Comment by judge2020
5 days ago
> - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)
I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Go do something in chrome (look for cruises maybe), then delete the activity from myactivity.google.com, then wipe and reinstall chrome. You will see that you aren’t advertised based on that activity yet it’s still in your chrome history.
>I have yet to see evidence that Google uses browser sync data for advertising.
Then you probably don't get out much:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24167119/google-search-al...
Another major point highlighted by Fishkin and King relates to how Google may use Chrome data in its search rankings. Google Search representatives have said that they don’t use anything from Chrome for ranking, but the leaked documents suggest that may not be true. One section, for example, lists “chrome_trans_clicks” as informing which links from a domain appear below the main webpage in search results. Fishkin interprets it as meaning Google “uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site, which go into the calculation of which to include in the sitelinks feature.”
It sounds like that might be talking about the hyperlink `ping` param: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...
It could be marked as chrome because Firefox doesn’t support it (without a default-off config value) and Safari technically implemented it at a later date than Chrome, with non-chromium Edge supporting it years after chrome.
This would indicate Google is using chrome to tell it when (via its support of the ping property) but wouldn’t indicate they are decrypting and analyzing chrome sync data.