
Google Chrome’s Users Take a Back Seat to Its Bottom Line - Sami_Lehtinen
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/google-chromes-users-take-back-seat-its-bottom-line
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aussieguy1234
"If everyone used Tor Browser or Brave, many data brokers’ and trackers’
current business models would cease to be viable"

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tssva
I consider Brave's highjacking of advertising revenue in an attempt to force
web sites to monetize their site through Brave highly unethical and am
disappointed to see it mentioned here.

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jimnotgym
Aside, have EFF just changed their logo? It jarred with me initially.

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privateSFacct
This article is confused about what users want.

EFF and politicians just hate cookies. If only users knew the website used
cookies they would choose something else they cry out. A billion cookie
warning clickthroughs later - nope.

If only we made the cookie warning scarier with GPDR, including lots more
details about how the scary cookie will be used. Nope - click click click go
the users, permit, OK, Allow etc.

Aside from EFF hysteria here, let's focus on what users might want.

Users want

* their computers to be free of malware (looking at every company out there that installs bloatware and malware every chance they get on PC's and phone's with totally bogus privacy policies),

* want to be safe when they visit a website (not make it easy for a random website clicked on from a phising link to go the ransomeware route),

* want to be able to browse in incognito mode from time and time if they want to leave less of a digital footprint.

* want to be able to browse relatively safely without their ISP and or govt selling all their data about exactly which pages they visit (google's push around SSL may help here a bit, and these privacy invasions tend to be huge and at utility scale),

* Maybe would sort of like certificate authorities not to give out chase bank SSL certs to random middlebox DPI companies (google's aggressive stance on CA ecosystem after seeming total inaction by folks like firefox and IE and Safari).

* Help move folks to proper 2-factor (non-SMS based) to avoid account hijackings

* While making lots of things easy (auto suggestions everywhere etc).

In short, stuff that helps users avoid messes in their day to day life, but
users seem happy to give up a lot to have maps, search, new devices etc all
work together relatively smoothly.

Depending on how you count, google is cleaning up in this space BTW. Talk to
some businesses who've made the switch to chrome + google apps about the
number of phishing / ransomware issues they have (if they were another
companies email service + ie / firefox).

Check out the absolute trash results (active malware) bing can return for
basic search terms.

[https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/bing-is-pushing-malware-
when-y...](https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/bing-is-pushing-malware-when-you-
search-for-chrome/)

Seriously, bing should run the landing pages of adds through google's filters.

Users privacy is under absolute attack. Of all the people attacking this
privacy (from governments to ISPS and more), google is not top of list. It
makes for a good clickbait headline though.

BTW - Apple in same boat on enviro issues, despite all the Greenpeace attacks
on apple, if you looked at the enviro story and workplace labor issues in
android space you'd be shocked.

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mthoms
You seem to be suggesting that because Google has done an excellent job with
security, they should get a free pass on privacy. I don't quite get the
connection.

And from an engineering standpoint, comparing search results quality to
browser-based privacy features is a tad absurd. At a basic level at least, the
latter is a solved problem (as evidenced by the fact there are dozens of
modestly-effective browser plugins made by hobbyist developers).

~~~
privateSFacct
The headline is clickbait.

EFF should say if you value your privacy, move off Xiomi, Huawei, your Samsung
smart tv, your company hosted email, even your non-google android phone filled
with bloatware and phone home systems that sell your viewing habits to data
brokers and move TO google / apple branded devices.

Just about everything you buy / touch OTHER THAN apple and google actively
trashes your privacy without a care in the world on sometimes huge scale.
Facebook, facebook apps, comcast/xfinity etc. Even dell was selling (or
employees were selling) their customer lists out to indian call centers -
you'd literally get a scam call from "dell" after purchasing your system with
all your details.

Ask yourself, will your companies sysadmin fight these kind of requests (see
below)?

[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/google-
resists...](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/google-resists-us-
subpoena-of-search-data.html)

I can't find it, but some hacker said the best thing they did was use google
email because they got a state of the art legal team involved for free.

Let's have an OUNCE of perspective here.

I'm not saying google should get a free pass on privacy, I'm saying others
should copy them, from google takeout, to the disclosures they do about how
they use info, to the options they provide, to the legal response they bring
to over-broad subpoenas.

Are they perfect? Certainly not. They obviously build a profile to market to
you while keeping that private from the advertisers (not always common).This
is the tradeoff folks get for free stuff, and my point was that users seem
pretty happy to make that trade. Youtube is dominating its sector, chrome is
dominating its sector etc. I don't, I like to pay for the google services I
use such as email, and use other services that I find more secure.

Apple has an even stronger stance here in my view (and I'm on a iphone for
that reason). But places like eff seem to attack category leaders not because
google is the worst offender, but because it a) generates a headline, and b)
is different than what people think.

