Comment by TheRealPomax
6 years ago
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.
You are right, but they also know most people won't switch. They have an entire generation of folks that don't even think about privacy.
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You can probably be identified on Firefox too: https://amiunique.org
They might and I used to be one of them, but now I use Google on Firefox isntead, because DuckDuckGo no longer yields useful results. The number of times I don't go "oh ffs, fine, !g" has been in steady decline over the last year, and at this point I've given up.
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.
Because of the deep irony? If you have a moto that binary and later decide to remove it, what is the world to infer?
> Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't be evil"?
Historical? It's not like it was 50 years ago.
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Please don't post blatantly false statements that are trivial to refute.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
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.
Actually, the low entropy provider is used for any field trials that get included in the header.
See: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/variations/v...
thanks. and ugh.
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13b plus IP is already huge, but browsers leak so much more than that.
By default it's much more than 13b. Seems to be 13b only if you disable analytics/crash reports.
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).