Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Chrome got blacklisted by our IT dept because of this.

"Ads are attack vectors."

Chrome hasn't worked for months on our network due to this and was removed recently with the latest updates last week
- Lfg
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.
- Change of manager?
- 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.
Respect.
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.
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

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.
Google's utopia is 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.
- 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.
- 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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

WELL I HOPE YOU FUCKS LIKE SOME WEIRD ASS PORN AND SHITPOSTS

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?

OP: * Wake me up when September ends *

Nobody did. OP just woke up.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

All google products are spyware. Although technically they should be called "trackingware".

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
I use it for everything except maps, there is no real alternative to Google maps as far as I know
- Magic Earth is neat
- 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.
- 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.

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

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

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

Just... change the shortcut icon???
- pretty sure that's a /whoosh

It's getting harder to remain compassionate towards people who keep using chrome.

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.
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.
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.

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.

wasch mich, aber mach mich nicht nass.

From the article...

Literally, “wash me, but don't get me wet”.
- In star Trek, they use sonic showers.

const google = "be evil";

set companies = {"only_care_about":"money"}
- for(Company company : getAllCompanies()) { assertFalse(company.isYourFriend()); }
  
  All test cases passed.

September news?

Wake me up when September ends?

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.

So, all those years creating “web standards” are for nothing...

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Web standards are the literal opposite of that. You're arguing against the web itself.
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.

don't be google

Which is blatantly evil.

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.

eww icky also this article is old

eww icky also this article is old

by Ron Amadeo - Sep 7, 2023 2:35pm PST

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.

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.

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

Security Now mentioned this too:

https://infosec.pub/post/8359932

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

Was it ever any surprise they got their way? They're basically unopposed.

"...and is now banned in the EU."

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.

So convience over privacy, got it. That is pretty much what made Facebook rise to fame.
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.
How dare you have a different opinion! This is Lemmy!
Maybe try Vivaldi? Chromium?
- Thanks for the suggestion, I haven't heard of Vivaldi before
You have your priorities defined. Well done.

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.
- Librewolf
We need a federated browser.
- 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?
- Like Tor?
- 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'd argue Firefox is the descent alternative.
  
  Opera is Crappy Chinese ad-filled browser
  
  Vivaldi, although it's extremely nice tab management system and unique features, isn't open source. But probably the better chromium browser of the owns you mentioned.
  
  Brave... Is a crypto shilling browser run by a turd wanting to ban same sex marriage
  
  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 🦊
- Each of which depend on chrome and google's decisions.

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.

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.

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.
but half the time it can't access any sites while Chrome does.

I smell exaggerated bullshit.
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...