corp ideally) should just take the v8 and the html rendering engine from Chrome and build a wrapper and keep it open sourced.
It's hubris. Right now Google know they have the power to shape things the way Google want. That's true, but it's also true that users are more powerful than Google, becoming increasingly aware of the value of their privacy, and that Chrome is paid for with their data.
Yup I switched to FF, despite its poorer performance (on Mac, anyway). My personal mail is Fastmail. My search engine is DDG. I do use Chrome for debugging web applications, as I just haven't been able to get myself accustomed to the FF dev tools... That's probably what I'll work on next.
I'd say 95% of people are happy that their accounts are all synchronised and follows them around. They pick up any device and carry on where they left off, similar to how Kindle bookmarks are synchronised across your devices.
IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.
80 years ago if you had a car then generally you'd need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you'd probably have is the tyres wearing out.
People don't want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.
The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks/programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they're currently using, because they're the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.
This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.
Only a small fraction of Chrome's user base will notice, and not even all of those will care. There are likely tech-savvy people reading this on Chrome 69 right now.
Office of 20 here. Now almost everyone's in agreement that we'll move off Chrome. And we'll recommend our families and friends do the same.
This is how Firefox (pre-bloat) gained traction at the expense of IE, and this is how chrome gained traction at the expense of Firefox/IE.
And now this is how chrome's market share will decline as tech leaders, journalists and then the public find out how much of a privacy nightmare it really is.
I agree and disagree. They didn’t get to where they are now by playing games and leaving major design decisions to seemingly the intern marketing dept. I think it’s safe to assume that information/sentiment moves much more quickly in these modern times. I second the recent HN comment that mentioned why Google chose this particular hill to die on.
Do you think they care that techies get annoyed at Chrome? If you’re browsing google.com - which most people on the internet outside of China are doing - without Chrome, you get an intrusive notice telling you that installing Chrome is the best thing you can do.
Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.
IMHO When you've got a company as large as Google that is able to do things like openly use dark patterns to trick users into giving up their location data and 99.99% of people aren't aware or use their dominant search page to nag users into using a browser that won't respect privacy setting or remove Google's tracking cookies that's the point you need to start thinking about government intervention.
Google is behaving like a malware company.
We were in this situation with Microsoft in the late 90s-early 00s. I was glad when they got a slap on the wrist and told to stop taking the piss. I hope the EU will do the same for Google.
They don't care directly - they care because it's still the same old world where techies install and configure the browser for them on their computers.
Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol' days. This is how IE lost.
News like this, and the "forced" sign-in just illustrates to me how desperate Google has become to "own all your data".
I lost all trust in public cloud after Snowden, but somehow remained convinced that yes, Google reads my email, but that's about it.
I migrated everything but email to a selfhosted solution, and simplified things a lot. Recently i've also migrated mail away from Google.
These past years have sadly proven (to me) i was right. What makes me even more sad is that the common user has very few options to avoid it.
To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn't track you, neither on Mac OS or iOS, but there's a steep price, one that most consumers are not ready to pay.
Linux may be ready for the desktop, but it's still a long way away from my parents installing it.
My best guess that Chrome works this way would be due to combining the sign-in cookies with the general cookies of the browser (e.g. 1 cookie store instead of 2).
So when you log in to Google, you log in to Chrome - and vice versa. For non-technical users this is a convenience feature, though for many it does come with privacy concerns.
Judging by the comments re cookie clearing, there is some part of the login still separate from that, but as it re-establishes itself the cookies come back and you stay logged-in to Google.
Is this perhaps preventable by having a "Guest" Chrome account? What happens then?
It doesn't have to be malicious for it to harm privacy, help them track users for advertising and to be anti-competitive.
The implementation details around cookie recreation don't matter if users are still being tracked. Especially bad if this lets them track you on third party sites that contain Google Plus buttons or advertising iframes.
By ensuring users always remain logged in to the browser they gain a strong advantage over other companies that track users. Users attempting to remove tracking cookies shouldn't find Google ones permanently bundled with the browser.
