> We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before it’s launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation.
> The variations active for a given installation are determined by a seed number which is randomly selected on first run. If usage statistics and crash reports are disabled, this number is chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy). If you would like to reset your variations seed, run Chrome with the command line flag “--reset-variation-state”. Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address), operating system, Chrome version and other parameters.
> This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information
> a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy)
They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
> Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address)
They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
> operating system, Chrome version and other parameters.
...and many additional sources of entropy.
[1] why 24 bits instead of 32? The LSB of the address might be zeroed if the packet is affected by Googles faux-"anonymization" feature ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059 )
> > Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address)
> They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
I don't think that sentence admits what you say? Chrome could be determining which experiments to run client-side.
Of course, when you visit a Google property, they needs must inspect your IP address to send a response to you, at a minimum. That goes for any site you might choose to visit. The existence of sufficient entropy to personally identify a site visitor is not a state secret. They do not need this chrome experiment seed to identify you, if that's a goal.
> They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of entropy, what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13 bits then Google suddenly able to track what they were not? If the IPv4 address, user-agent string, or some other behavior is sufficient to reveal a great deal of stuff, we have a more serious problem than that 13 bits. I agree that 13-bit seed is a concern. But I am wondering if it is a concern per se, or its orchestration with something else. Of course, how/whether Google keeps those data also matters.
That's basically saying "even if you opt out, we'll still try to track you, just not as much." Very unpleasant, but then again I'm not surprised to see this attitude from Google.
How many people will actually run chrome with a cli flag? It would be pretty impressive if every single person reading this thread did, but it probably won't even be that. Most people don't even touch their settings.
13 bits of entropy is far from a uuid (but to get it to that you need to disable some more settings, which again very few people do), but it's still plenty good enough to disambiguate individuals over time.
It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace. Google is using their powerful position to give themselves tracking capabilities that other online players can't access. It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps?
I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the default version first, do feature detection, and then set a session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
My other Thought was that they test a feature that is implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having to do with their account management.
Couldn't the Chrome installations receive a request from Google that says "Do you want to try out a new thing?", and couldn't the Chrome installations say yes with a certain probability? The only difference I can see is that the subset of users that are guinea pigs couldn't be the same in each test (if Google wanted that the subset is always the same).
Everybody imagine going back 15 years and tell yourself that you're using a web browser made by the parent company of DoubleClick. Your 15 year ago self would think you're a moron (assuming that 15 years ago you were old enough to know what DoubleClick was).
I always believed that tech-savvy people using Google Chrome are morons. It's the perfect blend of Google being evil trying to force it to everyone, the browser being dumbed down to masses so much it's missing the most basic features, and I guess privacy concerns too when using browser from advertising company.
Kind of true. The whole internet was much more of a toy back then. Tracking was not viewed so maliciously as now. Heck I might have even been convinced by a hard sell "this will help your favorite sites maximize their revenue".
I can only speak for myself, but myself from 15 years ago would not have cared so strongly about the choice of browser. I believe I was using the newly-ad-less Opera at the time, and new/cared little about the company making it.
TL;DR I think whoever posted that is trying to bury the UA anonymizing feature by derailing the discussion.
What I'm seeing is an RFC for anonymizing parts of User-Agent in order to reduce UA based fingerprinting, which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
Then I see someone comments how that could negatively impact existing websites or Chromium-derived browsers, comments which are totally fair and make an argument that may not be a good idea doing this change because of that.
Then someone mentions the _existing_ x-client-data headers attached to requests that uniquely identify a Chrome installation. Then a lot of comments on that, including here on HN.
To me that's derailing the original issue. If we want to propose that Chrome remove those headers we should do so as a separate issue and have people comment/vote on that. By talking about it on the UA anonymizing proposal we are polluting that discussion and effectively stalling that proposal which, if approved, could improve privacy (especially since it will go into Chromium so then any non-Chrome builds can get the feature without having to worry about x-client-data that Chrome does).
I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed.
Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are how they make money. And like all businesses, they are competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money off this change.
Their motivations are not honest, but they're pushing them as if this is the high road. It isn't. It's the dirty low road of dominating the online ad business, made possible by their dominance in the browser market. And it's always been the end-goal of Chrome browser.
I think this is a common strategy of big players at any industry.
First, they do some dirty thing to gain a competitive edge when the industry is still new and unregulated. Later they develop an alternative way to achieve the same competitive edge, and then criticize other players for doing an old way, saying they should be "mature and responsible".
Just yesterday I had to disable anti fingerprinting I'd enabled in Firefox because despite having a solid IP and and existing cookies to login to Google, it's security system rejected me, even after answering security questions. Turn off fingerprinting and I could log in.
So, this is a round about way of agreeing with the hidden dark patterns that Google are bringing to the web. It must stop.
Much of such discussions demonize the company, but we need to look broader. Google is a public company and its shareholders, since they share the company, are also to be pointed out. Discouraging such behaviour is better done by the shareholders by dumping shares since Google could very well argue that if it didn't work to maximize ad revenue, it would not be operating according to fiduciary responsibility principles. (IANAL .. just thinking out loud)
"I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed."
Pretty sure that was their main reason for helping push https-everywhere. A good idea generally, but hurt every other entity trying to do tracking more than it hurt Google.
That's sort of a fragile assumption though. I mean, yes, there's enough specificity in this number that it could be used (in combination with other fingerprinting techniques) to disambiguate a user. And yes, only Google would be capable of doing this. So it's abusable, in the same way that lots of software like this is abusable by the disributor. And that's worth pointing out and complaing about, sure.
But it's not tracking. It's not. It's a cookie that identifies the gross configuration of the browser. And Google claims that it's not being used for tracking.
So all the folks with the hyperbole about user tracking for advertising purposes need to come out with their evidence that Google is lying about this. Occam says that, no, it's probably just a misdesigned feature.
While I agree with some of your comment, I feel like it’s harsh to paint the whole chrome enterprise with that brush. Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser and a lot of devoted devs have spent a lot of time working on it. There’s an advertising aspect that it’s right to call out, but I think on the whole it was done to make the internet better, because the internet is google’s business too.
EDIT I just wanted to point out that a load of people have poured their lives into making Google Chrome the amazing bit of software that it is and suggesting that the end-goal has been entirely about supplying ads does a great disservice to their personal contributions.
>which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
Which means Google competitors are terribly disadvantaged, as they cannot use that.
Which not only reduces market diversity (contrary to TAG philosophy) but represents a significant conflict of interest for an organization proposing a major web standard change.
These issues are very relevant to the original proposal, especially in light of the fact that Noone outside of Google is terribly interested in this change. Any time a dominant player is the strongest (or only) advocate for a change that would coincidentally and disproportionately benefit its corporate interests, the proposal should be viewed very skeptically.
> Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
So when Apple releases a privacy feature, that doesn't affect them as a business, we praise the feature or we say "except it doesn't affect Apple" and somehow try to argue how the feature is less valuable because of that?
This is the equivalent of a protest, people are objecting to Google's illegal data harvesting practices in places that receive engagement, since that's the most effective way to get the word out and warn others.
Google's reasoning that this is not personal data is meaningless in the face of GDPR, which considers an IP address personal data. Google has access to the IP address when they receive the data, therefore they are transmitting personal information without user consent and control, which is illegal.
Basically all users opening the browser will contact www.googleapis.com to get a unique "Protected Media Identifier", without opening any web page and even before any ToS/EULA is accepted (and there is no user consent either).
The poster is the author of Kiwi browser, which unfortunately is closed source [0], but I have reason to believe he is familiar - as I am for the Bromite project - with all the (sometimes shady) internals of the Chromium codebase; it is indeed off-topic to discuss the header issue there but I would say that there is no explicit intention to derail it (and no advantage), just incorrect netiquette.
The Google employee argues that through UA-CH Google wants to disincetivise "allow" and "block" lists.
After many years of testing HTTP headers, IMO this really is a non-issue. Most websites return text/html just fine without sending any UA header at all.
What is an issue are the various ways websites try to coax users to download, install and use a certain browser.
Another related issue with Google Chrome is users getting better integration and performance when using Chrome with Google websites than they would if they used other clients. ^1 Some make the analogy to Microsoft where it was common for Microsoft software to integrate and perform better on Microsoft Windows whereas third party software was noticably worse to integrate and perform on that OS.
This leads to less user agent diversity. Users will choose what works best.
UA diversity is really a more important goal than privacy, or privacy in Chrome. The biggest privacy gains are not going to come from begging Google to make changes to Chrome. They could however come from making it easier for users to switch away from using Chrome and to use other clients. That requires some cooperation from websites as well as Google.
Those other clients could theoretically be written by anyone, not just large companies and organisations that are dependent on the online ad sales business. It would be relatively easy to achieve "privacy-by-design" in such clients. There is no rule that says users have to use a single UA to access every website. There needs to be choice.
For example, HN is a relatively simple website that does not require a large, complex browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. to read. It generates a considerable amount of traffic and stands as proof that simpler websites can be popular. Varying the UA header does not result in drastic differences in the text/html returned by the server.
1. Recently we saw Google exclude use of certain clients to access Gmail.
As long as web developers continue to create (app-)sites that only work in the latest versions of Chrome(and Chromium-ish) browsers, giving users little effective choice over what browsers they can use, this sort of abusive behaviour will continue. The sort of "feature-racing" that Google engages in is ultimately harmful for the open web. Mozilla struggles to keep up, Opera surrendered a while ago, and more recently, Microsoft seems to have already given up completely.
I feel like it's time we "hold the Web back" again. Leave behind the increasingly-walled-garden of "modern" appsites and their reliance on hostile browsers, and popularise simple HTML and CSS, with forms for interactivity, maybe even just a little JavaScript where absolutely necessary. Something that is usable with a browser like Dillo or Netsurf, or even one of the text-based ones. Making sites that are usable in more browsers than the top 2 (or 1) will weaken the amount of control that Google has, by allowing more browsers to appear and gain userbases.
This proposal would not accomplish what you intend. By slowing the adoption of open web technologies, developers and users would lean more heavily on mobile apps, which are also under Google's control considering Android's huge market share.
Developers who want to level the playing field need to develop sites that fully support Firefox and other browsers that are not based on Chromium. Users who want to see a more open web need to use Firefox and non-Chromium browsers, and complain to developers who don't properly support them.
I wish, but that's not what most people want. Hell, it's not what designers want. Thinking back to the Myspace days, people would have the worst websites imaginable. Granted, that was all done with little more than HTML and javascript, but I have little doubt what they would have done with things like HTML5 and even more javascript.
The last decade or so has really reinforced to me that we all ignore or are ignorant of fundamental structural problems with most of the systems we rely on - with us wanting them to "just work."
We're all guilty of this, we just see it up close for the things that we're building and chide others who don't care. Meanwhile we ignore other fundamental structures of modern society.
There's got to be a balance between every website looking exactly the same and fading out of my memory with one identical hamburger menu after another and dancing babies on geocities.
Are there really that many popular extensions not available on Firefox? I may be just one anecdote, but I think I'm pretty typical, and I've found the transition to Firefox to be quite pleasant, and uneventful.
Popular - no. Essential - yes. Case in point - my bank (top 5 in my country) which uses Chrome plugin for security purposes, you need it to create digital signature. So once a year I HAVE to install Chrome (key expires every year) and then delete it. I've also found at least one payment processor not working in Firefox, my city portal for public transport and several small sites. The worrying thing is the trend - with Firefox share dropping below 10% recently it will be abandoned more and more.
My issue is with certain sites that typically either uses non standard Javascript apis that only work in blink or relies on non standard behavior of standard components (numeric form inputs was mentioned here yesterday).
HTML is not enough. It’s why templating languages / libraries were invented, and it’s why SPA’s are so popular. There’s a difference between “sites” and applications. The web has been trending toward supporting applications more and more for a very long time.
The only thing that will make people who want to preserve the content-web happy is if we split the protocols somehow, and that will never happen. This is not likely to change ever.
I havent had js on by default in years. Using a js enabled browser is a drastically worse experience.
suckless surf lest you enable js with a hotkey on a per-process basis if you really want it for something, but 90% of the time, I just close the tab that wants to waste my time.
I think we at HN have a particular responsibility to keep the web free and open. This really is an arms race and only those of us building the tech have the power curtail FAANG's overreach. It might me time to choose a side and firmly push your work toward open web friendly tech.
Microsoft has not given up. They wrote windows phone which every last user agrees has a better ux than droid and iOS. How many of you wrote apps?
Hell every single discussion here nobody even talks about Microsoft products bing translate, bing maps et al. Despite them all being too notch and clearly better than Google in areas of their own. Eg. Chinese , last I checked , was better in bing translate.
And yet apple maps update is a top story for the day. You prefer bring cool and then wonder what went wrong.
You personally badmouthed PowerShell once only to satisfy the herd.
> Making sites that are usable in more browsers than the top 2 (or 1) will weaken the amount of control that Google has
You do realize/remember that Google is also a search-engine company, one that only stands to benefit (in terms of increased capability of advertising targeting) from a web that's simpler, and therefore more machine-legible.
I’m not so sure about that. Google has the resources, a simpler web makes it easier for competitors, seems like google is already quite competent at machine reading just about everything, even sometimes things that you can’t fond/visit. Domination by web-apps is the equivalent to widening the moat.
Credits to the ungoogled-chromium project [0] for the patch [1] which is also used in Bromite since 15 February 2018 to prevent this type of leaks; see also my reply here: [2]
This seems like a cut-and-dry case of getting caught in monopolistic behavior. The code is right there. The Chrome codebase has special features for Google’s own web properties.
I hope all these AGs suing google have some good tech advisors. It’s hard to keep track of all the nefarious things google has been up to over the past decade.
Security flaw? Surely some entity is squatting youtube on some TLD?!
