[HN Gopher] Google tracks individual users per Chrome installati...
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Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
Author : rvnx
Score : 1659 points
Date : 2020-02-04 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| everdrive wrote:
| Is this Chrome the browser, ChromeOS, or both? And if so, will it
| be in Chromium?
| olliej wrote:
| Am I getting this right?
|
| Irrespective of whether you use any other google products, if you
| use chrome google can now track you over any property that uses
| google ads, recaptcha, etc.
|
| The header is inserted by the browser after any extensions run,
| and google pins google properties so you can have an intermediate
| proxy that strips the header, so they gain persistent tracking of
| all users across most of the web?
|
| If it wasn't a tracking vector why do they limit it to just
| google ads, etc? Why not other ad providers as well?
| owaislone wrote:
| I visited my family a couple of weeks ago and was shocked when my
| father told me that his phone 'received' some of our photos. I
| checked and a huge chunk of whatsapp photos that were backed up
| by my wife's phone had ended up in my dad's Google Photos
| account. I discounted it as my wife accidentally sharing the
| whatsapp folder with my dad but now I'm not so sure.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Yup, that's one of the issues you'll get with interlinked
| accounts; in this case, Whatsapp backs up / stores photos
| automatically to your phone's photo gallery, and said photo
| gallery is automatically synchronized with the cloud.
|
| I don't know exactly what's going on with your wife's / your
| father-in-law's accounts though, are they sharing Google
| accounts, photo albums, or were the photos shared in the same
| whatsapp group?
| marriedWpt wrote:
| Ahh the good ol HN "stop using Google and start using Firefox"
| advertisement.
|
| It's a bit odd to see this in every Google thread.
|
| Btw, Firefox is too slow.
| Blaiz0r wrote:
| Firefox isn't too slow, but you might be talking about how
| Google optimise their sites for Chrome at the expense of
| Firefox's performance through browser sniffing.
| basscomm wrote:
| > Btw, Firefox is too slow.
|
| Ahh, the good ol' "Firefox is too slow for me to consider it"
| statement. Is there any evidence that Firefox is slower then
| Chrome other than old lingering memories of Firefox being slow
| ten years ago?
|
| I have used both Firefox and Chrome and I can't subjectively
| tell that one is significantly faster or slower than the other.
| To be fair, I only have a handful of extensions and rarely have
| more than ten tabs open at a time, so my use case may be
| atypical.
| rryan wrote:
| I _love_ that Firefox exists and Quantum is an amazing step
| forward, but Firefox still regularly runs away with gigabytes
| of RAM and hung worker processes. I have no problem with
| long-lived Chrome sessions but I need to restart Firefox
| ~daily. It 's not bad memories of 10-years ago.
| pier25 wrote:
| Same for me.
|
| I've been using FF for a couple of months and I get huge
| random CPU spikes on my MBP that go away once I restart it.
| It works fine on my iMac and Windows tower though albeit JS
| execution seems slower (I mostly work on front end stuff).
|
| It also seems to consume more battery on Android than
| Chrome although I admit I've never made any serious
| testing.
| Monotonic wrote:
| I've been using Firefox as my daily browser at work, home,
| and on my mobile devices, and I've literally never had
| issues with Firefox taking up too much RAM. Chrome on the
| other hand was always one of the main culprits when my
| computer(s) would start to slow down.
|
| This is the problem with anecdotal evidence; everybody's
| subjective experiences are slightly different and further
| colored with their own biases, so you can never get hard
| facts out of it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And yet Chrome consuming huge amounts of RAM is an actual
| meme
| marriedWpt wrote:
| The difference is extremely noticable. So yes.
|
| I can open up 2 tabs and Firefox is still loading the page.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Could it be because people who like their browser tend to tell
| others about it? I have absolutely nothing to do with Mozilla
| but I think the internet would be a better place if more people
| used Firefox.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236328.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It's not odd at all. It's what the folks at Mozilla do. They
| jump in to every thread to push Firefox and Rust and make
| people think it's more widely used/better than it is.
| falcolas wrote:
| Not everything is a conspiracy. I'm not a Mozilla employee,
| have never been one (probably never will be one). Firefox is
| awesome, fast, and extensible. It's my daily driver for all
| of my machines.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Side question: I've been trying to switch to firefox as my
| main browser but one thing is holding me up. When I'm using
| a private window, cookies are not shared between private
| tabs. I can see the advantage to that behavior, but is
| there a way to share them so that I can be logged into the
| same site in multiple private tabs? Unironically, I haven't
| had any luck googling this problem.
| lordnacho wrote:
| You can make as many separate containers as you like,
| where each tab shares the cookies with all the other tabs
| in that container. For example, I have a Facebook
| container that only shares with Messenger and none of the
| other tabs. I can see it works because sites that are
| logged in on one container are not logged in on others.
| It's easy to right-click and reopen a tab in one of your
| other containers.
| falcolas wrote:
| If you open a new tab from an existing tab, your session
| persists across tabs. So, for example, middle clicking on
| the Hacker News logo will preserve your HN session across
| tabs.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Huh, this is how I expected it to work and it does work
| for hacker news but it doesn't work for one site I want
| it to work for. I'll have to dig deeper, thanks.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Same. It works great and uses less RAM than Chrome.