The intent was likely to aid convenience and avoid users being unexpectedly logged out, but combined with Google automatically logging users into the browser this is a sign that the Chrome team is paying less attention to user privacy than they used to.
Perhaps users who regularly clear all cookies will start using guest accounts instead. Myself I'm more concerned about the general trend of unexpected behavior.
It is either malicious, or it is negligent. Either way it erodes trust significantly. Given the trend of changes in Chrome lately, if your alarm bells aren’t ringing yet, you are probably not paying attention.
I have switched to Firefox and have used this as an opportunity to begin my transition away from GMail.
Because based on their history big tech companies (possibly with the exception of Apple) lost any benefits of a doubt.
When they screw up like that I now assume that it's intentional and unless they run into a massive pr disaster or an EU fine of a couple billions they give exactly zero fucks about their users.
Title of the post is not right, the author issued a (technically important) correction[1]:
> Brief correction: Cookies seem to get removed and re-created immediately. At least the cookie content and creation date seems to change. Nonetheless: After hitting the "remove all" button you still don't end up with an empty cookie jar.
Readit News
Just use Firefox and have done with it - there's been a series of these kinds of posts over the last couple of days with people suggesting insane workaround hacks instead of just changing their browser.
P.S. if you keep chrome because some websites only work properly there, maybe y'all should follow standards at work instead of targeting a proprietary browser like its 2001/IE6 again.
It's really time to disentangle ourselves from google. They've quietly and effectively insinuated themselves across the web. Enough is enough.
1: no personal tracking or profiling data for the search providers
2: no 'personalised' search
3: search results from several providers condensed into one list, i.e. more results for the same query
You can also use one of the public Searx instances [2] if you trust them enough not to do their own profiling. By default Searx does not use cookies but there are other ways of tracking individual browsers so that is not a guarantee for tracking-free browsing.
[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/
[2] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/wiki/Searx-instances
I wish stuff like HP WebOS or Meego was still alive, but as far as I know, Apple and Google are the only serious players in town at the moment :-(
I've found Startpage and its sister site IxQuick to be a good alternative to Google. Same search results with a lot of detritus filtered out, keeps you out of Google's search bubble, and it has built in proxy features.
Instead of Bing, which tracks you for monetization on Microsoft's behalf (though I trust Microsoft with my information more than Google), try DuckDuckGo. It uses Bing as a back end but, like Startpage, proxies the query so your information and identity never hits Microsoft's servers. It's also a much cleaner page code-wise than any other search engine I've seen. It often comes up with more relevant results than Startpage; I find myself often searching both for the same subject so I don't miss what I'm looking for.
The most frequent services I use, after thinking about it, are:
- local business/food/bars (hours, reviews) - driving directions - accessing email to confirm a signup/lookup a receipt/license etc - events, theater showtimes - flight prices - pay bills etc - check reviews/HN/ random articles.
Most of these I access directly or could be provided by any basic app/search engine.
After reviewing this list, you are left with a few extremely low margin services and a dismal grouping of actual usage, at least seemingly from Google’s point of view.
I’m not saying I’m better than a non power user (mom etc), but are they really worth more? Does clicking on Pinterest links half of the day, or forwarding political/funny emails really have value to 3rd party companies? (Google etc)
Maybe in the short term, there is a circular, ad revenue generation model, but is it really sustainable?
It seems the only option is iOS and I don't want that...
I can't believe that this needs to be said here, but don't use Microsoft products if your goal is to avoid dark patterns and user monetization. Microsoft is at least 10 times more corrupt than google.
+1 for open source I guess.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277
To what? iOS spies even more by default (no way to disable AGPS vs. opt in on Android) and doesn't allow using privacy-enabling apps by default (system-wide ad/tracker blocker, real Firefox, Signal, local maps, etc.) unless you hack your phone. Worse, it doesn't let you develop for your own phone without rebuilding weekly or paying a yearly fee for the privilege. Between the two evils of Google and Apple, Google remains the lesser evil by a long stretch.
If you want to use a web browser, then use Firefox.
Until some weeks ago I was less unhappy with Google Chrome than with firefox, but now I am kind of almost equal unhappy with both...
