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Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban On Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (propublica.org)
Fudge Factor 3000 writes: Google has quietly changed its privacy policy to allow it to associate web tracking, which is supposed to remain anonymous, with personally identifiable user data. This completely reneges its promise to keep a wall between ad tracking and personally identifiable user data, further eroding one's anonymity on the internet. Google's priorities are clear. All they care about is monetizing user information to rake in the big dollars from ad revenue. Think twice before you purchase the premium priced Google Pixel. Google is getting added value from you as its product without giving you part of the revenue it is generating through tracking through lower prices. The crossed-out section in its privacy policy, which discusses the separation of information as mentioned above, has been followed with this statement: "Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google's services and the ads delivered by Google." ProPublica reports: "The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer. The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct. The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry's longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous. In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people's real names. But until this summer, Google held the line." You can choose to opt in or out of the personalized ads here.
Still the Google engineers who volunteer to implement these things in exchange for good payment and conditions, and excuse themselves as only following their employer's orders.
Most mass anything is the result of willing engineers. We should never forget this, or we end up being the problem.
I assume some people might actually want to share their information for assimilation purposes. The question is whether it defaults to opt-in or opt-out.
I knew this day would be coming a long time ago so there's a very elegant solution to this madness.
1) Use a separate IMAP/POP3 client (thunderbird is nice) to fetch your mail from Gmail
2) Make your Firefox clean your session data on exit (cookies, web cache, offline website data - that's enough)
3) Adbock+/Ublock Origin with anti tracking and anti social lists for good measure
This still leaves your IP address unprotected but if you're concerned enough, use a provide which generates random IP addresses or VPN.
It will be cussed and discussed on a few noble forums and everyone else will go on with their Facebook world, surrendering personal privacy for access to social media and the Google search engine.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It looks like the best choice is to get non-targeted ads that will be dropped by the various ad-blockers.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
Anyone with even an ounce of cynicism has believed Google -- and everybody else -- was doing this same thing anyway. At least now they are officially on the record with it. Maybe it will finally catalyze some privacy legislation with teeth.
Why people are so stupid to understand that selling the user's data is the only working business model for free Internet services. User's data is the only asset they hold.
It is so naive to assume that they would not sell anything for which there would be demand.
I'll wait and see until the dust settles and the "I knew it" paranoiacs get out of the way.
However, I'm kind of sceptical about this kind of "the world is falling" article, since such an act would be particularly out of tune, considering google is already under intensifying scrutiny from all kinds of (not always reasonable) angles. Doing something like this, which would draw immense amounts of fire, particularly in the EU, doesn't just seem tone-deaf but outright stupid.
This is enough to break my complacency of using Google products. I already just finished uploading my files to a cloud server that I'm hosting as an alternative to Google Drive. Does anyone have any recommendations for Chromium-based browsers with optimized privacy and security such as SRWare Iron or Comodo Dragon? How about privacy-based secure e-mail services such as ProtonMail? My last steps will be to switch over to DuckDuckGo for default search and find a custom Android ROM that is frequently updated and allows lots of visual customization.
Well, it seems that Google is only going to become more and more evil from now on. It was a good ride while it lasted. We got more than most companies, a solid ten years of good service. But now, the new crop of executives is in place and to them, "don't be evil" sounds like the stupidest motto ever. The old internet culture of sharing and open source and being trustworthy...well it just has no place in today's Google. The new breed just doesn't get it, or understand why it's important. It can be enforced, for a while. I'm sure it will live on in certain Google divisions, but as a principle it's dead as Dillinger.
I've used Gmail.com as my primary "real name email" for doing hotel reservations and such, anything that requires my real name. Obviously this has to come to a halt. Where should I migrate my real name email to? Is there any trustworthy email provider? Or, a provider in some oddball country that doesn't give a crap about spying on me? As I think the days of free email are behind us, I don't mind paying say, $5/month or something.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Do no evil? Must have been some other company named Google that promised that.
What are the good, secure alternatives to gmail and yahoo mail? And no, I'm not going to setup my own server.
Throw Google under the bus not the poor folks just trying to feed their families.
"Poor folks just trying to feed their families"? These are well paid engineers with options. Anyone talented enough to get a job at Google is talented enough to secure employment elsewhere. They are willing accomplices to this action and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Evidently these engineers lack a moral compass and their word means nothing. If they had a problem with this action they could easily have spoken up and taken action but they took the easy path and did nothing.
Pretty sure you'd scream bloody murder if you employer's actions were layer at your feet - douche!
My employer's actions are routinely laid at my feet and rightfully so. I am responsible for my actions at my employer as well as those who work for me. Companies are comprised of people who commit these actions and when these actions injure others there should be some accountability. If I have an ethical problem with what management at my company is doing or if I was wrongly accused of something I was not responsible for you can be quite certain I would either leave or take appropriate action to defend myself. But if I'm quiet about something then effectively I am endorsing it.
Android and all google services are nothing more than a huge surveillance system. We need to fork Android and make open source mobile phones asap.
Good thing they're not being evil about it. *cough*
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
My Noscript blocks Google Analytics. It's surprising how many sites have links to it for no known purpose.
Isn't associating non-Google app and web site activity with Google information sort of necessary in order for Google Now and Google Home to work properly?
I doubt Google cares much about non-moble systems, why ? Because smartphones have GPS, are locked down and on all the time. Google can then determine were you are going, what stores, malls, events and sell that data for targeted adverts. It may even be possible to determine were you live. Also,I thought I read somewhere that some stores even track where you are walking and what shelves you linger at. This type of data is very valuable to Google.
All one gets from a desktop or laptop is approx where you are when you are now when the device is turned on, not how you got there and what you could be seeing
Ghostery blocks sites from gathering personal information.
But it does have an opt-in feature GhostRank that can be checked to "support" them
so, don't check it ! (or uncheck it)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
... because we - the FOSS experts - are sitting on our hands and asses.
It takes a dedicated small crew of developers just a few weeks to develop a full-stack replacement of the E-Mail protocol and service, daemons and end user clients included. Fully encrypted, signed and 100% anonymised by default, with a distributed meta DNS to handle routing.
Likewise replacing the web can't be that hard either. Sure there is rendering, but remove 2 decades worth of document markup and build a working alternative, removing all the downfalls using the very same meta-dns described above and the web is history.
I actually think we will tackle this problem if it get's bad enough.
Replace DNS, E-Mail and the Web with modern encrypted distributed services and the web will start going the way of the dodo.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
https://www.eff.org/privacybad... Better than nothing...
Maybe google can finally serve me a relevant ad *before* I've bought the product...
Failing that; they could just email me and I'd tell them what I want to see ads about.
Requiem for the American Dream
There was a big notice on my Google account, asking me permission to use my web browsing habits to server ads. I'm not sure how an Opt-In feature that interrupted my login to ask me specifically can, in any way, be described as 'quiet'.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
What do you mean, Google Analytics has no known purpose? Google wants to know which websites your are visiting, the website maintainer wants to know who visits the web page and how. It is a perfect win-win situation (or win-win-lose).