| fortyseven wrote:
| People who push conspiracies without solid evidence should be
| jailed. Or at least publicly ridiculed.
| dropdrive wrote:
| And then? I use it and judge it bases on it's merits. Surely
| they know this (and hence decided it's worth the time?)
| detritus wrote:
| I work for Mozilla?
|
| Huh. I should ask for a pay rise...
| jeltz wrote:
| I think most people who advocate Firefox are not Mozilla
| employees. I am for sure not one, I do not even like Mozilla,
| but they are a much lesser evil compared to Google. And I
| think having multiple competing browsers is vital for
| preventing the internet for becoming a walled garden owned by
| some big corporation.
| Ohn0 wrote:
| Isn't moz pretty much funded by google?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| as a defense against antitrust accusations. microsoft once
| funded apple too
| throwawa66 wrote:
| You must be a google toolhead employee not to see how evil
| they've become
| swiley wrote:
| Google consumer software is almost universally an active full
| frontal attack on you. Stop using it.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| This sounded harder to do than it was in my experience. I
| figured the alternatives to their products would be less
| polished. But I switched to Firefox and honestly prefer it to
| Chrome. (They allow extensions on Android, meaning adblock,
| which is a game changer for me.) DDG for search is great.
| Protonmail for email is fine, etc. There isn't much in the
| Google ecosystem that I miss tbh.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| For me is google docs and maps.
| dleslie wrote:
| If you need online office and maps then there's Microsoft
| Office and Bing Maps. Office is an excellent product, well
| worth the few bucks a month.
|
| AFAIK, Office is fairly good about privacy.
| acollins1331 wrote:
| The only thing I have problems finding something that works
| is Google maps. As an Android user there are a few different
| options but Google did make a damn good maps app.
| sutro wrote:
| Bypassing CORS checks by "hiding" X-Client-Data:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/f3ceca9d0fd...
| haecceity wrote:
| What does freezing mean here?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I dropped chrome a long time ago and switched to Brave. Does
| Brave have these same issues, considering it uses webkit for it's
| rendering engine? Am I just being paranoid?
|
| What a tumor google has become.
| dmtroyer wrote:
| I must be dense but I never see the `x-client-data` header in the
| request headers of the network tab in developer tools.
| outworlder wrote:
| Try a packet capture. You wouldn't trust the browser to let you
| know all shady emails it is sending, right? :)
| dmtroyer wrote:
| This did come to mind, hah.
| calibas wrote:
| I just checked, I see it on Chrome when fetching resources from
| google.com, youtube.com, gstatic.com, and
| googlesyndication.com.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| I just tried it now on google.com, and it sent it in 6
| requests. You can ctrl+f in developer tools in Chrome.
| dessant wrote:
| I think extensions can filter out the x-client-data header,
| though Google should definitely make this data collection
| opt-in.
|
| GDPR is very clear about this data being personal information
| [1], since Google has access to the IP address on the
| receiving end, which has been repeatedly tested in courts as
| being personal data.
|
| Google is engaging in personal data harvesting without user
| consent and control, and no amount of mental gymnastics
| presented in their privacy whitepaper [2] will save them in
| courts.
|
| [1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/refo...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#var
| iat...
| dmtroyer wrote:
| Oh interesting, it must be an extension that is filtering
| it out for me (Ghostery, DDG Privacy Essentials or Adblock
| Plus in my case)
| GrayShade wrote:
| Can you also test under the incognito mode?
| sunnyque wrote:
| i've checked this already, chrome doesn't send this header
| in incognito mode, and this is really good
| 3xblah wrote:
| Right-click in the Name column, select "Save all as HAR with
| content". Then grep for the headers, e.g., sed
| -n '/headers\":/,/\]/p' example.com.har
|
| While running Chrome, try ps ax |grep -o
| field-trial-handle[^\ ]*[0-9]
|
| Handle to the shared memory segment containing field trial
| state that is to be shared between processes. The argument to
| this switch is the handle id (pointer on Windows) as a string,
| followed by a comma, then the size of the shared memory segment
| as a string.
|
| Also, can try typing "chrome://versions" in the address bar
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/541466/what-is-the-variation...
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2013/04/05/field-trials-in-chrome-how...
|
| Further reading:
|
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
|
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
| kohtatsu wrote:
| It's limited to Google properties.
| reader_1000 wrote:
| It seems that it does not send "x-client-data" header in
| private mode, but it sends it when browsing regular mode.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| But unless you changed IP, and other machine characteristics
| they'll be able to link the machine-id with an alternative
| fingerprint (cf amiunique/panopticlick).