The outlier is (was?) IE, it kept the same interface and configurability while others continued dumbing down (although things are changing with Edge too) and it seems the massively anti-user decisions the other browsers made never really took hold at MSFT until most recently when they began sticking telemetry up the wazoo.
If you care more about user control than web standards compatibility then perhaps IE is the best choice... for now. At least it is more compatible than the "fringe" browsers like Dillo and NetSurf, or even the text-based ones. Opera, before it became another WebKit-shell, might be another good one.
(Disclaimer: No affiliation with MSFT, just someone who has watched these browser wars for a long time and saw this gradual "illusion of choice" take hold. I use various browsers depending on which site it is.)
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They were built and grew out of their initial 'don't be evil' culture.
I'll keep Chrome around, like Opera, for browser testing.
Engineering and product first is how Google won the game initially, very easy to forget that when the money rolls in massively and the power structures move away from those driving forces.
Microsoft already went through this engineering/product growth to bizdev/marketing control to stagnation and is already in the return to engineering/product first phase. Basically their own Ballmer era is what Google is entering.
Bizdev + marketing are hugely important, but the products and engineering need to be the focus. It is much easier to bizdev and market a product and engineering led system/focus, though success through this is always forgotten when massive success comes around because engineering/research and development are hard to quantify and put metrics to which the power structures move away from.
Let's hope there are factions of engineering/product focused people in Google that can gain back control.
"Okay, users are confused by how they're logged into Google but not Chrome, or Chrome but not Google - let's make them one and the same".
"Okay, but once you're logged into Chrome now, every post we check to see if we have the Google cookies to keep that sync... so that means when you clear the cookies the Google ones will automagically reappear"
"Ugh, let's just notify the user that clearing the cookies won't clear the Google ones"
"Yeah, that works".
Come on, we're all developers here, we all know how these conversations work.
Example Use Case: I was contacted by my poor old mother recently who said that she was logged into "The Google" but was seeing the wrong emails! She was horribly confused.
What had happened was that my sister had checked her email on my mothers computer and forgot to log out. My mother was logged into Chrome (as it correctly said on the top right of the browser) but didn't understand that logging in/out of Gmail was a different thing.
To blame non technical users for being confused here is unfair at the least. And I'm sure there are millions of them with the same problem.
A technical user who cares about privacy can:
- not log into Google and use an external email client for Gmail
- use Gmail in incognito
- disable Chrome auto log in via the preferences (although I haven't tried this myself some people say it works, although I've seen conflicting info about if this works in future versions of Chrome).
- use Firefox (but if you are still using Gmail I'm rolling my eyes here)
I personally don't think it is too evil that Google cares more about people like my mother than advanced privacy conscious technical users.
Also I can't see how auto syncing ones account with Chrome really damages privacy any more than what is there now? If you are logged into Gmail they have your cookies while you browse the web anyway. If you privacy conscious enough that you log out of Gmail every time you are done, fair enough, but I would suggest not using Gmail at all in that case.
But most importantly I'd like to hear a better engineering solution for people like my mother?
Given Google's size and power it's irresponsible for them to not do so.
And given that there are really smart people working for Google, including a whole department working on analyzing the threats and preserving user privacy, I won't believe for a second that nobody thought of this. Which may mean that they don't care, even if they did once. And again, given their size, their power, their potential for harm, that's not OK. With great power comes great responsibility, bla, bla.
So I'm not buying that.
Also, now that the shit has hit the fan, lets see what they do in response. Probably nothing ;-)
People accept a LOT with gradual changes over a few years that they would never accept as an upfront bulk package. This is not just in engineering. But there is a flip side to this -- once bureaucrats are in control and engineers who stay accept "that is the way we do it" as a justification they often lose energy and become set in their ways. This is more dangerous to a company than a rotting executive class. My 2c.
I don't blame the engineers one bit. I certainly don't expect the poor engineer that had to implement the cookie changes to refuse and quit his job over it.
