Comment by foobarbecue
14 days ago
Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.
14 days ago
Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.
It’s absolutely true. It is a documented fact. It was discovered and entered into public record during the DOJ antitrust investigation into Google Chrome.
They call the signal „popularity“ and it is a successor of the Google Toolbar signal.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
So why is this not the largest GDPR case in all of history?
> „popularity“
Why are you using weird quotes?
I'll take a wild guess and assume they are of a German or Polish language background. Wait 'til you encounter a French person who accidentally uses guillemets if you want one even «weirder».
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No
This is why Chrome begs you to login constantly and will do it automatically when you login to Gmail through Chrome. Everything you do in the browser (bookmarks, settings, address bar) is data about you sent to Adsense. No need for cookies when you control the browser and know who is using it.
Edit: also private browsing isn’t exactly private when you’re logged in to the browser.
Chrome sends home the urls you visit together with the page performance data (and probably more). That's how they build Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for the most popular sites: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux
Something worth inspecting further. We know that Chrome stores and sends the browsing history but this is an interesting vector.
I’d be more surprised if they weren’t capturing this information.
Especially if you have autocomplete-while-searching type of features on.
Why don’t they also capture information you enter into forms on Chrome?
They control the entire browser surface, technically they can know everything, even TLS and E2E encrypted data, that they silently phone home…
If you think this is silly, consider that Microsoft Recall had been observing everything on people’s entire SCREENS and phoning home much of it. That is how a guy was caught recently: https://x.com/t3chfalcon/status/2074134314145489195
And it is actually much worse than even that:
https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
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There's no reason to think it isn't true. It matches every pattern of behavior observed from every tech company.
Why don’t they also read your gmail and get your bank passwords?
And maybe have access to EVERY site actually, with “forgot password” type stuff in addition to providing oauth tokens…
" Microsoft is scanning the inside of password-protected zip files for malware"
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/micro...
The tools in gmail in some sense "read" all your mail in order to classify spam and do things like calendar integration. The extent to which they do other things with the information is .. unclear.
> Why don’t they also read your gmail
Boy do I have news for you.
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Because your bank doesn't send your password to your Gmail because if they did they know Google would read it.