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| That would mean they are actually not tracking you (via that
| method at least) in private mode. I was just about to
| investigate how or if they were tracking in porn mode.
| swalsh wrote:
| I BELIEVE it is related to this section:
| https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/2e452bbf1fa092a742...
| outside1234 wrote:
| Does this apply to Edge installations? (If not, another great
| reason to move to Edge.)
| pier25 wrote:
| Chromium too?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| As another commenter pointed out, the list of domains the
| header is sent to is part of the Chromium codebase:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
| gempir wrote:
| this is just a test case. It could very well be a much bigger
| list.
| gruez wrote:
| Actual list: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/component
| s/google/core/...
|
| via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22237768
| macinjosh wrote:
| Doesn't look like it from my testing of version 81.0.4036.0.
| But in normal Chrome I do see it.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Can you test it in Microsoft's new Edge browser based on
| Chromium? I'm very curious about that. (I don't know how to
| test such a thing myself, sorry :S)
| ryneandal wrote:
| I didn't see the x-client-header in the Edge insider
| browser when accessing YouTube.
| pier25 wrote:
| I don't see it in Brave either
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| According to this source code [0], it looks like this is in
| Chromium as well. Does that mean this affects Electron
| applications?
|
| [0]:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
| currysausage wrote:
| Edge ("Edgium") doesn't appear to send this header. Neither
| does Chrome in Private or Guest Mode.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Checked that Vivaldi doesn't seem to be sending this header.
| nornagon wrote:
| Electron maintainer here. Electron does not send this header.
| croh wrote:
| Thanks for clarification.
| csagan5 wrote:
| Credits to the ungoogled-chromium project [0] for the patch [1]
| which is also used in Bromite since 15 February 2018 to prevent
| this type of leaks; see also my reply here: [2]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/bromite/bromite/blob/79.0.3945.139/build/...
|
| [2]:
| https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/480#issuecomment-5...
| gcb0 wrote:
| Which is not the right way to solve this problem.
|
| This is the reverse ad blocker problem.
|
| Just use firefox, where we can at least pretend that the full
| time paid contributors are not trying to shove Advertising and
| Tracking on us.
| janpot wrote:
| Not endorsing this, but according to
| https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html#variat...
|
| > We want to build features that users want, so a subset of users
| may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested before
| it's launched to the world at large. A list of field trials that
| are currently active on your installation of Chrome will be
| included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-Variations
| header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally
| identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the
| installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as
| well as server-side experiments that may affect the installation.
|
| > The variations active for a given installation are determined
| by a seed number which is randomly selected on first run. If
| usage statistics and crash reports are disabled, this number is
| chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy). If you would like
| to reset your variations seed, run Chrome with the command line
| flag "--reset-variation-state". Experiments may be further
| limited by country (determined by your IP address), operating
| system, Chrome version and other parameters.
| flukus wrote:
| So they're tracking people and using them as guinea pigs, the
| lack of respect for users is astounding.
| pdkl95 wrote:
| This is impressive doublespeak.
|
| > This ... header ... will not contain any personally
| identifiable information
|
| > a seed number which is randomly selected on first run ...
| chosen between 0 and 7999 (13 bits of entropy)
|
| They are not including any PII... while creating a new
| identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy _probably_
| isn 't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in
| isolation. Combined with _at least_ 24 additional bits[1] of
| entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives
| >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID for
| the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal account is
| trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
|
| > Experiments may be further limited by country (determined by
| your IP address)
|
| They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
|
| > operating system, Chrome version and other parameters.
|
| ...and many additional sources of entropy.
|
| [1] why 24 bits instead of 32? The LSB of the address might be
| zeroed if the packet is affected by Googles
| faux-"anonymization" feature (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15167059 )
| clSTophEjUdRanu wrote:
| >Linking that browser ID to a personal account is trivial as
| soon as someone logs in to any Google service.
|
| Wat? You mean to tell me they can identify you if you log
| into their service?
|
| Am I missing something here? Who cares?
| poxrud wrote:
| Yes you are missing something important. Once they've tied
| the browser ID to your personal account they can track you
| across all google properties, even the ones that you didn't
| log into.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I still don't understand. When I log into gmail, it logs
| me into all Google services. If I am worried about being
| tracked, surely my first mistake is logging in in the
| first place? Or visiting in the first place? After all,
| even if I click "log out," I'm only trusting Google that
| they unlinked the browser state from the account. If I
| trust them to do that, I don't see why I shouldn't trust
| them to ignore this experiment flag from Chrome, or at
| least not use it for tracking. If I don't trust them to
| avoid using the experiment state, I don't really see how
| you can trust them for anything.
|
| Anyway, if you're not building Chrome from source, then
| you have to trust that they aren't putting anything bad
| in it. And if you are building chrome from source, you
| can observe that they only send this experiment ID to
| certain domains, and they already know who you are on
| those domains anyway.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Unless you're running some extension that emulates FF's
| container tabs or something, it logs you into all G
| services. It would matter, though, if this header is
| still sent in incognito sessions.
| sildur wrote:
| I care. I care that I even if I log off, even if I use a
| vpn, even if I go into incognito mode, they still can
| associate my requests with the account I initially logged
| in.
| admax88q wrote:
| I mean, if you don't want Google to track you, then you
| probably shouldn't use their browser...
| foota wrote:
| I believe someone else in the thread stated it's cleared
| for incognito, don't remember if they meant it's not sent
| or that it's a new value.
| meowface wrote:
| The problem is any website can do that. Incognito-
| bypassing fingerprinting is difficult to prevent, unless
| you use something like uMatrix to disallow JavaScript
| from everything but a few select domains.
|
| This is a collection of random-ish unique-ish attributes.