If there is a country TLD of X where Google owns google.X but entity Y owns youtube.X then entity Y gets the X-CLIENT-DATA header information. See usage of IsValidHostName() in code.
If you strace chrome on linux it also picks up /etc/machine-id (or it did back when I looked), which is a 32 byte randomly generated string which uniquely identifies you and on some systems is used as the DHCP ID across reboots.
First I thought reading /etc/machine-id would be expected if Chrome uses D-bus or pulseaudio libraries which depend on D-bus, and /etc/machine-id is part of D-bus. But no, they really use it for tracking purposes.
And in a sick twist they have this comment for it:
std::string BrowserDMTokenStorageLinux::InitClientId() {
// The client ID is derived from /etc/machine-id
// (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-id.html). As per
// guidelines, this ID must not be transmitted outside of the machine, which
// is why we hash it first and then encode it in base64 before transmitting
// it.
In fairness, the guidelines they reference suggest you do exactly what the comment says they're doing (assuming they're keying the hash). The guidelines seem explicitly written with the idea that unique identifiers _derived from_ this value are not similarly quarantined, provided that you cannot take the derived value and "reverse" it back to the original identifier.
This ID uniquely identifies the host. It should be considered "confidential", and must not be exposed in untrusted environments, in particular on the network. If a stable unique identifier that is tied to the machine is needed for some application, the machine ID or any part of it must not be used directly. Instead the machine ID should be hashed with a cryptographic, keyed hash function, using a fixed, application-specific key. That way the ID will be properly unique, and derived in a constant way from the machine ID but there will be no way to retrieve the original machine ID from the application-specific one.
> which is why we hash it first and then encode it in base64 before transmitting it.
This made me chuckle. "As per the rules, we'll put on a boxing glove before we punch your lights out". You wont get privacy, but at least there is some security!
"Tracking purposes" is such a weasel word, when we're really talking about device management in an enterprise setting, and this code only gets activated if the root/administrator user has installed a token file on your computer.
When puppeteer first came out I was nervous to use it for scraping because I could totally see Chrome pulling tricks like this to help recaptcha in identifying the bots. I’m still not convinced they aren’t.
True, more precisely - 16 bytes, 32 hex characters. Your link is in agreement "The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during system installation or first boot and stays constant for all subsequent boots." And See https://wiki.debian.org/MachineId at least one distro uses it for the DHCP ID.
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any mainstream tech press attention. Chrome's Privacy Whitepaper describes a number of privacy-questionable nonstandard headers which are only sent to Google services. Just try searching for X- here:
> On Android, your location will also be sent to Google via an X-Geo HTTP request header if Google is your default search engine, the Chrome app has the permission to use your geolocation, and you haven’t blocked geolocation for www.google.com (or country-specific origins such as www.google.de)
> To measure searches and Chrome usage driven by a particular campaign, Chrome inserts a promotional tag, not unique to you or your device, in the searches you perform on Google. This non-unique tag contains information about how Chrome was obtained, the week when Chrome was installed, and the week when the first search was performed. ... This non-unique promotional tag is included when performing searches via Google (the tag appears as a parameter beginning with "rlz=" when triggered from the Omnibox, or as an “x-rlz-string” HTTP header).
> On Android and desktop, Chrome signals to Google web services that you are signed into Chrome by attaching an X-Chrome-Connected and/or C-Chrome-ID-Consistency-Request header to any HTTPS requests to Google-owned domains. On iOS, the CHROME_CONNECTED cookie is used instead.
PII concept is not the same for everyone/everywhere. For GDPR we have:
> Article 4(1): ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
If this chrome browser ID is matched against a (for example) google account, then they can track every single person. And that is just a couple of IDs, let alone all the quantity of data they have.
It's against GDPR to not be clear about this kind of ID. If my browser has an unique ID that is transmitted, then this ID can be coupled with other information to retrieve my identity and behavior, so it should be informed (in the EU).
EDIT: TD;LR, hiding behind "there is no PII in that ID" is not enough.
I'm sure there is someone out there who takes these kind of things seriously. Not me. I use firefox for that matter.
> And what if they put this in the browser's T&C?
Then the rest of GDPR applies: a clear message about the browser sending this info has to be shown, explaining why, with who they'll share it, the time they will keep this info, plus no auto opt-ins, the possibility of asking Google (or whatever) all the info relative to this ID and the option to cancel all the data, etc.
This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad in its definition of PII; it denies even innocuous feature-mode-distinguishing headers intended to allow for bug-identification of massively-distributed software installs.
If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "better software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better software quality."
Me too. Then a breach happens and someone with a straight face tells you: "we take your privacy very seriously", asking apologies, because the breach used some of your data to push some political campaign or to bother you with spam/extortions because that night you were watching some porn.
Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works. Otherwise upper levels have an excuse to do all this "experience" telemetry, and we all are smart enough to see the consequences of a data breach.
This it outrageous. Browsers are user-agents, not advertising accelerators. They should hide as much personal identifiable information as possible. This is exactly why using a browser from an advertising company is not a good idea. They use it to improve their service... The lie gets old...
This comment was sadly written in Chrome, since I need it for testing...
edit: pretty much exactly 10 years ago they already tried their shit with a unique id. We should have learned from that experience.
"We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before it’s launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation."
While this header may not contain personally identifiable information, its presence will make every request by this user far more unique and thus easier to track. I do not see Google saying they won't use it to improve their tracking of people.
One click while logged into any Google property will be enough for them to permanently associate this GUID with your (shadow) account, they know it, and they know you know it too
So, an extremely unique identifier for tracking purposes, that effectively no one knows exists, and no one knows can be changed at all?
With an obscure white paper that allows Google to claim they comply with the law because "they totally offer a way to change that and they even published that information to the web for anyone to find"?
Until we are deployed enough that users don't have a choice...
Now that Google has cornered the market for Internet browsing, they're using that foothold to change how it works to suit their dominance. This is why they are not concerned about per-site tracking that Google Analytics does, as long as THEY as a company have direct browser-based tracking, they no longer need to provide tracking services to other private companies to know what is trending everywhere. This is also probably why they're trying to kill ad blockers and certain browser privacy extensions.... But they won't really matter to Google if everything is done at the browser level to begin with from now on. :/
If they make moves to scale back [free] Google Analytics, which they probably will at some point, it will only highlight this ideal... They may turn to selling their privately collected metrics and qualitative studies to companies after Google Analytics is rendered useless, and then that's unadulterated monopolistic profit for them and shareholders...
Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't be evil"? It's not been applicable for half a decade now, and even in 2015 when it was officially removed from the last company documents, it was already a dead phrase.
Google had already cornered the market back in 2012, when it surpassed every other browser, with an absolute majority dominance (>50% market share) achieved way back in 2015.
"There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning
department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start
making a fuss about it now"
13 bits of entropy is not an extremely unique identifier.
The first three letters of your first name have more bits of entropy than that. It would be quite a trick to uniquely identify you by the first three letters of your first name.
I fear the factual incorrectness isn't mine: the random string used is 13 bits of entropy only if usage statics is disabled, which isn't the case by default. By default, it uses an unspecified entropy (and you can bet real dollars that it'll be more then 13 bits worth).
FWIW, it looks like that's a test case -- it is not part of Chrome itself. They most likely just wanted an example of a third-party website, and could have used any non-Google site there.
Yes, But they tested Yahoo of all websites to make sure they don't send tracking data, and not an unrelated website like wikipedia or archive.org. The only non-google test case too I might add.
Don’t forget that even if the number is varying only in an interval of 0 and 7999, this means without cookies a unique chrome installation can be identified if multiple users are using the same IP, like residential houses with families, etc. — that way it is possible to determine the unique amount of devices inside a house.
>that way it is possible to determine the unique amount of devices inside a house.
There are exceptions I guess. Imagine 8000 households in which couples live. Both partners own the same MacBook model. In 1/8000 cases Google would think there is only one person.
It seems like a reasonable time to bring up the reformer project 'ungoogled-chrome' [1]. I have used it and new versions of Firefox for over 3 years and have seldom had to jump back to `Googlified Chrome.` Do know that installing via `brew` [2] means no - standard browser auto-update. Which in this case, makes sense to me.
Aside: It seems to me the realist punk / anti-the-man software one can work on is a user respecting browser. I don't work on these, but I am very grateful for those out there who do.
Right-click in the Name column, select "Save all as HAR with content". Then grep for the headers, e.g.,
sed -n '/headers\":/,/\]/p' example.com.har
While running Chrome, try
ps ax |grep -o field-trial-handle[^\ ]*[0-9]
Handle to the shared memory segment containing field trial state that is to be shared between processes. The argument to this switch is the handle id (pointer on Windows) as a string, followed by a comma, then the size of the shared memory segment as a string.
Also, can try typing "chrome://versions" in the address bar
I think extensions can filter out the x-client-data header, though Google should definitely make this data collection opt-in.
GDPR is very clear about this data being personal information [1], since Google has access to the IP address on the receiving end, which has been repeatedly tested in courts as being personal data.
Google is engaging in personal data harvesting without user consent and control, and no amount of mental gymnastics presented in their privacy whitepaper [2] will save them in courts.
But unless you changed IP, and other machine characteristics they'll be able to link the machine-id with an alternative fingerprint (cf amiunique/panopticlick).
That would mean they are actually not tracking you (via that method at least) in private mode. I was just about to investigate how or if they were tracking in porn mode.
Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim" level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine monoculture?
It appears that chrome based Edge does not send this header. I've switched to firefox for everything I can switch, perhaps it time to use Edgeium over chrome for anything else.
Lol, is it news? I mean, it worked like this as long as I can remember, privacy conscious users were complaining for years, helplessly watching as Chrome market share grows, but nobody really cared, so... And now, suddenly, people act like this is big news and they are outraged by such blatant and unexpected(!) intrusion into their privacy.
Wow. I don't even know how I feel about it anymore.
I use (sometimes/often) mitmproxy and remove or change suspect headers. It is also nice to remove all the fb, google and more crap from the html. And much more. It is a lot of work not to break a website. I don't know whether I am more trackable or not - this is the 'only browser' without x-client-data header.
I've always assumed that everything I install tracks me through some unique ID. That's arguably wrong for typical Linux packages, but being right just once is enough to justify the assumption.
And for Google, it's arguably foolish to think that they don't.
Can you test it in Microsoft's new Edge browser based on Chromium? I'm very curious about that. (I don't know how to test such a thing myself, sorry :S)
I dropped chrome a long time ago and switched to Brave. Does Brave have these same issues, considering it uses webkit for it's rendering engine? Am I just being paranoid?
With that said, one can simply filter out these analytics with a c:\Windows\Systems32\Drivers\etc\hosts -> pointing to 0.0.0.0 or PiHole solution (https://pi-hole.net/), yes?
I mean, this is probably not the holistic solution, but this is why we have a firewall, vpn, antivirus, filters to just keep DNS in check, yes?
Yes, you can if you are willing to block google.com, android.com and youtube.com.
doubleclick.com might not be terrible for most, though.
Interesting enough, it does not add headers when accessing a country specific google domain in the EU - such as google.de or google.fr.
Is that GDPR kicking in - with a nod the the brexiteers given that google.co.uk gets these headers... ?
There are certain sub-domains that block certain things that keep most of the bad guys at bay, but to some extent yes. This is a fringe case of those activities, but being paranoid is not a bad thing these days, considering the level of red team activity and bad actors probing your network / computer / devices.
Not shocking. I never trusted Chrome, and never switched over to it. I never understood that Firefox hate. I never thought it was "slow" like so many complaints I have seen. Apparently Firefox is fast and amazing again, I certainly think it is better than it was a several years ago, but again even several years ago I didn't ever think it was slow.
The sad part is that most times Google violates your privacy, it's just some PM who thinks having some data will be super important and in most cases they're wrong.
Caveat here is that in 99.99999% cases it's also the case that nobody ever looks at your individual file but the fact that they could is bad enough.
By the way, if you use Chrome and Google as a default search engine, Google gets a signal from your browser (with cookies) every time you open a new tab. You can check it with DevTools.
Irrespective of whether you use any other google products, if you use chrome google can now track you over any property that uses google ads, recaptcha, etc.
The header is inserted by the browser after any extensions run, and google pins google properties so you can have an intermediate proxy that strips the header, so they gain persistent tracking of all users across most of the web?
If it wasn’t a tracking vector why do they limit it to just google ads, etc? Why not other ad providers as well?
This is another instance that google doesn’t care about users privacy and track without their consent by using chrome installation Id. This probably might be against GDPR, so Chrome installed base in Europe multiplied by per day fine, hopefully runs into a years revenue of google.
Another lesson don’t trust for profit companies with privacy protection especially advertising technology company like google with motto like don’t be evil or organize world’s information designed to mislead.
Honestly, it's 2020, even if your technical understanding is so low that you have no idea what a "browser" is, you know that Google will do anything in it's impressive power to track down everything you do with legal or illegal means.
Thanks to Snowden, this is no longer a conspiracy theory. It's a fact.
Google should be fined for this but they probably won't be.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It hits the nail on the head. If you are concerned about privacy around advertising then using a browser from the biggest online ad company is short sighted.
Quite a lot of reasons. I assume you asked that because you're thinking it's used to gather information on its users. That could be one of the many reasons. At least initially it was because Mozilla/Firefox didn't want to adopt a multi-process architecture.
In terms of strategic reasons, as a company that depends on people browsing on their websites other reasons are obvious: avoid lock in that could be pushed by third-party browser makers/competitors (say IE becomes the most popular and it implements proprietary extensions that work only on their websites[1]), ensure there exists a fast secure browser so that people can keep browsing even if everyone else stops making good browsers out there.