E.g. good luck trying to be a developer at Microsoft 10 years ago in Balmer's 'embrace, extend, extinguish' model
That is to say, it's organisational dna that dictates who defines the product. Once the 'specs' have been written, hands are tied.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty small issue compared to all the other tracking they do and things like "Project Dragonfly".
That said, as a customer I'm using an Android phone because IMHO anything else is a worse choice for a number of reasons. At least I'm signed out of any Google service except Play.
Just because you are a benefitting part of an organization, it doesn’t mean you cannot disagree with management and if you disagree it doesn’t mean you have to quit or stop being critical.
People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.
It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.
Now it's obvious to everyone but I am almost certain that Google did this already with search at least since 2008. The low hanging fruit was picked with Matt Cutts being their PR mouthpiece, and what's left to do now stinks. They can't hide behind the "search" and ads are separated lie. Special mention to his pal, Danny Sullivan, the "fair and balanced" search expert.
Edited to ad: If they claim that SERPS are unbiased and not connected to ad revenue, doing otherwise would fraud. Tens of $billion worth.
You can't blame them, their user base is in free fall.
If its just one person, it often easy to fix the problem by eliminating that one person(like Microsoft).
But if an entire cartel is at work in the top layers. Like the political brotherhood, to say. It will be impossible to solve the problem until an eventual IBM like corporation will come to happen. Basically you fire one exec, and the brotherhood will bring one from their golf buddies to replace them, and this process will go on. No one know what's to be done to fix the problem, because whatever new boss you will get will be the same as the old boss.
I'm also fairly sure by now that the 20% spare time project culture/process is fairly dead by now.
No political exec will let some programmer create a project leading to creation of a new threat to their fiefdom.
I'm guessing most of Google's growth will now come only from Acquisitions.
The engineers not being in charged happened a long time ago.
To wit: the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, was never an actual engineer.
He actually learnt the ropes of his job at McKinsey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
Mainstream people dont need and dont value products being great in every detail.
I don’t know what they need. But as google is still successful with a search engine that used to be great a decade ago because it delivered results for exactly what i was looking for and nothing else, and now is more a „whatever you search, we‘ll serve you some results no matter if words you search really appear there, they seem to be happy being served anything wether it’s what they ordered or not...
For the minority with high demands on products his is difficult because we have to look for new providers again and again after the logic of growth makes companies shift to cater there products to the mainstream... after using us as beta testers and advertisers.
Microsoft were always a marketing first company. Even in the early days they sold BASIC and DOS before they'd even written a line of code. And Windows certainly didn't become the dominant desktop OS through being the best at engineering (in the 80s and 90s they were usually amongst the worst in terms of performance and stability).
Having good engineering and being product focused doesnt mean you'll have a successful product. In fact all too often it takes underhanded stunts to get your neck in front simply because most people are not like us, they're not engineers. So you'd be amazed at how little most people would care about what's happening here (assuming they even understand it in the first place)
Microsoft didn't create DOS
I agree with the problem but not the cause. I don't feel that this has anything to do with being complacent. If anything, this is the downside of being a publicly traded company that has the pressure to meet Wall Street's myopic expectations of growth every quarter.
It was not just Ballmer. When Gates was in charge, the technology was never the priority. Gates understands the tech, but MS never worked trough technology towards their goals. They used their monopoly power and bought tech, almost never build it.
MS products started to gradually improve after Gates stopped being the chief technology officer of the company.
Dead Comment
I'm a high school IT teacher and have some influence over hundreds of students each year. I've already started to sprinkle in some discussion about privacy and will be sure to inform my students about the issues. Of course I won't brow beat my students, but i will encourage them to make informed decisions.
In aggregate, over time this kind of behaviour by google will hurt them. No such thing as too big to fail in tech.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i...
Or after they (ab)used systems intended for testing features to inject, what's basically an ad? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/lookingglass
And to be honest, unfortunately, I think most of the average users just want features.
That's were google is heading its efforts :)
IMHO the vast majority are not interested in understanding in the technology, they just want their stuff to work.
