Comment by ivansavz

3 years ago

Key actionable info: to fix this, go to this URL:

    chrome://settings/adPrivacy

and turn off the toggles on each of the three subpages.

Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.

83 comments

ivansavz

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account-5  3 years ago

Key actionable info: use Firefox.

Completely immune from this and you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

  • deely3  3 years ago

    > you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

    I will be caustious with such statement.

    https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/

    IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.

    Mozilla is one of the authors.

    • denton-scratch  3 years ago

      > IPA now allows

      Any more info on IPA? That link doesn't even say what the acronym stands for. I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work, too complicated. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have heard of it, and a cursory websearch didn't offer an explanation.

      > Mozilla is one of the authors.

      Mozilla as a company, or is it that there are Mozilla developers contributing? If Mozilla are planning to introduce a built-in tracking system to Firefox, doesn't that imply shooting off your one remaining foot?

      4 replies →

  • fweimer  3 years ago

    Mozilla has disabled privacy controls in the past without informing users. For example, they removed the “prompt when setting a cookie” (so that you could reject/accept/accept for this session only) without a replacement. Newer versions just accepted all cookies as persistent, non-session cookies automatically. There are other examples like this.

    It's difficult to deal with because as the code evolves, so do the configuration settings. The rate of change is high, and it's not always obvious what is relevant to users (and whether a new feature increases or decreases privacy!), so it's hard to communicate this in release notes.

  • gettodachoppa  3 years ago

    Ding ding ding! Switch now. If you use Chrome, you are complicit in what Google is subjecting the entire world to.

    This isn't iPhone vs Android. This isn't vim vs emacs. You can switch browsers in 5 minutes and never notice any meaningful difference.

    Degoogle today.

  • dig1  3 years ago

    > ... you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

    Using Firefox Developer edition and toggle(s) will get mysteriously turned back on all the time. And Mozilla is not immune to this practice at all for standard Firefox.

    Use chromium-ungoogled [1] if you want chrome(ium) without Google-specific stuff.

    [1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

  • numpad0  3 years ago

    I wouldn't call it completely immune, Fx is just better Chrome for time being. Tons of dark patterns and inner circle decision makings.

  • j45  3 years ago

    Agreed, using Firefox more and more and assisting everyone you know on how to switch and make it default with it is key.

    Show someone how to do it, and they can be asked to show someone else

CommanderData  3 years ago

Until you can't. The Chrome team routinely remove options from settings, usually keep them for a few months until there's no way of changing them.

1vuio0pswjnm7  3 years ago

Mozilla actively supports online ads and tracking. Without their partnership with Google, they could not continue as a going concern for very long.

The deception is to make people believe that studying them as ad targets through their internet use can be "private". Many will believe this nonsense. Including regulators. "It's OK, folks. Privacy is preserved." Green light to keep on tracking, collecting data and serving ads.

But the study of people's internet use to enable programmtic advertising _is_ the problem. There will be more ads. They will be more personal. The www will become even more annoying. Perhaps moreso than any other medium that has come before it.

To Mozilla, there can be no www without advertising. The truth is that there can be no so-called "tech" companies, monopolisng intermediaries, without programmatic internet advertising. The www does not need it and the original www did not have it.

First Mozilla partners with Yahoo. Then Google. Perhaps Meta will be next. Mozilla is no different than so-called "tech" companies in at least one regard: it cannot find a "business model" besides internet advertising.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/despite-clashes-in-the-past-mo...

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/ipa-the-meta-and-mozilla...

https://www.admonsters.com/eletters/mozilla-and-metas-ipa-fr...

  • whydoyoucare  3 years ago

    Yeah, that is my understanding as well. While many promote Firefox as an alternative to Google Chrome, it simply lacks adequate proof that Firefox is any better than Chrome at tracking. Else, how does Mozilla survive?

mrtksn  3 years ago

What do you do if websites are "best viewed in Chrome"?

Embrace: Embrace the open web, create an excellent product and aggressively promote it until you take over the market

Extend: Chrome experiments and advanced features that improve the user experience and developer experience through Chrome only API and Google services. Even provide these services to everyone who wants to use them free or charge so that the user expectations are elevated to that point and web businesses depend on these by building their products around them. Maybe make developers depend on this "topics" feature even.

Exterminate: Cut off or degrade the free services to 3rd party browsers, remove or tame extensions that harm your business and recoup the costs of the free services. Since you no longer have viable competition, reduce the development of Chrome any further, optimize only for profit. Developers who depend on you ad tech can choose to refuse serving users using another browser or opt out of Google verification or account services? The users will stay like they sat with IE.

IE of the 2020s.

mulmen  3 years ago

Does Google do the scummy thing where these toggles get reset to default after an update?

  • rjh29  3 years ago

    Yes. Very commonly they change a feature, put the old behaviour behind a config setting (flag), then silently remove the flag later.

  • benterix  3 years ago

    No, this is mainly Microsoft's domain. Google's thing is boiling the frog under the hood.

  • Eduard  3 years ago

    same with Firefox in my case. after restart, it asks to be the default browser. and again. and again.

dspillett  3 years ago

Also note that Chrome on my home machine has asked me more than once to enable the new feature. Each time I've said no, I find it has turned on other related features. This may be the final irritation that makes me pull my finger out and switch to Chromium or back to FF¹. I used to switch back & forth every year or two, as one of them did something to irritate me⁴ I switched to the other.

--

[1] I switched to Chrome a few years ago when FF went through a period of being unstable²

[2] and because certain extensions didn't have good FF alternatives, because they never were or because some were crippled by the changes in ~2017³, but that latter point is fairly moot as Google is now taking their turn to work towards crippling useful extensions

[3] at least FF's change here were mostly due to massively misreading the room while trying to streamline their platform, where Google's seem to be more malicious when you consider most of the affected extensions are ones that go against their primary business of tracking people & selling adverts.

[4] things breaking after updates, periods of general instability, not keeping up in the performance race for a while, etc.

ekanes  3 years ago

Thanks. Somehow this latest ickiness from Chrome was the push I needed to switch to Firefox.

est  3 years ago

Any binary hackers to modify the executable of Chrome directly?

  • 3np  3 years ago

    What's the point? It's open source. So some people naturally spend the effort to maintain something like https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

        In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first):

    1. ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services.
    2. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible.
       Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
    3. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency.
       However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview.

thekevan  3 years ago

Also alternatively, go to this URL https://brave.com/download/ to fix this permanently.