[1] Now before you go ahead and point out how Google proposes HTML/HTTP features that get implemented in their browsers and on the server side, all such features have public specification and source code, so anyone else could implement them too. This is very different from the IE days of yore, where MS was extending IE through ActiveX. ActiveX was developed in house and they were releasing binary plugins/SDKs to develop ActiveX plugins, effectively maintaining full control over it (one would have to develop ActiveX compatible technology from scratch if they wanted it open source, with Chrome all they have to do is fork the source code).
so that you don't have to pay royalties to other browsers for being the main search engine.
I mean you have to pay one less. And if you have the most used browser, you save a lot.
In the good old days everyone and their grandmother just sideloaded their malware toolbars with freeware crap like picasa or maps or outright bundled their bloatware with the system like Google still does for Android.
When Chrome was first developed, browsers and the web were relatively slow, and slowing down due to the popularization of Javascript and heavier websites.
Google's worked on a number of technologies to make the web faster; Chrome (and V8), their own DNS, image and video compression technologies, AMP, HTTP/2 (SPDY), HTTP/3 (QUIC), webserver plugins (mod_pagespeed), benchmark tooling (Lighthouse), and extensive guides on website speed optimization.
The reason is simple; faster internet = faster browsing = more page views = more ad impressions + more behaviour tracking data points. And it's a win-win for Google as well, because it earns them goodwill (well, except for AMP); especially at the time Chrome was a breath of fresh air compared to Firefox, and it's taken a lot of time and effort just to keep up, with mixed results (to the point where a number of manufacturers have just given up and adopted Chrome's renderer).
This sounded harder to do than it was in my experience. I figured the alternatives to their products would be less polished. But I switched to Firefox and honestly prefer it to Chrome. (They allow extensions on Android, meaning adblock, which is a game changer for me.) DDG for search is great. Protonmail for email is fine, etc. There isn't much in the Google ecosystem that I miss tbh.
The only thing I have problems finding something that works is Google maps. As an Android user there are a few different options but Google did make a damn good maps app.
IP address inspection has been getting a large amount of attention recently. It is considered a privacy violation, yet it is required to determine location, so devs know which privacy laws apply.
GDPR only applies in Europe, and CCPA only applies in California. How is one meant to determine which set of laws applies inside a piece of software without being able to determine location?
A waste of time (don't bother) answer is : Just apply maximum privacy everywhere and you won't have to worry about it... The response is always going to be - Many free tools you use are funded by advertising etc and advertising depends on being able to know where someone is, at least to the country level. Cutting off location and therefore revenue is not going to give people the software they want.
Other facts that usually matter - only 1-2% of people want to pay for private software. Everyone else wants the free option. Source : my apps.
No, Mozilla needs to keep focusing on Mozilla and trying to make it better than Chromium. Competition is essential. They're the only ones left other than Apple now that Microsoft has given up.
Well Mozilla burnt my trust in them over the last couple of years ... maybe Brave?
Some don't like their model to tip content providers but they seem - and I've not made rigorous enquiries here (please inform!) - to be a relatively trustworthy mod of Chromium!?
Am I correct to understand that this backdoor tracking of individual users applies to the standard Chromium browser (i.e., the non Eloston ungoogled-chromium) as well as the Chrome browser?
If so, its incredibly consistent with Google's surveillance capitalist business model.[1] Wow. I'm thankful for Firefox.
For every single claim Google makes about being pro-privacy, their definition of privacy ("data shared between you and Google and no one more") is implicit.
It's a surveillance company that makes proprietary software to sell you ads. As soon as you get that into your head, you'll be much less shocked.
"We personally get to track you" is not a unique stance, and it's far from a backdoor. It's just another vile move from a surveillance company that's pretty explicit that that's their goal.
Sure, the general pattern of behaviour is familiar, but I didn't know about this specific manifestation, and now I do. What's the use of being so dismissive about specific information on which one can act?
I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it is, but one thing seems clear to me:
From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing browsers and ridiculed by Apple ads. On a case by case basis I think some of this will be well deserved, some less so, but few outside of employees and shareholders will cry.
I also guess a lot of people, including certain owners and many in management hasn't deciphered the writing on the wall yet, and in that case it whatever comes next will be surprising.
When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..).
Working at that company has always been a dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture.
Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil that even Microsoft has a better standing among my peers..
Would love to hear some insight from ex employees on what changed on the inside of that company, but from the outside it doesn't even seem to be the same any more.
Maybe they're just worse at hiding it..
As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't.
The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.)
The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things."
The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.
It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.
Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes).
Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it.
In fact what Google sees is:
1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.
Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ...
2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ...
3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!"
4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors.
Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
There's been more than a few departures at Google recently. You have the profile departures of C-level execs; You've had prominent open source folks leaving projects like Angular. While some attrition is personal circumstance, you have to wonder how much is attributable to the changing identity of Google itself.
There is little point trying to correct misinformation about Google on Hacker News anymore, because people will just make up more tomorrow, and it will get hundreds of upvotes if it looks vaguely plausible.
So, people who want to dislike Google will find everything they need to confirm their biases here.
IIRC it's not that long ago that trying to criticize Google here on HN was an exercise in futility.
I won't say that the current situation is perfect but I can see why. In my view Google had earned the current criticism by hard work:
- mismanagement of services people loved to the point were Google always running 3 different more or less incompatible message services, while closing services east and west has become a meme,
- shoving other ideas down people's throats (hi identity and real name part of Google+)
>From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
Be careful, most of us on HN are part of a very small echo chamber. "What you see" is a small, non-representative portion of "techies". If it wasn't Firefox wouldn't be at sub-5% in general usage surveys and AMP would've died years ago.
> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
From what I've seen is it's like it's always been: people are upset for a day or two and then continue to not care, and continue to (directly or indirectly) support the evil they were upset about. It's incredibly difficult to get even geeks to support a cause if it requires more than pressing a like button or posting a comment.
Also, it's not like Google's wrongdoing are recent news. Anyone remember Google Watch (the site)? People have been warning and predicting things since very long ago, yet the geek crowd never seems to hesitate to embrace the next soon-to-be evil company and their proprietary offering.
I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/
These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.
Safari is horrible for HTML5 games. Dealing with all sorts of issues to the point where I've more or less given up and just tell my Safari players to use something else.
Some of my front-end colleagues like to tell me that Safari is the new
IE 6. Not in terms of the market domination (that's Crhome for you),
but in terms of dragging the front-end back with unimplemented features,
quirks, and bugs. The amount of hacks they have to add just to
support Safari is uncomfortable.
Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and sucks.
My biggest gripe is I can’t update it without updating the entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you ever need to unregister a service worker.
For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter: speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.
If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!)
I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)
I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop.
So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.
Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.
The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library?
Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.
Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.
As a firefox user, they are spending more money on PR and less on quality. Their UI has gotten progressively worse. And I'm not taking about xul deprecation. Please Mozilla come back to your strengths. SIMPLE: Provide a great alternative.
The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying.
I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actually even faster and lighter than Chrome. So, I've already started using it on my Windows and Mac machines and I'm just waiting for it to be released on Linux so I can use it on my main workstations.
I bet Edge exceeds Firefox market share any day now. Maybe Google should start giving Microsoft money too! But even if Edge market share doesn't grow I'll be quite comfortable since it's the WebKit/Chrome/Blink lineage and compatibility that I care about.
Fuck that piece of shit Gecko. I'm tired of hearing about it from the extremely tiny but loud minority of Mozillatroids. Now do your duty and fade my comment in your petty attempt at censoring my words. You can't change the truth.
I think Mozilla is a horrible leadership spending money on all the wrong things and I'd rather lose my job than donate to them. But, in all fairness, they're still way better than both Microsoft and Google. At least Mozilla isn't actively trying to make my life worse every single day.
Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale.
... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative to alternatives.
Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a notable and depressing example).
Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
Donations go to Mozilla "the non-profit organization" rather than Mozilla "the corporation".
Mozilla (the corporation) has the typical/bad corporate structures and ridiculous executive compensations. Mozilla (the corporation) had the layoffs. Mozilla (the corporation) bought Pocket with money that comes from deals with search engines.
That being said, though...
> Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
... is still a great point.
(Updated this because "Mozilla, Org" and "Mozilla, Inc" were inaccurate)
Do you care how Apple pays its executives when you shell out 3-4k on their laptops or 1-2k on their phones? The OP just said that Firefox is a great piece of software available for free, and they deserve to be compensated (in form of donation). Now, I'm totally on board with you that they waste money, that's not even debatable.
Better yet, donate to Brave who doesn't share the same conflict of interest as Mozilla does with Google, as Google is Mozilla's #1 source of income. Best of all you get a browser just as fast, if not faster than Chrome because it's Chrome without all the junk.
So I pay for Pocket Premium as it is wholly owned by Mozilla as a way of diversifying their income away from search and donations. I like and use pocket and get something in exchange for my money (which makes me more likely to keep a rolling payment going on). II know it’s not open source, but tbh that doesn’t hugely bother me given that Firefox itself is.
Does anyone object to this indirect way of funding Firefox? Does it cause indirect harm by making them prioritise pocket over Firefox?
I've spent a lot of time considering Pocket Premium but the price point is just too high. Maybe if they roll in features from feedly and have a really nice RSS reader.
I also hate spending money on news that isn't going to journalists.
Sorry, I can't bring myself to trust them after pocket, mr. robot, and of course the time they fired that guy for having a fetish. I might use their browser product if it ever seems like it'll be better for my needs but I'm certainly not giving them money.
I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out.
What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty brazillion employees it can test new features on.
> I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out.
It's crazy to me to think about when I was in college (in the mid aughts), I was doing a lot of research into Native American cultures. The amount of releases, paperwork, and other hoops you had to jump through in order to just interview subjects was pretty daunting.
The fact we have become involuntary research subjects without any protections as a research subject or easy way to opt out of these companies data collection (which itself is an ongoing form of research) is staggering to thing about.
Bias up front: I work at Google but am not speaking for Google.
> involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs.
I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use the product. If you choose to use the product, yes, you may be exposed to features that the product has. If you don't want to be exposed to those features, the way to opt out is to not use the product.
> What's the motivation?
It lets the company incrementally roll out and test features in real-world network configurations at scale. As far as I know, almost all tech companies do this.
Let's say you're Fapplebooglezon and you have an idea to put kitten emojis on the "Buy Now" button. Before you ship that, you want to make sure that:
1. The feature works correctly. It doesn't crash or have significant performance problems.
2. Users, in aggregate, like the change. No one wants to ship a "New Coke" debacle. It's bad for the company (they lose money) and bad for users (they don't like the product).
3. Your servers and network can handle the consequences of that change. Maybe users will be so excited that they all click "Buy Now" twice as much. You need to make sure your servers don't crumble under the increased load.
These are reasonable things that benefit both the company and users. So the way features and changes are usually shipped is like:
1. The feature is implemented behind some kind of flag. [0]
2. "Fishfooding" [1]: The team developing the feature starts using it. This gives you some feedback on "does the feature work correctly" but that's about it. The team owns the feature, so they are biased in terms of its usability. And they are on a privileged network and not a large enough population to verify how this affects the distributed system.
3. "Dogfooding": The entire company starts using it. This starts to give you some usability feedback because now people who don't have a stake in the feature are being exposed to it. But it's still skewed since employees are likely not a representative user population.
4. "Canary": The feature is enabled for a randomly selected small population of external users. Now you start getting feedback on how the feature performs in the wild on real-world machines and networks. The percent of users is kept small enough to not crush the servers in case anything goes awry, but you can start getting some performance data too.
5. "A/B testing": Now you start collecting data to see how behavior of users with the feature compares to users without it. You can actually start to get data on whether the feature is good or not.
6. Assuming everything looks OK, you start incrementally rolling it out to a larger and larger fraction of users. All the while, you watch the servers to make sure the load is within expected bounds.
7. Once you get to 100% of users and things look good, you remove the flag and the feature is now permanently enabled.
> Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware?
Google, like most other companies, also does lots of user testing and user surveys too. But that doesn't give you insight into the technical side of the question — how the feature impacts the behavior of your distributed system.
You may not be aware of this, but this kind of in-the-wild product testing is something almost all businesses do, all the time. Food companies test new products in grocery stores in selected cities [2]. Car manufacturers drive camoflaged prototypes on the road [3]. Restaurant chains tinker with recipes to see how sales are affected. There is absolutely no guarantee that the Coke you're drinking today has the same ingredients as the one you had yesterday.
You seem to think this is some nefarious scheme, but it's just basic marketing. You want to make a thing people like, so you make two things and measure which one people like more. People "opt in" and "consent" by using the product. If you don't want to be a "guinea pig" when McDonald's changes their French fry recipe, don't buy the fries. If you don't want to test out new Chrome features, don't use Chrome.
I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use the product
It's involuntary because it's not informed consent. Google doesn't tell people up front or in any meaningful way that this is happening.
That's like saying "Oh, that steak was covered in the chef's experimental hot sauce that we didn't list on the menu? Well, too bad, you chose to come to this restaurant."
If I use a bunch of older Chromes from portableapps, are those affected by feature testing, provided I've disabled google update but I'm not behind a firewall?
In other words, is feature polling just hard-coded or it is bound to a specific installation?
This is a meaningless cliche. Just because users of Google products don't pay in cash to use them doesn't change the fact that Google has to attract the users to their platform in the first place, and keep them there.
Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless.
See the fiasco where they broke Terminal Services last year as an example of what can go wrong even when doing experiments on the whole user base.
Also consider how to measure the usage of web features Google's own websites don't use, but are popular on e.g. intranets in Korea.
A/B testing isn't bad, it's a good thing. People are notoriously not very good at giving feedback. Experiments and usage statistics let you get the ground truth about what they really value, and what's really working.
Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless.
This is a lazy argument. Google isn't some scrappy tech startup where 90% of the employees are programmers. Google has legions of lawyers, mailroom clerks, accountants, travel coordinators, janitors, cafeteria workers, middle managers of all stripes, and so much more. Thousands and thousands of people it can test on without violating the privacy of the general public.