| Any collection of such things can be used to track you,
| like installed fonts, installed extensions, etc. If this
| were just a set of meaningless encoded random numbers,
| then it's essentially a kind of cookie, but that's not
| what it is. This is (claimed to be) a collection of
| information that's useful and possibly needed by some
| backends when testing new Chrome features. It tells
| servers what your Chrome browser supports. The
| information is probably similar to
| "optimizeytvids=1,betajsparser=1".
|
| So, the only question is if Google is actually using this
| to help fingerprint users in addition to the pragmatic
| use case. It certainly could be used that way, and it's
| possible they are, but they have so many other ways of
| doing that with much higher fidelity / entropy if they
| want to. If this were intended as a sneaky undisclosed
| fingerprinting technique, I think they would've ensured
| it was actually 100% unique per installation, with a
| state space in the trillions, rather than 8000.
|
| Yes, this could be so sneaky that they took this into
| consideration and made it low-entropy to create plausible
| deniability while still being able to increase entropy
| when doing composite fingerprinting, but I think it's
| pretty unlikely. Also, 99% of the time they could
| probably just use use Google Analytics and Google login
| cookies to do this anyway.
| rvnx wrote:
| Maybe one actually useful non-advertising usage could be
| reCAPTCHA ? If you read carefully, it says nowhere than
| there is the limit to 8000. There is this limit of 8000
| only if you disable usage statistics / crash reports.
| [deleted]
| make3 wrote:
| he means they can continue to identify you after you log
| off
| pests wrote:
| I think the argument is they have other methods like
| cookies they could also use. The fact you trust them not
| to use those methods extends to this form of tracking.
| mdiesel wrote:
| If you browse the internet, they could know what websites
| are visited by the same person, but not who they are
| exactly.
|
| If you visit a load of websites, then also log into google,
| they connect the two and they know what websites were
| visited by you specifically.
| kag0 wrote:
| Normally you would only expect to be identified and tracked
| when using Google services when logged in. The significance
| of this post is that they would be able to identify and
| track you across all your usage of that browser
| installation regardless of if you've logged out, or say in
| an incognito window.
| clSTophEjUdRanu wrote:
| Ah. So I was missing something. Thanks for clarifying.
| That is alarming.
| adriantam wrote:
| > They are not including any PII... while creating a new
| identifier for each installation. 13 bits of entropy probably
| isn't a unique identifier iff you only look at that header in
| isolation. Combined with at least 24 additional bits[1] of
| entropy from the IPv4 Source Address field Google receives
| >=37 bits of entropy, which is almost certainly a unique ID
| for the browser. Linking that browser ID to a personal
| account is trivial as soon as someone logs in to any Google
| service.
|
| Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of entropy,
| what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13 bits then
| Google suddenly able to track what they were not? If the IPv4
| address, user-agent string, or some other behavior is
| sufficient to reveal a great deal of stuff, we have a more
| serious problem than that 13 bits. I agree that 13-bit seed
| is a concern. But I am wondering if it is a concern per se,
| or its orchestration with something else. Of course,
| how/whether Google keeps those data also matters.
| gruez wrote:
| >Now this is interesting. If without that 13 bits of
| entropy, what will Google lost? Is it because of this 13
| bits then Google suddenly able to track what they were not?
|
| At the very least, having those 13 bits of entropy along
| with a /24 subnet allows you to have device-level
| granularity, whereas a /24 subnet may be shared by hundreds
| of households.
| rvnx wrote:
| They have more than 13 bits of entropy
|
| https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/metrics/e
| ntr...
|
| Look how the function is called, high-entropy source :)
| AsyncAwait wrote:
| But if you disable telemetry, they'll only have 13?
| [deleted]
| rvnx wrote:
| One clarification:
|
| - By default it's much more than 13 bits of entropy
|
| - If you disable usage statistics then you are limited to
| 13 bits of entropy
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, if you have enough bits you can come up with a
| fingerprint, but that's not what PII means.
| tjoff wrote:
| It becomes PII the instant you can correlate that
| fingerprint with any PII.
| mega_dingus wrote:
| This.
|
| A bank account number is consider PII. Knowing the bank
| name & account number will uniquely identify the account
| holder's name, which is PII.
| fmajid wrote:
| IP addresses are considered PII under both GDPR and CCPA.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| ... which is crazy unrealistic, since it's "PII" that can
| only stay "private" by collective agreement of every node
| in the network, but no accounting for the reality of
| network architecture in passing law, I guess.
|
| Maybe a deep expectation of anonymity while accessing a
| worldwide network of cooperative machines is something
| people should stop telling the public they should expect?
| labawi wrote:
| Under GDPR you can use all the PII you reasonably need to
| provide expected services, you don't even need separate
| consent. But, if you have PII, the moment you use it for
| other purposes, or obtain/retain/share without proper
| cause, you are breaking the law.
|
| IMHO, that is very reasonable.
|
| Real world example - giving your phone number and
| information to your car mechanic / doctor / bank teller /
| plumber is reasonable. Using that information to score
| girls or ask donation for a puppy shelter would be
| considered improper.
