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Google Is A Serial Tracker (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Two Princeton academics conducted a massive research into how websites track users using various techniques. The results of the study, which they claim to be the biggest to date, shows that Google, through multiple domains, is tracking users on around 80 percent of all Top 1 Million domains. Researchers say that Google-owned domains account for the top 5 most popular trackers and 12 of the top 20 tracker domains. Additionally, besides tracking scripts, HTML5 canvas fingerprinting and WebRTC local IP discover, researchers discovered a new user fingerprinting technique that uses the AudioContext API. Third-party trackers use it to send low-frequency sounds to a user's PC and measure how the PC processes the data, creating an unique fingerprint based on the user's hardware and software capabilities. A demo page for this technique is available. Of course, this sort of thing is nothing new and occurs all across the web and beyond. MIT and Oxford published a study this week that revealed that Twitter location tags on only a few tweets can reveal details about the account's owner, such as his/her real world address, hobbies and medical history. Another recently released study by Stanford shows that phone call metadata can also be used to infer personal details about a phone owner.
If you do your damned best to block Google's tracking - not loading their scripts and so on - the Web is broken. So many sites use Google scripts for required functions that things just don't work any more. "The open Web" is now "The Google Web".
There might be hope though. Some people have packaged up the Google scripts (sanitized?) so that your browser can load them locally, and you can still block Google IP ranges without breaking every fucking site on the web.
Letting one company become THIS pervasive? Not so good for fault tolerance, privacy, and decentralization of control.
They misspelled "stalker".
This is where regulators need to step in. Simple legislation is all we need: if you don't own a domain, you can't track people on it, unless it's something like an OAuth login.
I can use OS/X, Linux. With all the fervor over Windows 10, there's still Windows options to reduce or turn off telemetry off (in some versions). Google's been doing this forever, making billions for it, and there's no escaping it. Why won't Microsoft get in on the trend to make a better OS?
No option to self host your own Google software, no way to get them to truly honor your preference not to track you, nothing. I can't even pay them to do so. And if my employer or school uses their applications, I have to trust them that they don't track those users, but if some of the current lawsuits against them turn out to be true, that trust was misplaced.
Look, if you want to make software services, just do so. But Google can't let go of ads or advertising revenue and are dragging other software companies with them. Frustrating. But, go ahead, keep using Chrome and making fun of MS or Apple for having their own browsers and cheer as their market share goes down.
I just move on in that case. I need their content less than they seem to need me.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This just proves that their tracking of individual users doesn't work very well.
See the other AC's reply. I ran the demo page on firefox and chrome and the fingerprint is vastly different. You can try it for yourself. It seems like the browser has a significant effect on the results.