A/B testing as implemented in industry is
-evokes emotional responses eerily similar to those evoked when gaslighting is noticed
-uncompensated
-inconsistent with any semblance of established research ethics
-generally non-consensual
-completely undermines trust
I'm not normally one to make a big deal about this sort of thing, but there is a reason research ethics exist. If one can't be trusted to even attempt to follow ethical research protocols, one damn well shouldn't be trusted with anything important.
Your user's time and information is not yours to share. Whether you bury it in the fine print or not.
Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the product stable enough for enterprise.
Although Window 7 may have been one of the most complex software deployments in history, needing to support decades of poorly written drivers, while making the system both stable and compatible.
>Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the product stable enough for enterprise.
That claim is directly contradicted by the fact that there's Windows Vista enterprise edition[1]. Vista is also supported for a full 10 years just like 7, which would be strange for something that was supposed to be an "experiment".
Do you understand what licensing is? That's one of the underlying aspects that's important with software and why you can't treat it like other things you buy. I'd add it's also why things that adopt software-style licencing models are bad too.
A company creates a licence with terms and you agree to use the licence under those terms by using the software. The terms are difficult to change unless you have leverage. The only party other than the company is often the regulatory authority. Regulation is limited in the US at best when compared to the EU. If you are from the EU then you probably assume the US works similarly, but most Americans don't recognize issues like this one. When they do, it's hard to fight the incumbents and make something opt-in, or ban it outright.
> What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? (the start of your first paragraph applies here too)
It's fairly simple. The motivation is making correct decisions based on the gold standards of decision-making that some people aspire to. The model is not dissimilar to clinical trials where a treatment is given to some individuals and not to others. The hope is that this form of experimentation removes bias and let's the product manager make the best decisions.
Based on this thinking it is not possible to test with just Google's employees. For many decisions, the bias will be significant, and ultimately the belief is that worse decisions will be made for users.
I'm trying to convey that in as neutral way as possible. I think this can be a useful technique, but I think that there is little discipline and accountability in the wider software world compared to medicine. You have PMs who'll routinely just run an A/B test longer to collect more data (that's better, right?), but invalidate their results, just to please management.
If anyone is going to implement this approach then I'd trust Google to implement it effectively to meet their needs. They do it on a large scale across their products and have many layers of people to ensure it's effectively meeting their needs. As stated in the previous paragraph, this doesn't mean that other people do it right, or that everyone in Google does it right every time. I'm sure they've had a fair share of failed experiments.
Nope, no one understands licensing. Which means that arguments grounded on "The user accepted the terms!" has a shaky ethical foundation. Not necessarily a shaky legal foundation, although that wheel seems to be turning.
Ahh, the good ol' "Firefox is too slow for me to consider it" statement. Is there any evidence that Firefox is slower then Chrome other than old lingering memories of Firefox being slow ten years ago?
I have used both Firefox and Chrome and I can't subjectively tell that one is significantly faster or slower than the other. To be fair, I only have a handful of extensions and rarely have more than ten tabs open at a time, so my use case may be atypical.
I love that Firefox exists and Quantum is an amazing step forward, but Firefox still regularly runs away with gigabytes of RAM and hung worker processes. I have no problem with long-lived Chrome sessions but I need to restart Firefox ~daily. It's not bad memories of 10-years ago.
Could it be because people who like their browser tend to tell others about it? I have absolutely nothing to do with Mozilla but I think the internet would be a better place if more people used Firefox.
Firefox isn't too slow, but you might be talking about how Google optimise their sites for Chrome at the expense of Firefox's performance through browser sniffing.
It's not odd at all. It's what the folks at Mozilla do. They jump in to every thread to push Firefox and Rust and make people think it's more widely used/better than it is.
Not everything is a conspiracy. I'm not a Mozilla employee, have never been one (probably never will be one). Firefox is awesome, fast, and extensible. It's my daily driver for all of my machines.
I think most people who advocate Firefox are not Mozilla employees. I am for sure not one, I do not even like Mozilla, but they are a much lesser evil compared to Google. And I think having multiple competing browsers is vital for preventing the internet for becoming a walled garden owned by some big corporation.
> It's a unique ID to track a specific Chrome instance across all Google properties.
> Really curious about your opinion, especially after the GDPR explicitly forbidding such tracking. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to anonymise user-agent if you have such backdoor.
I visited my family a couple of weeks ago and was shocked when my father told me that his phone 'received' some of our photos. I checked and a huge chunk of whatsapp photos that were backed up by my wife's phone had ended up in my dad's Google Photos account. I discounted it as my wife accidentally sharing the whatsapp folder with my dad but now I'm not so sure.
Yup, that's one of the issues you'll get with interlinked accounts; in this case, Whatsapp backs up / stores photos automatically to your phone's photo gallery, and said photo gallery is automatically synchronized with the cloud.
I don't know exactly what's going on with your wife's / your father-in-law's accounts though, are they sharing Google accounts, photo albums, or were the photos shared in the same whatsapp group?
> are they sharing Google accounts, photo albums, or were the photos shared in the same whatsapp group?
None of these. They don't share any accounts. I don't share any account with my father either. Me and my wife use the shared galley feature. The photos that ended up on my fathers phone were shared by me and my wife with each other on whatsapp. I suspect either mine or my wife's gallery somehow "leaked" into my fathers even though none of the accounts have any connections AFAICT. Probably we clicked some share button somewhere accidentally but I couldn't find any shared galleries on any of our phones.
If you really want to help, suggesting an accurate and neutral title, preferably using representative language from the article itself, is a great way to do that. We don't know enough to get it right in every case, even when awake.
Not endorsing this, but according to https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...
> We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before it’s launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation.
> The variations active for a given installation are determined by a seed number which is randomly selected on first run. If usage statistics and crash reports are disabled, this number is chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy). If you would like to reset your variations seed, run Chrome with the command line flag “--reset-variation-state”. Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address), operating system, Chrome version and other parameters.
This is impressive doublespeak.
> This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information
> a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ... chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy)
They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
> Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address)
They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
> operating system, Chrome version and other parameters.
...and many additional sources of entropy.
[1] why 24 bits instead of 32? The LSB of the address might be zeroed if the packet is affected by Googles faux-"anonymization" feature ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059 )
> > Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by your IP address)
> They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
I don't think that sentence admits what you say? Chrome could be determining which experiments to run client-side.
Of course, when you visit a Google property, they needs must inspect your IP address to send a response to you, at a minimum. That goes for any site you might choose to visit. The existence of sufficient entropy to personally identify a site visitor is not a state secret. They do not need this chrome experiment seed to identify you, if that's a goal.
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> They are not including any PII... while creating a new identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of entropy, what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13 bits then Google suddenly able to track what they were not? If the IPv4 address, user-agent string, or some other behavior is sufficient to reveal a great deal of stuff, we have a more serious problem than that 13 bits. I agree that 13-bit seed is a concern. But I am wondering if it is a concern per se, or its orchestration with something else. Of course, how/whether Google keeps those data also matters.
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> This ... header ... will not contain any personally identifiable information
Except for everything you do on your browser. I'm so glad I haven't used Chrome for almost three years.
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Yes, if you have enough bits you can come up with a fingerprint, but that's not what PII means.
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Don't forget that just about any registration requires recaptcha these days
>Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
Wat? You mean to tell me they can identify you if you log into their service?
Am I missing something here? Who cares?
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They key in the wording is: "If usage statistics and crash reports are disabled, this number is chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy)."
"If, statistics are disabled."
In chrome://version you can see the active variations. It seems to be pretty big numbers to be significant, and so far haven't observed duplicates.
Since this header is generated server-side, you have only to believe I guess ? Plus why Doubleclick would need it :)
That's basically saying "even if you opt out, we'll still try to track you, just not as much." Very unpleasant, but then again I'm not surprised to see this attitude from Google.
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How many people will actually run chrome with a cli flag? It would be pretty impressive if every single person reading this thread did, but it probably won't even be that. Most people don't even touch their settings.
13 bits of entropy is far from a uuid (but to get it to that you need to disable some more settings, which again very few people do), but it's still plenty good enough to disambiguate individuals over time.
And Google is certainly in a position to disambiguate that uuid to an individual as soon as they login to gmail or any other Google property!
Is there a reason for only sending this header to Google web properties and not all domains?
It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace. Google is using their powerful position to give themselves tracking capabilities that other online players can't access. It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
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Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests which use experimental features only available in Chrome perhaps?
I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature detection and be back to being standards compliant and not creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is because they optimize the payload server-side to return a certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the default version first, do feature detection, and then set a session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
My other Thought was that they test a feature that is implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having to do with their account management.
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Err yeah, because it adds loads of data that can be used to track you.
Couldn't the Chrome installations receive a request from Google that says "Do you want to try out a new thing?", and couldn't the Chrome installations say yes with a certain probability? The only difference I can see is that the subset of users that are guinea pigs couldn't be the same in each test (if Google wanted that the subset is always the same).
So they're tracking people and using them as guinea pigs, the lack of respect for users is astounding.
How does one apply the “--reset-variation-state” flag on a chromebook?
So it’s just a poor excuse to send an evercookie.
Everybody imagine going back 15 years and tell yourself that you're using a web browser made by the parent company of DoubleClick. Your 15 year ago self would think you're a moron (assuming that 15 years ago you were old enough to know what DoubleClick was).
I always believed that tech-savvy people using Google Chrome are morons. It's the perfect blend of Google being evil trying to force it to everyone, the browser being dumbed down to masses so much it's missing the most basic features, and I guess privacy concerns too when using browser from advertising company.
> DoubleClick
What browser would you recommend?
That's a really great way of conceptualizing it, if you assume Google is basically DoubleClick at it's core (which I think makes sense).
Doubleclick ads were, originally, what prompted me to seek an adblock extension.
I think it was around 2006 that I got the extension for Firefox; Google bought them about a year later.
Well, it depends. Do I get a funny animation following my cursor if I do it?
Kind of true. The whole internet was much more of a toy back then. Tracking was not viewed so maliciously as now. Heck I might have even been convinced by a hard sell "this will help your favorite sites maximize their revenue".
I can only speak for myself, but myself from 15 years ago would not have cared so strongly about the choice of browser. I believe I was using the newly-ad-less Opera at the time, and new/cared little about the company making it.
My 15 year ago self would have taken a double helping of DoubleClick if my only choices were that or Internet Explorer 6.
Firefox and Opera existed at the time.
Do you remember what browsers were like when Chrome came out? I switched from Firefox the day it came out, and was very happy with performance and UI.
I don’t use Chrome. Never have, never will. Why do you?
TL;DR I think whoever posted that is trying to bury the UA anonymizing feature by derailing the discussion.
What I'm seeing is an RFC for anonymizing parts of User-Agent in order to reduce UA based fingerprinting, which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
Then I see someone comments how that could negatively impact existing websites or Chromium-derived browsers, comments which are totally fair and make an argument that may not be a good idea doing this change because of that.
Then someone mentions the _existing_ x-client-data headers attached to requests that uniquely identify a Chrome installation. Then a lot of comments on that, including here on HN.
To me that's derailing the original issue. If we want to propose that Chrome remove those headers we should do so as a separate issue and have people comment/vote on that. By talking about it on the UA anonymizing proposal we are polluting that discussion and effectively stalling that proposal which, if approved, could improve privacy (especially since it will go into Chromium so then any non-Chrome builds can get the feature without having to worry about x-client-data that Chrome does).
I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed.
Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are how they make money. And like all businesses, they are competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money off this change.
Their motivations are not honest, but they're pushing them as if this is the high road. It isn't. It's the dirty low road of dominating the online ad business, made possible by their dominance in the browser market. And it's always been the end-goal of Chrome browser.
I think this is a common strategy of big players at any industry.
First, they do some dirty thing to gain a competitive edge when the industry is still new and unregulated. Later they develop an alternative way to achieve the same competitive edge, and then criticize other players for doing an old way, saying they should be "mature and responsible".
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Just yesterday I had to disable anti fingerprinting I'd enabled in Firefox because despite having a solid IP and and existing cookies to login to Google, it's security system rejected me, even after answering security questions. Turn off fingerprinting and I could log in.
So, this is a round about way of agreeing with the hidden dark patterns that Google are bringing to the web. It must stop.
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Much of such discussions demonize the company, but we need to look broader. Google is a public company and its shareholders, since they share the company, are also to be pointed out. Discouraging such behaviour is better done by the shareholders by dumping shares since Google could very well argue that if it didn't work to maximize ad revenue, it would not be operating according to fiduciary responsibility principles. (IANAL .. just thinking out loud)
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"I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors while keeping them fully-armed."
Pretty sure that was their main reason for helping push https-everywhere. A good idea generally, but hurt every other entity trying to do tracking more than it hurt Google.
> while keeping them fully-armed.
That's sort of a fragile assumption though. I mean, yes, there's enough specificity in this number that it could be used (in combination with other fingerprinting techniques) to disambiguate a user. And yes, only Google would be capable of doing this. So it's abusable, in the same way that lots of software like this is abusable by the disributor. And that's worth pointing out and complaing about, sure.
But it's not tracking. It's not. It's a cookie that identifies the gross configuration of the browser. And Google claims that it's not being used for tracking.
So all the folks with the hyperbole about user tracking for advertising purposes need to come out with their evidence that Google is lying about this. Occam says that, no, it's probably just a misdesigned feature.
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While I agree with some of your comment, I feel like it’s harsh to paint the whole chrome enterprise with that brush. Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser and a lot of devoted devs have spent a lot of time working on it. There’s an advertising aspect that it’s right to call out, but I think on the whole it was done to make the internet better, because the internet is google’s business too.
EDIT I just wanted to point out that a load of people have poured their lives into making Google Chrome the amazing bit of software that it is and suggesting that the end-goal has been entirely about supplying ads does a great disservice to their personal contributions.