| outworlder wrote:
| Or they can stay 'private' by not being stored or
| correlated with other user data. GDPR doesn't apply to
| the network itself, it applies to whoever is using it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "Stored" is definitely the purpose of a router.
| "Correlated" can be necessary for debugging routing
| issues (or client-server connection issues that are tied
| to the intermediary fabric near the client doing
| something weird; hard to determine if an entire subnet is
| acting up if you aren't allowed to maintain state on
| errors correlated to IP address).
| gcb0 wrote:
| > IP addresses are considered PII under both GDPR and
| CCPA.
|
| That's why Google do that little obfuscation dance. All
| the trackings of cookie/ip, none of the gdpr annoyances.
|
| The var is called "kMetricsLowEntropySource" in case
| anyone is wondering
|
| https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/dc70013d5a70434
| fae...
| forgotmypw38 wrote:
| Don't forget that just about any registration requires
| recaptcha these days
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > > Experiments may be further limited by country (determined
| by your IP address)
|
| > They even admit to inspecting the IP address...
|
| I don't think that sentence admits what you say? Chrome could
| be determining which experiments to run client-side.
|
| Of course, when you visit a Google property, they needs must
| inspect your IP address to send a response to you, at a
| minimum. That goes for any site you might choose to visit.
| The existence of sufficient entropy to personally identify a
| site visitor is not a state secret. They do not need this
| chrome experiment seed to identify you, if that's a goal.
| calibas wrote:
| Yeah, it's not a "state secret" but it's not common
| knowledge either. Their privacy policy says that specific
| header can't be used to identify you, but fails to mention
| it can be combined with other information to make browser
| fingerprinting trivial.
|
| If you don't know how all this works, which is true for
| most human beings, their privacy policy might give you the
| wrong impression.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > says that specific header can't be used to identify you
|
| That's not what it says. It says the header won't contain
| PII, which is true. It can be linked to PII, but so can
| literally every bit of information you send to Google
| while logged into or otherwise using their services. A
| disclaimer to this effect would not have any purpose.
| GrayShade wrote:
| If I log in to my Google account once, they can associate
| that browser id with my account. Even if I log out, clear
| my cookies (and probably use the incognito mode), Google
| will be able to identify and follow me all over the Web.
|
| I don't know about your PII thing, but it's personal data
| under the GDPR.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| AIUI GDPR restricts the handling and use of PII, not its
| existence. So it's PII under GDPR. Is Google misusing it?
| If so, that's an issue. If not, then it's kinda pointless
| to observe that it's PII under some possibly distinct
| legal definition than the one Google is using in its
| privacy policy.
| calibas wrote:
| That's the whole point. Using any Google service means
| they can easily personally identify you, that's what the
| privacy policy should explain.
|
| That's their policy towards privacy, you don't have any.
| For some reason I can't fathom, you claim mentioning this
| in their privacy policy "would not have any purpose".
| Instead of honesty, their privacy policy is a wonder of
| public relations where it seems like they care deeply
| about protecting your privacy.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| We disagree about the purpose of privacy policies. I
| believe that privacy policies should describe how data
| _will_ be used, not how it _could_ be used. I just don 't
| think a policy describing how data could be used is very
| useful, because it's going to be the same for all
| services.
|
| Under this formulation, Google's policy is (presumably,
| lacking any data to the contrary) honest with respect to
| this value.
| shuckles wrote:
| This is a fair distinction, though it does not include
| the option of discussing how the data _won't_ be used.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Per your observation, I would argue that the intent of
| the privacy policy as quoted above is pretty clear. When
| the policy says that the identifier doesn't contain PII,
| I believe that is meant to convey that it will not be
| used to identify you. But it's true that that use is not
| explicitly excluded. I'm not a lawyer so I couldn't tell
| you if being weasely in this way would count as fraud or
| not. Otoh, I suspect that Google is actually abiding by
| the spirit of the policy they wrote because honestly they
| have little to gain and much to lose by violating it.
| emmelaich wrote:
| > _I believe that privacy policies should describe how
| data will be used, not how it could be used._
|
| This is key. If you subscribe to the "how it could be
| used" version, then even say _possessing_ an android
| phone would be a violation of the privacy policy. Which
| is absurd.
| coliveira wrote:
| > This ... header ... will not contain any personally
| identifiable information
|
| Except for everything you do on your browser. I'm so glad I
| haven't used Chrome for almost three years.
| [deleted]
| rvnx wrote:
| They key in the wording is: "If usage statistics and crash
| reports are disabled, this number is chosen between 0 and 7999
| (13 bits of entropy)."
|
| "If, statistics are disabled."
|
| In chrome://version you can see the active variations. It seems
| to be pretty big numbers to be significant, and so far haven't
| observed duplicates.
|
| Since this header is generated server-side, you have only to
| believe I guess ? Plus why Doubleclick would need it :)
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Is there a reason for only sending this header to Google web
| properties and not all domains?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Is it because Google's webapps will have their own a/b tests
| which use experimental features only available in Chrome
| perhaps?
|
| I mean personally I think they should do client-side feature
| detection and be back to being standards compliant and not
| creepy. The only reason why I'd consider such a flag is
| because they optimize the payload server-side to return a
| certain a/b test, but even with that they could do the
| default version first, do feature detection, and then set a
| session cookie for that domain only that loads the a/b test.
