Submitted 2 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
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.
The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an "alternative" tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can't just not be spied on.
lmao what the fuck kind of dystopia are we living in
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 :)
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.
Googles utopia is our humanity’s dystopia.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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)_/¯
WELL I HOPE YOU FUCKS LIKE SOME WEIRD ASS PORN
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 🤪
I’m on board with this call to action :P
Printing bumper stickers of this now.
Honestly, in general, this could be my new life motto.
posted in 9/7/2023, 3:35 PM
Why are we posting news from September?
*Nobody woke him up when September ended *
The Eternal September.
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.
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.
All google products are spyware. Although technically they should be called "trackingware".
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?
Just Chrome
Lemmy pushes hard for Firefox, but Vivaldi has not implemented this and will likely hold out as long as possible on it.
Supporting Chromium is to support Google’s control on the web. You choose.
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.
Google 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
I use it for everything except maps, there is no real alternative to Google maps as far as I know
Maps
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.
It’s just dressed up bing, it’s also going downhill
Bing has gotten surprisingly good recently though?
kagi
I'm totally unable to switch from chrome, the chrome icon is really the only one that works, all others are just too hard to see
const google = "be evil";
set all_companies = {"only_care_about":"money"}
for(Company company : getAllCompanies()) { assertFalse(company.isYourFriend()): }
All test cases passed.
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.
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.
September news?
It’s also already built into Google Play Services. Remember this when they claim a monopoly is good for “security” reasons.
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.
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?
don’t be google
Seems like a quick hop to chrome://flags allows one to disable this.
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.
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.
If your version of Chromium has the ability to disable 3rd party cookies then it’s not effected 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.
eww icky also this article is old
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.
The blog post says the ad platform is hitting “general availability” today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.
This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.
Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an “ad privacy” feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.
That’s actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google’s core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.
Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads."
The original article contains 587 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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.
Security Now mentioned this too:
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.
Jaysyn@kbin.social 2 months ago
Chrome just got blacklisted by our IT dept because of this.
"Ads are attack vectors."
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Chrome hasn’t worked for months on our network due to this and was removed recently with the latest updates last week
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Lfg
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 2 months ago
And mine is making the switch from Firefox to Chrome next year. I’m so fucking mad about it.
roertel@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
oce@jlai.lu 2 months ago
Change of manager?
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Respect.
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
redfox@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Chrome is pretty much the defacto standard for web. If it works with chrome, you’re probably safe.
JustARegularNerd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 months ago
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