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>which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
Which means Google competitors are terribly disadvantaged, as they cannot use that.
Which not only reduces market diversity (contrary to TAG philosophy) but represents a significant conflict of interest for an organization proposing a major web standard change.
These issues are very relevant to the original proposal, especially in light of the fact that Noone outside of Google is terribly interested in this change. Any time a dominant player is the strongest (or only) advocate for a change that would coincidentally and disproportionately benefit its corporate interests, the proposal should be viewed very skeptically.
> Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
So when Apple releases a privacy feature, that doesn't affect them as a business, we praise the feature or we say "except it doesn't affect Apple" and somehow try to argue how the feature is less valuable because of that?
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This is the equivalent of a protest, people are objecting to Google's illegal data harvesting practices in places that receive engagement, since that's the most effective way to get the word out and warn others.
Google's reasoning that this is not personal data is meaningless in the face of GDPR, which considers an IP address personal data. Google has access to the IP address when they receive the data, therefore they are transmitting personal information without user consent and control, which is illegal.
It could be argued that a similar violation is present (since March 2019) in Chromium for the Widevine CDM provisioning request, see https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/471
Basically all users opening the browser will contact www.googleapis.com to get a unique "Protected Media Identifier", without opening any web page and even before any ToS/EULA is accepted (and there is no user consent either).
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The poster is the author of Kiwi browser, which unfortunately is closed source [0], but I have reason to believe he is familiar - as I am for the Bromite project - with all the (sometimes shady) internals of the Chromium codebase; it is indeed off-topic to discuss the header issue there but I would say that there is no explicit intention to derail it (and no advantage), just incorrect netiquette.
[0]: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/issues/12#issuecommen...
The Google employee argues that through UA-CH Google wants to disincetivise "allow" and "block" lists.
After many years of testing HTTP headers, IMO this really is a non-issue. Most websites return text/html just fine without sending any UA header at all.
What is an issue are the various ways websites try to coax users to download, install and use a certain browser.
Another related issue with Google Chrome is users getting better integration and performance when using Chrome with Google websites than they would if they used other clients. ^1 Some make the analogy to Microsoft where it was common for Microsoft software to integrate and perform better on Microsoft Windows whereas third party software was noticably worse to integrate and perform on that OS.
This leads to less user agent diversity. Users will choose what works best.
UA diversity is really a more important goal than privacy, or privacy in Chrome. The biggest privacy gains are not going to come from begging Google to make changes to Chrome. They could however come from making it easier for users to switch away from using Chrome and to use other clients. That requires some cooperation from websites as well as Google.
Those other clients could theoretically be written by anyone, not just large companies and organisations that are dependent on the online ad sales business. It would be relatively easy to achieve "privacy-by-design" in such clients. There is no rule that says users have to use a single UA to access every website. There needs to be choice.
For example, HN is a relatively simple website that does not require a large, complex browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc. to read. It generates a considerable amount of traffic and stands as proof that simpler websites can be popular. Varying the UA header does not result in drastic differences in the text/html returned by the server.
1. Recently we saw Google exclude use of certain clients to access Gmail.
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/google/core/...
Just thinking out loud.
What happens, let's say, if someone malicious buys youtube.vg and puts a SSL certificate on it ? Will they be able to collect the ID ?
I guess so ?
Yes, but they would also need a valid TLS certificate?
A country's government could also take over the TLD and grab its traffic overnight.
The original issue is supposedly fingerprinting and privacy related.
If that's true then Google should be called out for their poor behaviour.
As long as web developers continue to create (app-)sites that only work in the latest versions of Chrome(and Chromium-ish) browsers, giving users little effective choice over what browsers they can use, this sort of abusive behaviour will continue. The sort of "feature-racing" that Google engages in is ultimately harmful for the open web. Mozilla struggles to keep up, Opera surrendered a while ago, and more recently, Microsoft seems to have already given up completely.
I feel like it's time we "hold the Web back" again. Leave behind the increasingly-walled-garden of "modern" appsites and their reliance on hostile browsers, and popularise simple HTML and CSS, with forms for interactivity, maybe even just a little JavaScript where absolutely necessary. Something that is usable with a browser like Dillo or Netsurf, or even one of the text-based ones. Making sites that are usable in more browsers than the top 2 (or 1) will weaken the amount of control that Google has, by allowing more browsers to appear and gain userbases.
This proposal would not accomplish what you intend. By slowing the adoption of open web technologies, developers and users would lean more heavily on mobile apps, which are also under Google's control considering Android's huge market share.
Developers who want to level the playing field need to develop sites that fully support Firefox and other browsers that are not based on Chromium. Users who want to see a more open web need to use Firefox and non-Chromium browsers, and complain to developers who don't properly support them.
I'm talking about the vast majority of things people use websites for, which do not need a webapp much less a mobile app.
I wish, but that's not what most people want. Hell, it's not what designers want. Thinking back to the Myspace days, people would have the worst websites imaginable. Granted, that was all done with little more than HTML and javascript, but I have little doubt what they would have done with things like HTML5 and even more javascript.
I have to agree with this.
The last decade or so has really reinforced to me that we all ignore or are ignorant of fundamental structural problems with most of the systems we rely on - with us wanting them to "just work."
We're all guilty of this, we just see it up close for the things that we're building and chide others who don't care. Meanwhile we ignore other fundamental structures of modern society.
There's got to be a balance between every website looking exactly the same and fading out of my memory with one identical hamburger menu after another and dancing babies on geocities.
Are there really that many popular extensions not available on Firefox? I may be just one anecdote, but I think I'm pretty typical, and I've found the transition to Firefox to be quite pleasant, and uneventful.
Popular - no. Essential - yes. Case in point - my bank (top 5 in my country) which uses Chrome plugin for security purposes, you need it to create digital signature. So once a year I HAVE to install Chrome (key expires every year) and then delete it. I've also found at least one payment processor not working in Firefox, my city portal for public transport and several small sites. The worrying thing is the trend - with Firefox share dropping below 10% recently it will be abandoned more and more.
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Firefox is really good.
My issue is with certain sites that typically either uses non standard Javascript apis that only work in blink or relies on non standard behavior of standard components (numeric form inputs was mentioned here yesterday).
It doesn't happen often but sometimes, when a website doesn't work, I switch to chrome and it works there.
HTML is not enough. It’s why templating languages / libraries were invented, and it’s why SPA’s are so popular. There’s a difference between “sites” and applications. The web has been trending toward supporting applications more and more for a very long time.
The only thing that will make people who want to preserve the content-web happy is if we split the protocols somehow, and that will never happen. This is not likely to change ever.
I havent had js on by default in years. Using a js enabled browser is a drastically worse experience.
suckless surf lest you enable js with a hotkey on a per-process basis if you really want it for something, but 90% of the time, I just close the tab that wants to waste my time.
I think we at HN have a particular responsibility to keep the web free and open. This really is an arms race and only those of us building the tech have the power curtail FAANG's overreach. It might me time to choose a side and firmly push your work toward open web friendly tech.
> [...] this sort of abusive behaviour will continue.
Can you elaborate what exactly is abusive behavior?
> [...] reliance on hostile browsers, [...]
What exactly is a hostile browser?
What is mentioned in the title of this article.
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Microsoft has not given up. They wrote windows phone which every last user agrees has a better ux than droid and iOS. How many of you wrote apps?
Hell every single discussion here nobody even talks about Microsoft products bing translate, bing maps et al. Despite them all being too notch and clearly better than Google in areas of their own. Eg. Chinese , last I checked , was better in bing translate.
And yet apple maps update is a top story for the day. You prefer bring cool and then wonder what went wrong.
You personally badmouthed PowerShell once only to satisfy the herd.
> Making sites that are usable in more browsers than the top 2 (or 1) will weaken the amount of control that Google has
You do realize/remember that Google is also a search-engine company, one that only stands to benefit (in terms of increased capability of advertising targeting) from a web that's simpler, and therefore more machine-legible.
I’m not so sure about that. Google has the resources, a simpler web makes it easier for competitors, seems like google is already quite competent at machine reading just about everything, even sometimes things that you can’t fond/visit. Domination by web-apps is the equivalent to widening the moat.
It's fine for Google to benefit from things that everyone benefits from.
Credits to the ungoogled-chromium project [0] for the patch [1] which is also used in Bromite since 15 February 2018 to prevent this type of leaks; see also my reply here: [2]
[0]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
[1]: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/79.0.3945.139/build/...
[2]: https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/480#issuecomment-5...
Which is not the right way to solve this problem.
This is the reverse ad blocker problem.
Just use firefox, where we can at least pretend that the full time paid contributors are not trying to shove Advertising and Tracking on us.
You can see all the domains they add the header to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034849
Actual list: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/google/core/...
This seems like a cut-and-dry case of getting caught in monopolistic behavior. The code is right there. The Chrome codebase has special features for Google’s own web properties.
I hope all these AGs suing google have some good tech advisors. It’s hard to keep track of all the nefarious things google has been up to over the past decade.
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Security flaw? Surely some entity is squatting youtube on some TLD?!
If there is a country TLD of X where Google owns google.X but entity Y owns youtube.X then entity Y gets the X-CLIENT-DATA header information. See usage of IsValidHostName() in code.
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According to this source code [0], it looks like this is in Chromium as well. Does that mean this affects Electron applications?
[0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
Electron maintainer here. Electron does not send this header.
Thanks for clarification.
Edge ("Edgium") doesn't appear to send this header. Neither does Chrome in Private or Guest Mode.
Checked that Vivaldi doesn't seem to be sending this header.
If you strace chrome on linux it also picks up /etc/machine-id (or it did back when I looked), which is a 32 byte randomly generated string which uniquely identifies you and on some systems is used as the DHCP ID across reboots.
First I thought reading /etc/machine-id would be expected if Chrome uses D-bus or pulseaudio libraries which depend on D-bus, and /etc/machine-id is part of D-bus. But no, they really use it for tracking purposes.
And in a sick twist they have this comment for it:
In fairness, the guidelines they reference suggest you do exactly what the comment says they're doing (assuming they're keying the hash). The guidelines seem explicitly written with the idea that unique identifiers _derived from_ this value are not similarly quarantined, provided that you cannot take the derived value and "reverse" it back to the original identifier.
Quoting from https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-id....:
This ID uniquely identifies the host. It should be considered "confidential", and must not be exposed in untrusted environments, in particular on the network. If a stable unique identifier that is tied to the machine is needed for some application, the machine ID or any part of it must not be used directly. Instead the machine ID should be hashed with a cryptographic, keyed hash function, using a fixed, application-specific key. That way the ID will be properly unique, and derived in a constant way from the machine ID but there will be no way to retrieve the original machine ID from the application-specific one.
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> which is why we hash it first and then encode it in base64 before transmitting it.
This made me chuckle. "As per the rules, we'll put on a boxing glove before we punch your lights out". You wont get privacy, but at least there is some security!
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"Tracking purposes" is such a weasel word, when we're really talking about device management in an enterprise setting, and this code only gets activated if the root/administrator user has installed a token file on your computer.
That really is a cynical comment. It almost bothers me more than this header.
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Which (among many other things) can be faked with firejail, if you absolutely have to run Chromium (e.g. for testing):
Chromium doesn't seem to read that file.
When puppeteer first came out I was nervous to use it for scraping because I could totally see Chrome pulling tricks like this to help recaptcha in identifying the bots. I’m still not convinced they aren’t.
firefor / tor also read this file
What does tor do with it? Maybe pass it along in packet timing intervals, or something ... ;o)
That's not a correct description.
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/machine-id.xm...
True, more precisely - 16 bytes, 32 hex characters. Your link is in agreement "The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during system installation or first boot and stays constant for all subsequent boots." And See https://wiki.debian.org/MachineId at least one distro uses it for the DHCP ID.
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And this is a legal thing to do?
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any mainstream tech press attention. Chrome's Privacy Whitepaper describes a number of privacy-questionable nonstandard headers which are only sent to Google services. Just try searching for X- here:
https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html
And for ease of reading, a few others:
> On Android, your location will also be sent to Google via an X-Geo HTTP request header if Google is your default search engine, the Chrome app has the permission to use your geolocation, and you haven’t blocked geolocation for www.google.com (or country-specific origins such as www.google.de)
> To measure searches and Chrome usage driven by a particular campaign, Chrome inserts a promotional tag, not unique to you or your device, in the searches you perform on Google. This non-unique tag contains information about how Chrome was obtained, the week when Chrome was installed, and the week when the first search was performed. ... This non-unique promotional tag is included when performing searches via Google (the tag appears as a parameter beginning with "rlz=" when triggered from the Omnibox, or as an “x-rlz-string” HTTP header).
> On Android and desktop, Chrome signals to Google web services that you are signed into Chrome by attaching an X-Chrome-Connected and/or C-Chrome-ID-Consistency-Request header to any HTTPS requests to Google-owned domains. On iOS, the CHROME_CONNECTED cookie is used instead.
Holy rotten metal batman... those are pretty bad. Why in the world isn't everyone up in arms over this?....
PII concept is not the same for everyone/everywhere. For GDPR we have:
> Article 4(1): ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
If this chrome browser ID is matched against a (for example) google account, then they can track every single person. And that is just a couple of IDs, let alone all the quantity of data they have.
It's against GDPR to not be clear about this kind of ID. If my browser has an unique ID that is transmitted, then this ID can be coupled with other information to retrieve my identity and behavior, so it should be informed (in the EU).
EDIT: TD;LR, hiding behind "there is no PII in that ID" is not enough.
Who's going to raise this issue though? And what if they put this in the browser's T&C?
I thought they needed explicit consent. T&Cs ain't that.
> Who's going to raise this issue though?
I'm sure there is someone out there who takes these kind of things seriously. Not me. I use firefox for that matter.
> And what if they put this in the browser's T&C?