~~~
candiodari
You are very wrong about politicians' motivations though. Those cookie
policies never had any of the stated purposes. They're not to improve privacy,
nor are they about fairness in any way.

Google/FB are starting to determine the outcome of elections, and politicians
inflict punishment on them to ... get them to influence elections. Surprise !

What really set this of, however is Google's support for Hillary Clinton. A
third of the top of Google's management went to work 100% for Hillary Clinton
(Eric Schmidt), and created effectively a department of Google working only to
get her elected. And then ... let's just say he failed to deliver what was
promised.

So then the companies were in the worst possible position. The government that
got elected was very mad at them for working against them, and the government
that lost (but was still in power) was VERY mad them for their failure.

This is the result.

In the EU Google (and FB, and Twitter, but especially Youtube) keeps and keeps
and keeps exposing the real intentions of politicians. Mostly accidental,
because they're surfacing real information that normally wouldn't make it
anywhere.

When the French state decided to "evict" the "Calais jungle". Sounds so
innocent doesn't it ? Youtube showed what it really was. Police went in, a
central cordon surrounded by machine gun fire that set refugee's tents and
houses on fire ...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53uBTn3tBEo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53uBTn3tBEo)

And when the EU decided that "the right to be forgotten" was needed (I'm sure
it was a complete coincidence that the then-president of the EU commission,
Jose Manuel Barroso (I met the guy, he's a serious asshole who makes Trump
look as gracious as a ballerina), the only institution with absolute lawgiving
power in the EU) started his career organizing terrorist attacks for communist
youth parties in a Portugese university (note: I'm not against leftists. But
read what this guy did ... he played Gestapo chief for a decade. Beating
people into year-long hospital stays because he lost an argument).

And then Google decided to sabotage this effort, in a number of ways ... And
surprise ! Suddenly privacy is REALLY important !

When the Belgian youth services had 2 grandparents arrested for fleeing from
youth services with a kid, then left the kids behind in a mental institution
in Zagreb, Facebook surfaced this article to half of Belgium. A private
individual (a reporter/presenter) (NOT child services, they just left the kids
there. 2 and 4 years old, left alone in a mental institution) managed to
convince the country to release the children and she brought them back to
their parents. No further news.

When Norway's child expert council's chair Jo Erik Brøyn (this council decides
on children being taken away from their parents "for their protection") was
convicted ( _VERY_ lightly) for "using child porn for 20 years", again the
article was surfaced and exposed to lots of people. The government decided to
protect the name of this porn-using child psychiatrist (And failed, his name
is "Jo Erik Brøyn") (The Norwegian government child services expert "Thore
Langfeldt" testified in court, on government paid time of course, that "there
is no evidence to suggest that people who download child pornography are more
likely than anyone else to commit other offences against children") (note that
the child-porn psychiatrist Jo Erik Brøyn also used Barnevernet, the Child
Protection Service of Norway to get 2 Indian children as his own. Needless to
say, Norway's CPS did not see any need to take those children away from a
convicted sex offender). Again articles about this were widely circulated by
Google and FB (and this one has a bit of a resurgence at the moment)

Oh, and in the UK it was exposed that Her Majesty's government has private
companies getting paid for child placements, opening up accusations of child
trafficking. Weirdly, several such companies doing these adoption placements
of children taken away from their parents "for their own protection" are
valued at tens of millions of pounds ...

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asdfasgasdgasdg
I think there is a rule against sensationalized titles.

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majewsky
There is a rule against submitters editing titles to be more sensationalist,
but in this case, the submitter copied the submission's title verbatim.

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asdfasgasdgasdg
I don't think that is true. There have been cases in the recent past where the
mods changed titles because they were overly sensational, even if they were
the original title.

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majewsky
Well, the guidelines say:

> [Please] use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't
> editorialize.

This sounds like the submitter MAY tone it down, with "MAY" like in RFC 2119.

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MonkeyDan
Don’t forget the inability to install add-ons (i.e. ad-blockers) in Android
Chrome.

