
Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (2016) - ForHackernews
https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking
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mtmail
The reaction back in October 2016
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003)

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dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769178)

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petilon
If you want to see an example of the devious means now employed by Google,
open Chrome settings and turn off "Allow Chrome sign-in". Then go to Gmail and
sign in. You are now signed into Chrome, regardless of the setting. By signing
into Gmail you are sharing your identity with the browser itself.

Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge can't arrive soon enough.

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mulmen
It still blows my mind that any technologically literate person would use
Chrome as their primary browser in 2019. Or 2018, or really ever.

The incentives for Google are perverse, this is really simple reasoning.

Google will continue their MS-esque Embrace-Extend-Extinguish march until only
Chrome is left. That people who should know better willingly enable this
disaster terrifies me.

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distant_hat
My company is a Google shop, we use Google docs for collaboration, Gmail, and
Google Calendar, and Google Hangouts, and Meet and all that. All of this works
best in Chrome. On Safari you get huge RAM bloat necessitating killing the
browser every few days, same with Firefox, some things like video meets don't
work at all.

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mulmen
Sounds exactly like IE6 in “Microsoft shops”.

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macinjosh
The more 'advantages' Google gives Chrome in the area of tracking/data
collection the more I worry that websites will begin to only test for and/or
work on Chrome. Seems like it could soon be a logical business decision since
it has large market share, it is cross platform, and is heading in the
direction of being hostile towards priacy, i.e. enables business models based
on tracking and data collection.

Tell your friends and family to ditch Chrome for Firefox.

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hopler
The article is not accurate. The article is about this change[0], which is
simply clarifying that DoubleClick isn't the only data source and linking to
the new control panel where the opt-in/out settings UI is (there was no link
before). The policy document change is an improvement, and isn't a change in
privacy. If too don't like the new policy (up to you), then logically you
didn't like the old policy either.

[https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/archive/20160325-201...](https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/archive/20160325-20160628/)

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mda
Please don't disturb the daily HN Google bashing session.

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resters
Just a reminder that Google is a major defense contractor. The incentive to
create highly targeted ads is the same basic incentive that exists to create
highly targeted threat assessments and social credit scores.

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eitally
Wait wat!? Source, please?

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resters
Google has a large sales force that targets government agencies, defense,
etc., with its products and services.

As for the incentives, it's a logical argument:

1) Google is a large, powerful entity.

2) Powerful entities benefit from a preservation of the status quo.

3) Powerful entities must stay on the good side of governments.

4) Social upheaval is a threat to Google's business model.

5) Google's ad business has led to tools that are superior to those built by
governments.

Thus, the sales team realizes the opportunity to sell the proprietary tech to
government entities. Once this business relationship begins the team effort to
suppress some ideas and amplify others, to militarize the core technology,
becomes impossible to stop.

Google is at this point a defense contractor to many governments. There has
recently been hubbub about Google behaving in this way toward the Chinese
government, but what people are missing is that the core service google offers
is desired by all governments. Put succinctly, governments all want a great
firewall and a social credit score. This is what Google and Facebook sell.

Consider that in the US it's conceivable that a search interface could be
built for private user data that also includes the feature of automatically
submitting and obtaining a warrant so that all searches performed are legal.
The friction associated with needing to obtain a warrant has been removed
completely in the US, and likely never even existed under other regimes. In
either case, Google is happy to militarize all of the data and technology that
it has built.

AI (Google's main thrust) is a particularly insidious form of this because a
"trained" AI is a unique combination of data and algorithm. In essence, the
data set is baked into the algorithm. So Google can (for example) train a gait
analysis algorithm intended to predict violent acts on citizens of one regime,
and sell the resulting "trained" product to other regimes.

Governments have a strong need for information about thought crimes and
evidence for premeditation of all sorts of antisocial acts. Google and
Facebook have created trillions in market value for firms by doing the same
thing for consumer behavior but it's worth many more Trillions when applied to
criminality and the softer sister definition, "anti-social" behavior.

When will learning about a third party candidate be viewed as an antisocial
act by Google and Facebook? Quite likely this happened in 2017.

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wtmt
This needs (2016) in the title. It has also been discussed before, as pointed
by mtmail here.