Then the rest of GDPR applies: a clear message about the browser sending this info has to be shown, explaining why, with who they'll share it, the time they will keep this info, plus no auto opt-ins, the possibility of asking Google (or whatever) all the info relative to this ID and the option to cancel all the data, etc.
This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad in its definition of PII; it denies even innocuous feature-mode-distinguishing headers intended to allow for bug-identification of massively-distributed software installs.
If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "better software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better software quality."
Me too. Then a breach happens and someone with a straight face tells you: "we take your privacy very seriously", asking apologies, because the breach used some of your data to push some political campaign or to bother you with spam/extortions because that night you were watching some porn.
Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software as is, and start releasing software that works. Otherwise upper levels have an excuse to do all this "experience" telemetry, and we all are smart enough to see the consequences of a data breach.
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> This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad in its definition of PII
And I consider it far too narrow.
> If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "better software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better software quality."
Fair enough. I would go for "more privacy", personally. There is no technical reason why both of our preferences couldn't be honored.
Well why does Chrome send this special header to only Google properties like YouTube and search and not the rest of the internet.
It really seems fishy and a lot of double speak. I really don’t trust Google here.
> and not the rest of the internet
Privacy issues aside, this might not help an antitrust case if one is brought against them.
This it outrageous. Browsers are user-agents, not advertising accelerators. They should hide as much personal identifiable information as possible. This is exactly why using a browser from an advertising company is not a good idea. They use it to improve their service... The lie gets old...
This comment was sadly written in Chrome, since I need it for testing...
edit: pretty much exactly 10 years ago they already tried their shit with a unique id. We should have learned from that experience.
Well when the browser is created by an advertising company...
>This comment was sadly written in Chrome, since I need it for testing...
You realize you can have multiple different browsers installed, right?
According to https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html
"We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before it’s launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation."
While this header may not contain personally identifiable information, its presence will make every request by this user far more unique and thus easier to track. I do not see Google saying they won't use it to improve their tracking of people.
One click while logged into any Google property will be enough for them to permanently associate this GUID with your (shadow) account, they know it, and they know you know it too
So, an extremely unique identifier for tracking purposes, that effectively no one knows exists, and no one knows can be changed at all?
With an obscure white paper that allows Google to claim they comply with the law because "they totally offer a way to change that and they even published that information to the web for anyone to find"?
Gotcha.
Don't be evil...
Until we are deployed enough that users don't have a choice...
Now that Google has cornered the market for Internet browsing, they're using that foothold to change how it works to suit their dominance. This is why they are not concerned about per-site tracking that Google Analytics does, as long as THEY as a company have direct browser-based tracking, they no longer need to provide tracking services to other private companies to know what is trending everywhere. This is also probably why they're trying to kill ad blockers and certain browser privacy extensions.... But they won't really matter to Google if everything is done at the browser level to begin with from now on. :/
If they make moves to scale back [free] Google Analytics, which they probably will at some point, it will only highlight this ideal... They may turn to selling their privately collected metrics and qualitative studies to companies after Google Analytics is rendered useless, and then that's unadulterated monopolistic profit for them and shareholders...
Diabolical.
True. But luckily you actually have a choice. Many opt for DuckDuckGo on Firefox, for instance.
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Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't be evil"? It's not been applicable for half a decade now, and even in 2015 when it was officially removed from the last company documents, it was already a dead phrase.
Google had already cornered the market back in 2012, when it surpassed every other browser, with an absolute majority dominance (>50% market share) achieved way back in 2015.
Google has been in control for a long time now.
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Reminds me of this.
"There’s no point acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now"
Beware of the leopard!
Are you talking about the same thing? Because the identifier above is claimed to have 13b of entropy. Is there another high entropy identifier?
13b, if usage statistics are disabled (not the default). Otherwise, unspecified amount of entropy.
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13b plus IP is already huge, but browsers leak so much more than that.
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Your comment is factually incorrect.
13 bits of entropy is not an extremely unique identifier.
The first three letters of your first name have more bits of entropy than that. It would be quite a trick to uniquely identify you by the first three letters of your first name.
I fear the factual incorrectness isn't mine: the random string used is 13 bits of entropy only if usage statics is disabled, which isn't the case by default. By default, it uses an unspecified entropy (and you can bet real dollars that it'll be more then 13 bits worth).
Chrome explicitly having a line [1] of code to not send the `x-client-data` header to Yahoo made me laugh.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
FWIW, it looks like that's a test case -- it is not part of Chrome itself. They most likely just wanted an example of a third-party website, and could have used any non-Google site there.
Yes, But they tested Yahoo of all websites to make sure they don't send tracking data, and not an unrelated website like wikipedia or archive.org. The only non-google test case too I might add.
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Don’t forget that even if the number is varying only in an interval of 0 and 7999, this means without cookies a unique chrome installation can be identified if multiple users are using the same IP, like residential houses with families, etc. — that way it is possible to determine the unique amount of devices inside a house.
>that way it is possible to determine the unique amount of devices inside a house.
There are exceptions I guess. Imagine 8000 households in which couples live. Both partners own the same MacBook model. In 1/8000 cases Google would think there is only one person.
It seems like a reasonable time to bring up the reformer project 'ungoogled-chrome' [1]. I have used it and new versions of Firefox for over 3 years and have seldom had to jump back to `Googlified Chrome.` Do know that installing via `brew` [2] means no - standard browser auto-update. Which in this case, makes sense to me.
Aside: It seems to me the realist punk / anti-the-man software one can work on is a user respecting browser. I don't work on these, but I am very grateful for those out there who do.
-------
- [1]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#downloads
- [2]: Brew install via: `brew cask fetch eloston-chromium && brew cask install eloston-chromium`
Enjoy old school browsing with new school development benefits.
I must be dense but I never see the `x-client-data` header in the request headers of the network tab in developer tools.
I just checked, I see it on Chrome when fetching resources from google.com, youtube.com, gstatic.com, and googlesyndication.com.
Try a packet capture. You wouldn't trust the browser to let you know all shady emails it is sending, right? :)
This did come to mind, hah.
I BELIEVE it is related to this section: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2e452bbf1fa092a742...
Right-click in the Name column, select "Save all as HAR with content". Then grep for the headers, e.g.,
While running Chrome, try
Handle to the shared memory segment containing field trial state that is to be shared between processes. The argument to this switch is the handle id (pointer on Windows) as a string, followed by a comma, then the size of the shared memory segment as a string.
Also, can try typing "chrome://versions" in the address bar
https://superuser.com/questions/541466/what-is-the-variation...
https://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/05/field-trials-in-chrome-how...
Further reading:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
I just tried it now on google.com, and it sent it in 6 requests. You can ctrl+f in developer tools in Chrome.
I think extensions can filter out the x-client-data header, though Google should definitely make this data collection opt-in.
GDPR is very clear about this data being personal information [1], since Google has access to the IP address on the receiving end, which has been repeatedly tested in courts as being personal data.
Google is engaging in personal data harvesting without user consent and control, and no amount of mental gymnastics presented in their privacy whitepaper [2] will save them in courts.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
[2] https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...
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Can you also test under the incognito mode?
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It seems that it does not send "x-client-data" header in private mode, but it sends it when browsing regular mode.
But unless you changed IP, and other machine characteristics they'll be able to link the machine-id with an alternative fingerprint (cf amiunique/panopticlick).
That would mean they are actually not tracking you (via that method at least) in private mode. I was just about to investigate how or if they were tracking in porn mode.
It's limited to Google properties.
Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim" level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine monoculture?
Seems to be Chromium judging by some issue comments: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/ccd149af47315e4c6f...
I just checked Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge, and it isn't sending the headers.
FWIW, running Chromium 79.0.3945.130 through mitmproxy (on Debian sid), I don't see this in the headers when visiting gmail.com or youtube.com.
Don't forget Electron! Like Atom, VS Code etc
Electron maintainer here. Electron doesn't send this header.
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This is specifically on Chrome, it seems.
I don't see it in Brave
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Firefox and DuckDuckGo, folks. Today's Google is no more benevolent than yesterday's Microsoft.
To give them some credit: it's not sent when in incognito mode.
How thoughtful of them!
It appears that chrome based Edge does not send this header. I've switched to firefox for everything I can switch, perhaps it time to use Edgeium over chrome for anything else.
MS Windows probably used the Skype to fingerprint you already, and don't need the browser to do it explicitly?
Bypassing CORS checks by "hiding" X-Client-Data: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/f3ceca9d0fd...
Lol, is it news? I mean, it worked like this as long as I can remember, privacy conscious users were complaining for years, helplessly watching as Chrome market share grows, but nobody really cared, so... And now, suddenly, people act like this is big news and they are outraged by such blatant and unexpected(!) intrusion into their privacy.
Wow. I don't even know how I feel about it anymore.
I noticed this when doing work with Puppeteer lately. I thought about reporting it but didn't exactly know what I was looking at.
I use (sometimes/often) mitmproxy and remove or change suspect headers. It is also nice to remove all the fb, google and more crap from the html. And much more. It is a lot of work not to break a website. I don't know whether I am more trackable or not - this is the 'only browser' without x-client-data header.
This is why I use firefox for personal browsing, and edge for work.
Now that Edge / Chromium is out of beta, even better.
I've always assumed that everything I install tracks me through some unique ID. That's arguably wrong for typical Linux packages, but being right just once is enough to justify the assumption.
And for Google, it's arguably foolish to think that they don't.
Chromium too?
Doesn't look like it from my testing of version 81.0.4036.0. But in normal Chrome I do see it.
Can you test it in Microsoft's new Edge browser based on Chromium? I'm very curious about that. (I don't know how to test such a thing myself, sorry :S)
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As another commenter pointed out, the list of domains the header is sent to is part of the Chromium codebase: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
this is just a test case. It could very well be a much bigger list.
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I dropped chrome a long time ago and switched to Brave. Does Brave have these same issues, considering it uses webkit for it's rendering engine? Am I just being paranoid?
What a tumor google has become.
Brave uses Chromium not Webkit.
With that said, one can simply filter out these analytics with a c:\Windows\Systems32\Drivers\etc\hosts -> pointing to 0.0.0.0 or PiHole solution (https://pi-hole.net/), yes?
I mean, this is probably not the holistic solution, but this is why we have a firewall, vpn, antivirus, filters to just keep DNS in check, yes?
Yes, you can if you are willing to block google.com, android.com and youtube.com.
doubleclick.com might not be terrible for most, though.
Interesting enough, it does not add headers when accessing a country specific google domain in the EU - such as google.de or google.fr. Is that GDPR kicking in - with a nod the the brexiteers given that google.co.uk gets these headers... ?
Not sure, but my chrome will send the additional `x-client-data` header even when i'm on eg. `google.de`
So are you suggesting people should DNS block google.com and gmail.com?
There are certain sub-domains that block certain things that keep most of the bad guys at bay, but to some extent yes. This is a fringe case of those activities, but being paranoid is not a bad thing these days, considering the level of red team activity and bad actors probing your network / computer / devices.
Short of putting on the tin foil hat, mind you.
Not shocking. I never trusted Chrome, and never switched over to it. I never understood that Firefox hate. I never thought it was "slow" like so many complaints I have seen. Apparently Firefox is fast and amazing again, I certainly think it is better than it was a several years ago, but again even several years ago I didn't ever think it was slow.
I’ve taken to using FF for browsing With noscript etc and chrome for when I need something to work well and can accept some tracking
No Facebook Firefox PiHole is my Live Love Laugh
Please do not destroy vital testing apparatus.
The sad part is that most times Google violates your privacy, it's just some PM who thinks having some data will be super important and in most cases they're wrong.
Caveat here is that in 99.99999% cases it's also the case that nobody ever looks at your individual file but the fact that they could is bad enough.
Can browser plugins control what headers go out? If so then a simple browser plugin could put a stop to this.
Can scripts from non-google sites making XHR requests to google domains see the outgoing request headers?
Analysis of the same tracking mechanisms from September 2018, and its discussion on HN late last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034849
Does this apply to Edge installations? (If not, another great reason to move to Edge.)
Is this Chrome the browser, ChromeOS, or both? And if so, will it be in Chromium?
By the way, if you use Chrome and Google as a default search engine, Google gets a signal from your browser (with cookies) every time you open a new tab. You can check it with DevTools.
Am I getting this right?
Irrespective of whether you use any other google products, if you use chrome google can now track you over any property that uses google ads, recaptcha, etc.
The header is inserted by the browser after any extensions run, and google pins google properties so you can have an intermediate proxy that strips the header, so they gain persistent tracking of all users across most of the web?
If it wasn’t a tracking vector why do they limit it to just google ads, etc? Why not other ad providers as well?
Just in time for their announcement that they plan to abolish third party cookies by 2021. Talk about monopoly.
This is another instance that google doesn’t care about users privacy and track without their consent by using chrome installation Id. This probably might be against GDPR, so Chrome installed base in Europe multiplied by per day fine, hopefully runs into a years revenue of google.
Another lesson don’t trust for profit companies with privacy protection especially advertising technology company like google with motto like don’t be evil or organize world’s information designed to mislead.
Honestly, it's 2020, even if your technical understanding is so low that you have no idea what a "browser" is, you know that Google will do anything in it's impressive power to track down everything you do with legal or illegal means. Thanks to Snowden, this is no longer a conspiracy theory. It's a fact.
Google should be fined for this but they probably won't be.
It's not in the Epic Privacy Browser (a chromium-based web browser) :-). Is it in Chromium?
And, since it's per installation, it nicely ties all your profiles together for Google.
Obviously! What else to expect from Google! In the user personalization...
Is this also true for all the standalone binaries that embed chromium?
Just ask: why does an advertising company make a browser?
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It hits the nail on the head. If you are concerned about privacy around advertising then using a browser from the biggest online ad company is short sighted.