|
| My other Thought was that they test a feature that is
| implemented across Google's properties, e.g. something having
| to do with their account management.
| CommanderData wrote:
| I can think of a hundreds reasons why they do this. It
| doesn't make it right in any of those.
| masswerk wrote:
| Isn't this what cookies are for?
| rvnx wrote:
| Cross-site cookies are soon getting blocked by Chrome
| starting Chrome 80 if I'm right (whereas this header
| isn't)
| CaveTech wrote:
| So they build a personal back door to a feature that
| they've chosen to remove for everyone else? Because of
| it's potential for abuse, yet the very same company is
| somehow abusing it in a way more sinister way. Antitrust
| can't come soon enough.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Chrome will only block cross-site cookies that don't use
| HTTPS and the SameSite=Lax flag. It's easy for trackers
| to user HTTPS and SameSite=Lax. This Chrome change is
| mostly intended to protect against Cross Site Request
| Forgery (CSRF) attacks, not to block trackers.
| macinjosh wrote:
| It is an abuse of Chrome's position in the marketplace.
| Google is using their powerful position to give themselves
| tracking capabilities that other online players can't access.
| It is a major competitive advantage for Google.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Err yeah, because it adds loads of data that can be used to
| track you.
| some_random wrote:
| How many people will actually run chrome with a cli flag? It
| would be pretty impressive if every single person reading this
| thread did, but it probably won't even be that. Most people
| don't even touch their settings.
|
| 13 bits of entropy is far from a uuid (but to get it to that
| you need to disable some more settings, which again very few
| people do), but it's still plenty good enough to disambiguate
| individuals over time.
| Yeroc wrote:
| And Google is certainly in a position to disambiguate that
| uuid to an individual as soon as they login to gmail or any
| other Google property!
| ravedave5 wrote:
| It appears that chrome based Edge does not send this header. I've
| switched to firefox for everything I can switch, perhaps it time
| to use Edgeium over chrome for anything else.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| MS Windows probably used the Skype to fingerprint you already,
| and don't need the browser to do it explicitly?
| Tepix wrote:
| According to
| https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html
|
| " _We want to build features that users want, so a subset of
| users may get a sneak peek at new functionality being tested
| before it's launched to the world at large. A list of field
| trials that are currently active on your installation of Chrome
| will be included in all requests sent to Google. This Chrome-
| Variations header (X-Client-Data) will not contain any personally
| identifiable information, and will only describe the state of the
| installation of Chrome itself, including active variations, as
| well as server-side experiments that may affect the
| installation._ "
|
| While this header may not contain personally identifiable
| information, its presence will make every request by this user
| far more unique and thus easier to track. I do not see Google
| saying they won't use it to improve their tracking of people.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| One click while logged into any Google property will be enough
| for them to permanently associate this GUID with your (shadow)
| account, they know it, and they know you know it too
| balls187 wrote:
| This is why I use firefox for personal browsing, and edge for
| work.
|
| Now that Edge / Chromium is out of beta, even better.
| cs702 wrote:
| Doubtlessly, this will be rationalized and justified as being
| necessary for, and in the best interest of, consumers...
|
| ...but inevitably, it _will_ be used for tracking -- regardless
| of intent.
|
| It might also get Google in trouble. Copying and pasting from the
| a comment in the OP's URL:
|
| _> Example: https://www.youtube.com - in network headers, look
| for x-client-data
|
| > Now, go to https://ad.doubleclick.net/abc - and your browser
| also sends this magic x-client-data.
|
| > It's a unique ID to track a specific Chrome instance across all
| Google properties.
|
| > Really curious about your opinion, especially after the GDPR
| explicitly forbidding such tracking. Moreover, it doesn't make
| sense to anonymise user-agent if you have such backdoor._
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Can Chrome extensions on the new proposed v3 standard remove
| that outbound request header?
| floatingatoll wrote:
| This comment is unreadable on mobile.
| https://i.imgur.com/jFusqw0.png
|
| Could you please remove the four-space indent? You can wrap
| each paragraph in * ... * if you want to italic them.
| cs702 wrote:
| Fixed. Sorry about that. Thank you for letting me know!
| floatingatoll wrote:
| No worries :)
| metahost wrote:
| You may give https://hackerweb.app a try! Aside: It is read
| only though.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I don't appreciate your link to a third-party reader here,
| because you're implying that the contradiction of HN's
| style guidelines (code formatting is for code) is somehow
| made acceptable by the existence of an app that reformats
| it for only a few readers.
|
| If I switch to an app rather than ask the person to stop,
| the other HN mobile users who use a browser rather than app
| will continue to suffer. "Use an app" is not an acceptable
| choice.
| cs702 wrote:
| It seems my comment may have been misinterpreted.
|
| I meant that this will be rationalized and justified BY GOOGLE.
| mojuba wrote:
| > Now, go to https://ad.doubleclick.net/abc - and
|
| It's funny that the doubleclick URL was removed by my adblocker
| and I didn't get what the original message was about. Now I can
| see it, thanks :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies use
| their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No
| opt-out.