80 years ago if you had a car then generally you'd need some understanding, 30 years ago spark plugs needed changing every 5k miles, points needed cleaning etc etc. Now anyone can hop in a car and without doing anything the first problem you'd probably have is the tyres wearing out.
People don't want to know how or why, they just want it to be reliable and easy to use.
The people who fix your computers or help you over the phone are the family friends who are geeks/programmers. Once the geek herd has moved on to something else, then the mass follows whatever they're currently using, because they're the ones that advocate the change. It will take a few years, but once Google has lost the geek vote, they will die a slow death like Microsoft did. At this point my money is on Microsoft taking the geek mindshare back.
This looks exactly like what happened when Chrome started killing IE.
Their gain?
- Less of a monopoly status.
Their losses?
- The privacy concerned.
- Ad-blocker users.
- Over-opinionated users.
Good move, for them.
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This is how Firefox (pre-bloat) gained traction at the expense of IE, and this is how chrome gained traction at the expense of Firefox/IE.
And now this is how chrome's market share will decline as tech leaders, journalists and then the public find out how much of a privacy nightmare it really is.
Approximately 99.99% of those people do not know what cookies are, nor do they care.
Google is behaving like a malware company.
We were in this situation with Microsoft in the late 90s-early 00s. I was glad when they got a slap on the wrist and told to stop taking the piss. I hope the EU will do the same for Google.
Handhelds are different, but computers are just like back in the ol' days. This is how IE lost.
The internal name for the feature is "DICE" (desktop identity consistency feature)
There is a build flag to disable the feature: ENABLE_DICE_SUPPORT
Dead Comment
Even YouTube's stuff are left, that's crazy.
I lost all trust in public cloud after Snowden, but somehow remained convinced that yes, Google reads my email, but that's about it. I migrated everything but email to a selfhosted solution, and simplified things a lot. Recently i've also migrated mail away from Google.
These past years have sadly proven (to me) i was right. What makes me even more sad is that the common user has very few options to avoid it. To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn't track you, neither on Mac OS or iOS, but there's a steep price, one that most consumers are not ready to pay. Linux may be ready for the desktop, but it's still a long way away from my parents installing it.
My best guess that Chrome works this way would be due to combining the sign-in cookies with the general cookies of the browser (e.g. 1 cookie store instead of 2).
So when you log in to Google, you log in to Chrome - and vice versa. For non-technical users this is a convenience feature, though for many it does come with privacy concerns.
Judging by the comments re cookie clearing, there is some part of the login still separate from that, but as it re-establishes itself the cookies come back and you stay logged-in to Google.
Is this perhaps preventable by having a "Guest" Chrome account? What happens then?
Because Google has been screwing up so much, by this point they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.
> My best guess that Chrome works this way would be due to combining the sign-in cookies with the general cookies of the browser
Why keep Youtube cookies, then? https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044286636991877120
As it is, I think it's quite transparent. You get new cookies. It shows you their age. They're new. You're still logged into your Google account.
Solution: Log out of your Google account.
The implementation details around cookie recreation don't matter if users are still being tracked. Especially bad if this lets them track you on third party sites that contain Google Plus buttons or advertising iframes.
By ensuring users always remain logged in to the browser they gain a strong advantage over other companies that track users. Users attempting to remove tracking cookies shouldn't find Google ones permanently bundled with the browser.
The intent was likely to aid convenience and avoid users being unexpectedly logged out, but combined with Google automatically logging users into the browser this is a sign that the Chrome team is paying less attention to user privacy than they used to.
Perhaps users who regularly clear all cookies will start using guest accounts instead. Myself I'm more concerned about the general trend of unexpected behavior.
I have switched to Firefox and have used this as an opportunity to begin my transition away from GMail.
Because based on their history big tech companies (possibly with the exception of Apple) lost any benefits of a doubt.
When they screw up like that I now assume that it's intentional and unless they run into a massive pr disaster or an EU fine of a couple billions they give exactly zero fucks about their users.
> Brief correction: Cookies seem to get removed and re-created immediately. At least the cookie content and creation date seems to change. Nonetheless: After hitting the "remove all" button you still don't end up with an empty cookie jar.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044543955457773573