Quite a lot of reasons. I assume you asked that because you're thinking it's used to gather information on its users. That could be one of the many reasons. At least initially it was because Mozilla/Firefox didn't want to adopt a multi-process architecture.
In terms of strategic reasons, as a company that depends on people browsing on their websites other reasons are obvious: avoid lock in that could be pushed by third-party browser makers/competitors (say IE becomes the most popular and it implements proprietary extensions that work only on their websites[1]), ensure there exists a fast secure browser so that people can keep browsing even if everyone else stops making good browsers out there.
[1] Now before you go ahead and point out how Google proposes HTML/HTTP features that get implemented in their browsers and on the server side, all such features have public specification and source code, so anyone else could implement them too. This is very different from the IE days of yore, where MS was extending IE through ActiveX. ActiveX was developed in house and they were releasing binary plugins/SDKs to develop ActiveX plugins, effectively maintaining full control over it (one would have to develop ActiveX compatible technology from scratch if they wanted it open source, with Chrome all they have to do is fork the source code).
so that you don't have to pay royalties to other browsers for being the main search engine. I mean you have to pay one less. And if you have the most used browser, you save a lot.
In the good old days everyone and their grandmother just sideloaded their malware toolbars with freeware crap like picasa or maps or outright bundled their bloatware with the system like Google still does for Android.
When Chrome was first developed, browsers and the web were relatively slow, and slowing down due to the popularization of Javascript and heavier websites.
Google's worked on a number of technologies to make the web faster; Chrome (and V8), their own DNS, image and video compression technologies, AMP, HTTP/2 (SPDY), HTTP/3 (QUIC), webserver plugins (mod_pagespeed), benchmark tooling (Lighthouse), and extensive guides on website speed optimization.
The reason is simple; faster internet = faster browsing = more page views = more ad impressions + more behaviour tracking data points. And it's a win-win for Google as well, because it earns them goodwill (well, except for AMP); especially at the time Chrome was a breath of fresh air compared to Firefox, and it's taken a lot of time and effort just to keep up, with mixed results (to the point where a number of manufacturers have just given up and adopted Chrome's renderer).
A better question is to ask why people continue to let themselves be confounded by a browser made by an advertising company.
Google is a total-spectrum surveillance company. Advertising is a product they offer to their clients. (No, that is not you and me.)
What does freezing mean here?
How about Electron apps?
Google consumer software is almost universally an active full frontal attack on you. Stop using it.
This sounded harder to do than it was in my experience. I figured the alternatives to their products would be less polished. But I switched to Firefox and honestly prefer it to Chrome. (They allow extensions on Android, meaning adblock, which is a game changer for me.) DDG for search is great. Protonmail for email is fine, etc. There isn't much in the Google ecosystem that I miss tbh.
For me is google docs and maps.
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The only thing I have problems finding something that works is Google maps. As an Android user there are a few different options but Google did make a damn good maps app.
IP address inspection has been getting a large amount of attention recently. It is considered a privacy violation, yet it is required to determine location, so devs know which privacy laws apply.
GDPR only applies in Europe, and CCPA only applies in California. How is one meant to determine which set of laws applies inside a piece of software without being able to determine location?
A waste of time (don't bother) answer is : Just apply maximum privacy everywhere and you won't have to worry about it... The response is always going to be - Many free tools you use are funded by advertising etc and advertising depends on being able to know where someone is, at least to the country level. Cutting off location and therefore revenue is not going to give people the software they want.
Other facts that usually matter - only 1-2% of people want to pay for private software. Everyone else wants the free option. Source : my apps.
How is software meant to determine location?
New motto: "Don't get caught being evil".
Downvote me how many times you want, but Mozilla needs to fork Chromium, degoogle it and fix the web.
Mozilla is the only internet entity I can say I trust, I am donating to it, and yet I am using Chrome and Brave on both Desktop and mobile.
Just follow the users and fork it!
Mozilla makes a web browser called Firefox. You should try it!
I've used it for many years, then switched to chrome and since then I've tried it more times that I want to admit. I am also donating to it.
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Microsoft kind of did it with the new Edge:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...
I am using it, but Microsoft, as Brave and Google is a commercial entity I do not trust.
No, Mozilla needs to keep focusing on Mozilla and trying to make it better than Chromium. Competition is essential. They're the only ones left other than Apple now that Microsoft has given up.
Well Mozilla burnt my trust in them over the last couple of years ... maybe Brave?
Some don't like their model to tip content providers but they seem - and I've not made rigorous enquiries here (please inform!) - to be a relatively trustworthy mod of Chromium!?
Brave is commercial entity, same as Google.
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There is a Chromium fork that does that already.
Am I correct to understand that this backdoor tracking of individual users applies to the standard Chromium browser (i.e., the non Eloston ungoogled-chromium) as well as the Chrome browser?
If so, its incredibly consistent with Google's surveillance capitalist business model.[1] Wow. I'm thankful for Firefox.
--
[1] "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", by Shoshana Zuboff, reviewed here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveil...
"Backdoor" this, "backdoor" that. Proprietary software company releases proprietary software that allows them to spy on you, how shocking.
In which they sacrifice privacy to allow their ad network to target you better. https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/building-a-more-priv...
In which they explicitly track you more under the guise of protecting your privacy. https://github.com/jkarlin/floc
For every single claim Google makes about being pro-privacy, their definition of privacy ("data shared between you and Google and no one more") is implicit.
It's a surveillance company that makes proprietary software to sell you ads. As soon as you get that into your head, you'll be much less shocked.
"We personally get to track you" is not a unique stance, and it's far from a backdoor. It's just another vile move from a surveillance company that's pretty explicit that that's their goal.
Sure, the general pattern of behaviour is familiar, but I didn't know about this specific manifestation, and now I do. What's the use of being so dismissive about specific information on which one can act?
It's not a backdoor! Calling random anti-consumer behavior a backdoor is the privacy-equivalent of Godwin's law.
"It's only metadata." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#R...
I was fooled by Google for a while, thinking it was less evil than FB. They're just a little smarter about their shittiness.
I hate to say this, but duh. It's a closed-source browser made by an ad company. What the hell to do people expect?
We need the GDPR equivalent in the US.
Jesus.. It gets better and better..
I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it is, but one thing seems clear to me:
From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing browsers and ridiculed by Apple ads. On a case by case basis I think some of this will be well deserved, some less so, but few outside of employees and shareholders will cry.
I also guess a lot of people, including certain owners and many in management hasn't deciphered the writing on the wall yet, and in that case it whatever comes next will be surprising.
When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..). Working at that company has always been a dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture.
Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil that even Microsoft has a better standing among my peers..
Would love to hear some insight from ex employees on what changed on the inside of that company, but from the outside it doesn't even seem to be the same any more. Maybe they're just worse at hiding it..
As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't.
The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.)
The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things."
The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.
It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.
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We thought Microsoft was evil because of how they treated their partners and competitors.
We didn't consider that a greater evil would arise, and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy.
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Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes).
Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it.
In fact what Google sees is:
1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.
Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ...
2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ...
3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!"
4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors.
Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
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> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
To me, the explanation is simpler: people don't want to defend Google on HN because they'll get downvoted or shouted down because of it.
More and more people are blocking ads. Google’s business model is under threat. They will turn into hyenas in order to survive.
Good point. Although I feel their hyena nature has been visible for a while now and what we are now seeing is hungry hyena :-)
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i think their business model is just fine: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/9to5google.com/2020/02/03/alp...
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There's been more than a few departures at Google recently. You have the profile departures of C-level execs; You've had prominent open source folks leaving projects like Angular. While some attrition is personal circumstance, you have to wonder how much is attributable to the changing identity of Google itself.
There is little point trying to correct misinformation about Google on Hacker News anymore, because people will just make up more tomorrow, and it will get hundreds of upvotes if it looks vaguely plausible.
So, people who want to dislike Google will find everything they need to confirm their biases here.
IIRC it's not that long ago that trying to criticize Google here on HN was an exercise in futility.
I won't say that the current situation is perfect but I can see why. In my view Google had earned the current criticism by hard work:
- mismanagement of services people loved to the point were Google always running 3 different more or less incompatible message services, while closing services east and west has become a meme,
- shoving other ideas down people's throats (hi identity and real name part of Google+)
- etc
>From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
Be careful, most of us on HN are part of a very small echo chamber. "What you see" is a small, non-representative portion of "techies". If it wasn't Firefox wouldn't be at sub-5% in general usage surveys and AMP would've died years ago.
> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
From what I've seen is it's like it's always been: people are upset for a day or two and then continue to not care, and continue to (directly or indirectly) support the evil they were upset about. It's incredibly difficult to get even geeks to support a cause if it requires more than pressing a like button or posting a comment.
Also, it's not like Google's wrongdoing are recent news. Anyone remember Google Watch (the site)? People have been warning and predicting things since very long ago, yet the geek crowd never seems to hesitate to embrace the next soon-to-be evil company and their proprietary offering.
I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/
These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.
Safari has the same kind of AdBlock limits that Chrome team wants to implement. Also it's kinda behind the curve on iOS when it comes to features.
Not to mention the fact that iOS users are forbidden from using any competitive browser, including Firefox.
I'm not sure what you mean by forbidden? Chrome and Firefox (and other browsers too) are readily available through the iOS app store.
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Safari as well. Almost anything but Chrome. Both Safari and FF are good. Im only using these 2 myself
Safari is horrible for HTML5 games. Dealing with all sorts of issues to the point where I've more or less given up and just tell my Safari players to use something else.
Some of my front-end colleagues like to tell me that Safari is the new IE 6. Not in terms of the market domination (that's Crhome for you), but in terms of dragging the front-end back with unimplemented features, quirks, and bugs. The amount of hacks they have to add just to support Safari is uncomfortable.
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+1. Safari is great. Super fast, great on battery life, and has most, if not all, of the extensions you would look for.
Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and sucks.
My biggest gripe is I can’t update it without updating the entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you ever need to unregister a service worker.
For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter: speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.
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Have you tried Safari Developer Previews? It's been a while since I've used them myself.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/safari/download/
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If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.
As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!)
I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)
I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.
I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options.
Edit:
I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN.
See these other comments of mine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567
Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.
The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library?
https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu
Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.
Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks.
I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.
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Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.
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Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.
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As a firefox user, they are spending more money on PR and less on quality. Their UI has gotten progressively worse. And I'm not taking about xul deprecation. Please Mozilla come back to your strengths. SIMPLE: Provide a great alternative.
The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has always been annoying.
I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actually even faster and lighter than Chrome. So, I've already started using it on my Windows and Mac machines and I'm just waiting for it to be released on Linux so I can use it on my main workstations.
I bet Edge exceeds Firefox market share any day now. Maybe Google should start giving Microsoft money too! But even if Edge market share doesn't grow I'll be quite comfortable since it's the WebKit/Chrome/Blink lineage and compatibility that I care about.
Fuck that piece of shit Gecko. I'm tired of hearing about it from the extremely tiny but loud minority of Mozillatroids. Now do your duty and fade my comment in your petty attempt at censoring my words. You can't change the truth.
I think Mozilla is a horrible leadership spending money on all the wrong things and I'd rather lose my job than donate to them. But, in all fairness, they're still way better than both Microsoft and Google. At least Mozilla isn't actively trying to make my life worse every single day.
Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser.
By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure to avoid them.
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> We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em
You are the types of people who are slowly destroying the internet, nice work.
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Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?
Long ago.
Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale.
... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative to alternatives.
Got this from google white paper: "run Chrome with the command line flag "--reset-variation-state" to reset the value."
I tried this and my "x-client-data" header changed.
You should also donate to Mozilla because it’s an insanely good piece o software for the price!
Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a notable and depressing example).
Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
Donations go to Mozilla "the non-profit organization" rather than Mozilla "the corporation".
Mozilla (the corporation) has the typical/bad corporate structures and ridiculous executive compensations. Mozilla (the corporation) had the layoffs. Mozilla (the corporation) bought Pocket with money that comes from deals with search engines.
That being said, though...
> Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
... is still a great point.
(Updated this because "Mozilla, Org" and "Mozilla, Inc" were inaccurate)
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> their executive compensation rates are way too high
Just because they're a non-profit doesn't mean execs should be paid far below market rates.
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Do you care how Apple pays its executives when you shell out 3-4k on their laptops or 1-2k on their phones? The OP just said that Firefox is a great piece of software available for free, and they deserve to be compensated (in form of donation). Now, I'm totally on board with you that they waste money, that's not even debatable.
Also, Mozilla made donations to political entities in the past
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As long as they keep Firefox available they can waste my money as much as they want. Why should they owe me anything? I am taking their browser.
Better yet, donate to Brave who doesn't share the same conflict of interest as Mozilla does with Google, as Google is Mozilla's #1 source of income. Best of all you get a browser just as fast, if not faster than Chrome because it's Chrome without all the junk.
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> Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a mistake.
These seem at odds with each other. If you want Firefox to be used, how do you suggest its development be paid for?
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So I pay for Pocket Premium as it is wholly owned by Mozilla as a way of diversifying their income away from search and donations. I like and use pocket and get something in exchange for my money (which makes me more likely to keep a rolling payment going on). II know it’s not open source, but tbh that doesn’t hugely bother me given that Firefox itself is.
Does anyone object to this indirect way of funding Firefox? Does it cause indirect harm by making them prioritise pocket over Firefox?
I've spent a lot of time considering Pocket Premium but the price point is just too high. Maybe if they roll in features from feedly and have a really nice RSS reader.
I also hate spending money on news that isn't going to journalists.
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I don't object. Personally I'd be happy to pay for Firefox Send, or better still for tech support in self-hosting Firefox Sync and Send.
I agree with the endorsement as a FF/TB user. However, I would stop at charity shaming, as there is always a different side to the story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737
Mozilla Corporation which makes the browser doesn't accept donations.
I assume they do get quite a bit of money from Mozilla Foundation, which does.
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Do you know why that is?
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236328.