|
| What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they don't
| want to deal with wetware? Is it afraid that if people knew what
| was happening they wouldn't be happy? Google has eighty
| brazillion employees it can test new features on.
| basch wrote:
| Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to
| basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the
| product stable enough for enterprise.
|
| Although Window 7 may have been one of the most complex
| software deployments in history, needing to support decades of
| poorly written drivers, while making the system both stable and
| compatible.
| gruez wrote:
| >Microsoft Vista was a Windows 7 beta, and was "necessary" to
| basically experiment on the entire Home market, to make the
| product stable enough for enterprise.
|
| That claim is directly contradicted by the fact that there's
| Windows Vista enterprise edition[1]. Vista is also supported
| for a full 10 years just like 7, which would be strange for
| something that was supposed to be an "experiment".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_editions
| basch wrote:
| most enterprises skipped it.
| munificent wrote:
| Bias up front: I work at Google but am not speaking for Google.
|
| _> involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs._
|
| I don't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to use
| the product. If you choose to use the product, yes, you may be
| exposed to features that the product has. If you don't want to
| be exposed to those features, the way to opt out is to not use
| the product.
|
| _> What 's the motivation?_
|
| It lets the company incrementally roll out and test features in
| real-world network configurations at scale. As far as I know,
| almost all tech companies do this.
|
| Let's say you're Fapplebooglezon and you have an idea to put
| kitten emojis on the "Buy Now" button. Before you ship that,
| you want to make sure that:
|
| 1. The feature works correctly. It doesn't crash or have
| significant performance problems.
|
| 2. Users, in aggregate, like the change. No one wants to ship a
| "New Coke" debacle. It's bad for the company (they lose money)
| and bad for users (they don't like the product).
|
| 3. Your servers and network can handle the consequences of that
| change. Maybe users will be so excited that they all click "Buy
| Now" twice as much. You need to make sure your servers don't
| crumble under the increased load.
|
| These are reasonable things that benefit both the company and
| users. So the way features and changes are usually shipped is
| like:
|
| 1. The feature is implemented behind some kind of flag. [0]
|
| 2. "Fishfooding" [1]: The team developing the feature starts
| using it. This gives you some feedback on "does the feature
| work correctly" but that's about it. The team owns the feature,
| so they are biased in terms of its usability. And they are on a
| privileged network and not a large enough population to verify
| how this affects the distributed system.
|
| 3. "Dogfooding": The entire company starts using it. This
| starts to give you some usability feedback because now people
| who don't have a stake in the feature are being exposed to it.
| But it's still skewed since employees are likely not a
| representative user population.
|
| 4. "Canary": The feature is enabled for a randomly selected
| small population of external users. Now you start getting
| feedback on how the feature performs in the wild on real-world
| machines and networks. The percent of users is kept small
| enough to not crush the servers in case anything goes awry, but
| you can start getting some performance data too.
|
| 5. "A/B testing": Now you start collecting data to see how
| behavior of users with the feature compares to users without
| it. You can actually start to get data on whether the feature
| is good or not.
|
| 6. Assuming everything looks OK, you start incrementally
| rolling it out to a larger and larger fraction of users. All
| the while, you watch the servers to make sure the load is
| within expected bounds.
|
| 7. Once you get to 100% of users and things look good, you
| remove the flag and the feature is now permanently enabled.
|
| _> Is it simple laziness because they don 't want to deal with
| wetware?_
|
| Google, like most other companies, also does lots of user
| testing and user surveys too. But that doesn't give you insight
| into the technical side of the question -- how the feature
| impacts the behavior of your distributed system.
|
| You may not be aware of this, but this kind of in-the-wild
| product testing is something almost all businesses do, all the
| time. Food companies test new products in grocery stores in
| selected cities [2]. Car manufacturers drive camoflaged
| prototypes on the road [3]. Restaurant chains tinker with
| recipes to see how sales are affected. There is absolutely no
| guarantee that the Coke you're drinking today has the same
| ingredients as the one you had yesterday.
|
| You seem to think this is some nefarious scheme, but it's just
| basic marketing. You want to make a thing people like, so you
| make two things and measure which one people like more. People
| "opt in" and "consent" by using the product. If you don't want
| to be a "guinea pig" when McDonald's changes their French fry
| recipe, don't buy the fries. If you don't want to test out new
| Chrome features, don't use Chrome.
|
| [0]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/3qpdnn/anyone_knows...
|
| [2]: https://smallbusiness.com/product-development/best-u-s-
| citie...
|
| [3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/20/camouflage-the-incognito-
| way...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I don 't see how this is involuntary. You are choosing to
| use the product_
|
| It's involuntary because it's not informed consent. Google
| doesn't tell people up front or in any meaningful way that
| this is happening.
|
| That's like saying "Oh, that steak was covered in the chef's
| experimental hot sauce that we didn't list on the menu? Well,
| too bad, you chose to come to this restaurant."
| munificent wrote:
| _> It 's involuntary because it's not informed consent. _
|
| I think you're making an analogy that doesn't logically
| apply. "Informed consent" is a property of _healthcare_
| administration. When you 're putting drugs into someone's
| blood stream or cutting them open while anaesthetized,
| yeah, you need to make damn sure you're doing the right
| thing for them.