Sorry, I can't bring myself to trust them after pocket, mr. robot, and of course the time they fired that guy for having a fetish. I might use their browser product if it ever seems like it'll be better for my needs but I'm certainly not giving them money.
I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out.
What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty brazillion employees it can test new features on.
> I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out.
It's crazy to me to think about when I was in college (in the mid aughts), I was doing a lot of research into Native American cultures. The amount of releases, paperwork, and other hoops you had to jump through in order to just interview subjects was pretty daunting.
The fact we have become involuntary research subjects without any protections as a research subject or easy way to opt out of these companies data collection (which itself is an ongoing form of research) is staggering to thing about.
I still do'nt understand how people ask these questions when it's been it since 30 years.
Isn't that what most A/B testing is?
No, it's what unethical A/B testing is.
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Bias up front: I work at Google but am not speaking for Google.
> involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs.
I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use the product. If you choose to use the product, yes, you may be exposed to features that the product has. If you don't want to be exposed to those features, the way to opt out is to not use the product.
> What's the motivation?
It lets the company incrementally roll out and test features in real-world network configurations at scale. As far as I know, almost all tech companies do this.
Let's say you're Fapplebooglezon and you have an idea to put kitten emojis on the "Buy Now" button. Before you ship that, you want to make sure that:
1. The feature works correctly. It doesn't crash or have significant performance problems.
2. Users, in aggregate, like the change. No one wants to ship a "New Coke" debacle. It's bad for the company (they lose money) and bad for users (they don't like the product).
3. Your servers and network can handle the consequences of that change. Maybe users will be so excited that they all click "Buy Now" twice as much. You need to make sure your servers don't crumble under the increased load.
These are reasonable things that benefit both the company and users. So the way features and changes are usually shipped is like:
1. The feature is implemented behind some kind of flag. [0]
2. "Fishfooding" [1]: The team developing the feature starts using it. This gives you some feedback on "does the feature work correctly" but that's about it. The team owns the feature, so they are biased in terms of its usability. And they are on a privileged network and not a large enough population to verify how this affects the distributed system.
3. "Dogfooding": The entire company starts using it. This starts to give you some usability feedback because now people who don't have a stake in the feature are being exposed to it. But it's still skewed since employees are likely not a representative user population.
4. "Canary": The feature is enabled for a randomly selected small population of external users. Now you start getting feedback on how the feature performs in the wild on real-world machines and networks. The percent of users is kept small enough to not crush the servers in case anything goes awry, but you can start getting some performance data too.
5. "A/B testing": Now you start collecting data to see how behavior of users with the feature compares to users without it. You can actually start to get data on whether the feature is good or not.
6. Assuming everything looks OK, you start incrementally rolling it out to a larger and larger fraction of users. All the while, you watch the servers to make sure the load is within expected bounds.
7. Once you get to 100% of users and things look good, you remove the flag and the feature is now permanently enabled.
> Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware?
Google, like most other companies, also does lots of user testing and user surveys too. But that doesn't give you insight into the technical side of the question — how the feature impacts the behavior of your distributed system.
You may not be aware of this, but this kind of in-the-wild product testing is something almost all businesses do, all the time. Food companies test new products in grocery stores in selected cities [2]. Car manufacturers drive camoflaged prototypes on the road [3]. Restaurant chains tinker with recipes to see how sales are affected. There is absolutely no guarantee that the Coke you're drinking today has the same ingredients as the one you had yesterday.
You seem to think this is some nefarious scheme, but it's just basic marketing. You want to make a thing people like, so you make two things and measure which one people like more. People "opt in" and "consent" by using the product. If you don't want to be a "guinea pig" when McDonald's changes their French fry recipe, don't buy the fries. If you don't want to test out new Chrome features, don't use Chrome.
[0]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3qpdnn/anyone_knows...
[2]: https://smallbusiness.com/product-development/best-u-s-citie...
[3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/20/camouflage-the-incognito-way...
I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use the product
It's involuntary because it's not informed consent. Google doesn't tell people up front or in any meaningful way that this is happening.
That's like saying "Oh, that steak was covered in the chef's experimental hot sauce that we didn't list on the menu? Well, too bad, you chose to come to this restaurant."
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If I use a bunch of older Chromes from portableapps, are those affected by feature testing, provided I've disabled google update but I'm not behind a firewall?
In other words, is feature polling just hard-coded or it is bound to a specific installation?
1. It's about the money.
2. See 1.
... what?
If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.
Nowadays you are the product even if you pay. (E.g. Subscription news sites including trackers on subscribed users, smartTVs siphoning data etc)
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This is a meaningless cliche. Just because users of Google products don't pay in cash to use them doesn't change the fact that Google has to attract the users to their platform in the first place, and keep them there.
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But what about people like me that are paying google (quite a lot actually)?
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> If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.
This nonsense should belong into Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness along with: Capitalism - God's way of determining who is smart, and who is poor.
Do you get the consent to observe everyone you interact with?
It's because most people don't care and if it means that they have a better product at the end of it, they'll take the trade.
Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless.
See the fiasco where they broke Terminal Services last year as an example of what can go wrong even when doing experiments on the whole user base.
Also consider how to measure the usage of web features Google's own websites don't use, but are popular on e.g. intranets in Korea.
A/B testing isn't bad, it's a good thing. People are notoriously not very good at giving feedback. Experiments and usage statistics let you get the ground truth about what they really value, and what's really working.
Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so such experiments would be meaningless.
This is a lazy argument. Google isn't some scrappy tech startup where 90% of the employees are programmers. Google has legions of lawyers, mailroom clerks, accountants, travel coordinators, janitors, cafeteria workers, middle managers of all stripes, and so much more. Thousands and thousands of people it can test on without violating the privacy of the general public.
A/B testing as implemented in industry is -evokes emotional responses eerily similar to those evoked when gaslighting is noticed -uncompensated -inconsistent with any semblance of established research ethics -generally non-consensual -completely undermines trust
I'm not normally one to make a big deal about this sort of thing, but there is a reason research ethics exist. If one can't be trusted to even attempt to follow ethical research protocols, one damn well shouldn't be trusted with anything important.
Your user's time and information is not yours to share. Whether you bury it in the fine print or not.
Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the product stable enough for enterprise.
Although Window 7 may have been one of the most complex software deployments in history, needing to support decades of poorly written drivers, while making the system both stable and compatible.
>Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the product stable enough for enterprise.
That claim is directly contradicted by the fact that there's Windows Vista enterprise edition[1]. Vista is also supported for a full 10 years just like 7, which would be strange for something that was supposed to be an "experiment".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_editions
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> No consent. No opt-out.
Do you understand what licensing is? That's one of the underlying aspects that's important with software and why you can't treat it like other things you buy. I'd add it's also why things that adopt software-style licencing models are bad too.
A company creates a licence with terms and you agree to use the licence under those terms by using the software. The terms are difficult to change unless you have leverage. The only party other than the company is often the regulatory authority. Regulation is limited in the US at best when compared to the EU. If you are from the EU then you probably assume the US works similarly, but most Americans don't recognize issues like this one. When they do, it's hard to fight the incumbents and make something opt-in, or ban it outright.
> What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't want to deal with wetware? (the start of your first paragraph applies here too)
It's fairly simple. The motivation is making correct decisions based on the gold standards of decision-making that some people aspire to. The model is not dissimilar to clinical trials where a treatment is given to some individuals and not to others. The hope is that this form of experimentation removes bias and let's the product manager make the best decisions.
Based on this thinking it is not possible to test with just Google's employees. For many decisions, the bias will be significant, and ultimately the belief is that worse decisions will be made for users.
I'm trying to convey that in as neutral way as possible. I think this can be a useful technique, but I think that there is little discipline and accountability in the wider software world compared to medicine. You have PMs who'll routinely just run an A/B test longer to collect more data (that's better, right?), but invalidate their results, just to please management.
If anyone is going to implement this approach then I'd trust Google to implement it effectively to meet their needs. They do it on a large scale across their products and have many layers of people to ensure it's effectively meeting their needs. As stated in the previous paragraph, this doesn't mean that other people do it right, or that everyone in Google does it right every time. I'm sure they've had a fair share of failed experiments.
> Do you understand what licensing is?
Nope, no one understands licensing. Which means that arguments grounded on "The user accepted the terms!" has a shaky ethical foundation. Not necessarily a shaky legal foundation, although that wheel seems to be turning.
Ahh the good ol HN "stop using Google and start using Firefox" advertisement.
It's a bit odd to see this in every Google thread.
Btw, Firefox is too slow.
> Btw, Firefox is too slow.
Ahh, the good ol' "Firefox is too slow for me to consider it" statement. Is there any evidence that Firefox is slower then Chrome other than old lingering memories of Firefox being slow ten years ago?
I have used both Firefox and Chrome and I can't subjectively tell that one is significantly faster or slower than the other. To be fair, I only have a handful of extensions and rarely have more than ten tabs open at a time, so my use case may be atypical.
I love that Firefox exists and Quantum is an amazing step forward, but Firefox still regularly runs away with gigabytes of RAM and hung worker processes. I have no problem with long-lived Chrome sessions but I need to restart Firefox ~daily. It's not bad memories of 10-years ago.
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The difference is extremely noticable. So yes.
I can open up 2 tabs and Firefox is still loading the page.
Could it be because people who like their browser tend to tell others about it? I have absolutely nothing to do with Mozilla but I think the internet would be a better place if more people used Firefox.
Firefox isn't too slow, but you might be talking about how Google optimise their sites for Chrome at the expense of Firefox's performance through browser sniffing.
Isn't moz pretty much funded by google?
as a defense against antitrust accusations. microsoft once funded apple too
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236328.
You must be a google toolhead employee not to see how evil they’ve become
This breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do that, regardless of how wrong someone else is or how bad another comment is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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It's not odd at all. It's what the folks at Mozilla do. They jump in to every thread to push Firefox and Rust and make people think it's more widely used/better than it is.
Not everything is a conspiracy. I'm not a Mozilla employee, have never been one (probably never will be one). Firefox is awesome, fast, and extensible. It's my daily driver for all of my machines.
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I think most people who advocate Firefox are not Mozilla employees. I am for sure not one, I do not even like Mozilla, but they are a much lesser evil compared to Google. And I think having multiple competing browsers is vital for preventing the internet for becoming a walled garden owned by some big corporation.
I work for Mozilla?
Huh. I should ask for a pay rise...
People who push conspiracies without solid evidence should be jailed. Or at least publicly ridiculed.
And then? I use it and judge it bases on it's merits. Surely they know this (and hence decided it's worth the time?)
What a mess
Break this company up.
That is all.
>It's a unique ID to track a specific Chrome instance across all Google properties.
>Really curious about your opinion, especially after the GDPR explicitly forbidding such tracking.
>Moreover, it doesn't make sense to anonymise user-agent if you have such backdoor
Oh, but it does make sense because with this everyone _but_ google will have a harder time tracking people :\
Doubtlessly, this will be rationalized and justified as being necessary for, and in the best interest of, consumers...
...but inevitably, it will be used for tracking -- regardless of intent.
It might also get Google in trouble. Copying and pasting from the a comment in the OP's URL:
> Example: https://www.youtube.com - in network headers, look for x-client-data
> Now, go to https://ad.doubleclick.net/abc - and your browser also sends this magic x-client-data.
> It's a unique ID to track a specific Chrome instance across all Google properties.
> Really curious about your opinion, especially after the GDPR explicitly forbidding such tracking. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to anonymise user-agent if you have such backdoor.
This comment is unreadable on mobile. https://i.imgur.com/jFusqw0.png
Could you please remove the four-space indent? You can wrap each paragraph in * ... * if you want to italic them.
Fixed. Sorry about that. Thank you for letting me know!
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You may give https://hackerweb.app a try! Aside: It is read only though.
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> Now, go to https://ad.doubleclick.net/abc - and
It's funny that the doubleclick URL was removed by my adblocker and I didn't get what the original message was about. Now I can see it, thanks :)
Can Chrome extensions on the new proposed v3 standard remove that outbound request header?
It seems my comment may have been misinterpreted.
I meant that this will be rationalized and justified BY GOOGLE.
I visited my family a couple of weeks ago and was shocked when my father told me that his phone 'received' some of our photos. I checked and a huge chunk of whatsapp photos that were backed up by my wife's phone had ended up in my dad's Google Photos account. I discounted it as my wife accidentally sharing the whatsapp folder with my dad but now I'm not so sure.
Yup, that's one of the issues you'll get with interlinked accounts; in this case, Whatsapp backs up / stores photos automatically to your phone's photo gallery, and said photo gallery is automatically synchronized with the cloud.
I don't know exactly what's going on with your wife's / your father-in-law's accounts though, are they sharing Google accounts, photo albums, or were the photos shared in the same whatsapp group?
> are they sharing Google accounts, photo albums, or were the photos shared in the same whatsapp group?
None of these. They don't share any accounts. I don't share any account with my father either. Me and my wife use the shared galley feature. The photos that ended up on my fathers phone were shared by me and my wife with each other on whatsapp. I suspect either mine or my wife's gallery somehow "leaked" into my fathers even though none of the accounts have any connections AFAICT. Probably we clicked some share button somewhere accidentally but I couldn't find any shared galleries on any of our phones.
Wow, I didn't think sensationalist headlines were allowed on HN. I'm guessing mods are asleep or just don't care anymore.
Edit: If the mods are listening, I've come up with an alternative title for you:
"The Evil GOOGLE Has Installed a MALICIOUS BACKDOOR On All Chrome Users Machines To Sell PERSONAL DATA to RUSSIAN HACKERS on the DARK WEB".
This will surely get the clicks now. You can thank me later.
The mods were asleep. That happens sometimes.
If you really want to help, suggesting an accurate and neutral title, preferably using representative language from the article itself, is a great way to do that. We don't know enough to get it right in every case, even when awake.