|
| _> the chef 's experimental hot sauce that we didn't list
| on the menu?_
|
| Likewise, when you're serving food that someone will ingest
| and which may cause allergic reactions or food poisoning,
| again the bar is pretty high to make sure you are treating
| people safely.
|
| But we're talking about using a free piece of software. If
| Chrome changes the color of their tab bar, no one is going
| into anaphylactic shock. When Facebook adds a new button on
| the sidebar, there is little risk of that inadvertently
| severing someone's carotid artery.
| zerkten wrote:
| > No consent. No opt-out.
|
| Do you understand what licensing is? That's one of the
| underlying aspects that's important with software and why you
| can't treat it like other things you buy. I'd add it's also why
| things that adopt software-style licencing models are bad too.
|
| A company creates a licence with terms and you agree to use the
| licence under those terms by using the software. The terms are
| difficult to change unless you have leverage. The only party
| other than the company is often the regulatory authority.
| Regulation is limited in the US at best when compared to the
| EU. If you are from the EU then you probably assume the US
| works similarly, but most Americans don't recognize issues like
| this one. When they do, it's hard to fight the incumbents and
| make something opt-in, or ban it outright.
|
| > What's the motivation? Is it simple laziness because they
| don't want to deal with wetware? (the start of your first
| paragraph applies here too)
|
| It's fairly simple. The motivation is making correct decisions
| based on the gold standards of decision-making that some people
| aspire to. The model is not dissimilar to clinical trials where
| a treatment is given to some individuals and not to others. The
| hope is that this form of experimentation removes bias and
| let's the product manager make the best decisions.
|
| Based on this thinking it is not possible to test with just
| Google's employees. For many decisions, the bias will be
| significant, and ultimately the belief is that worse decisions
| will be made for users.
|
| I'm trying to convey that in as neutral way as possible. I
| think this can be a useful technique, but I think that there is
| little discipline and accountability in the wider software
| world compared to medicine. You have PMs who'll routinely just
| run an A/B test longer to collect more data (that's better,
| right?), but invalidate their results, just to please
| management.
|
| If anyone is going to implement this approach then I'd trust
| Google to implement it effectively to meet their needs. They do
| it on a large scale across their products and have many layers
| of people to ensure it's effectively meeting their needs. As
| stated in the previous paragraph, this doesn't mean that other
| people do it right, or that everyone in Google does it right
| every time. I'm sure they've had a fair share of failed
| experiments.
| lmkg wrote:
| > Do you understand what licensing is?
|
| Nope, no one understands licensing. Which means that
| arguments grounded on "The user accepted the terms!" has a
| shaky ethical foundation. Not necessarily a shaky legal
| foundation, although that wheel seems to be turning.
| gowld wrote:
| Do you get the consent to observe everyone you interact with?
| duxup wrote:
| Isn't that what most A/B testing is?
| reaperducer wrote:
| No, it's what unethical A/B testing is.
| duxup wrote:
| " involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent. No opt-out"
|
| That sounds like all A/B testing...
| csallen wrote:
| "Scientists run tests on guinea pigs. A/B testers run
| tests on me. Therefore I am a guinea pig. Guinea pigs
| have no rights. Therefore A/B testers are taking away my
| rights."
|
| I've never been a fan of this particular type of logic
| and reasoning (or lack thereof).
| duxup wrote:
| Yeah I agree. A/B testing is generally ... innocuous.
|
| The idea that such a pattern is as severe / bad as
| described I don't think makes sense.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _That sounds like all A /B testing..._
|
| In the tech world, maybe. But not in the real world.
|
| For example, one of the colleges I went to was in an area
| with a lot of pharmaceutical companies. My friends would
| A/B test drugs for the companies. They made enough money
| to pay for college. But it was all completely consensual,
| with contracts and disclosures, etc...
|
| Companies in the increasingly morally bankrupt SV bubble
| just test on people without letting them know about it.
| That's the problem.
| duxup wrote:
| In the tech world changing the background color on a
| webpage to see what I do and ... medicine are pretty
| darned different.
| zerkten wrote:
| Like it, or not, these companies believe the terms of
| service at the bottom of the page suffice for your
| consent. We really need this problem to be tackled on
| many levels (legal precedents that terms don't matter,
| education, encouragement of good alternatives, etc.)
|
| Until that time, folks in the SV bubble will just keep
| doing this. Companies that can operate only from the US
| are effectively untouchable when it comes to regulation.
| Big companies like Facebook get caught a bit because they
| have offices, but many no name companies acting as data
| brokers, etc. don't have a presence and are hard to deal
| with.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Firefox's testing (aka studies) are opt-in, not opt-out.
| gowld wrote:
| Firefox telemetry is opt-out, however.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-
| help...
| w0m wrote:
| ... what?
|
| If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.
| dawnerd wrote:
| But what about people like me that are paying google (quite a
| lot actually)?
| wolco wrote:
| I don't understand your group. The company that offers
| everything for free for the price of privacy and you also
| give them money?
|
| If I was paying for a service that didn't respect my
| privacy I wouldn't give them my identifying payment info as
| well. Your fingerprint is connected to all of the credit
| data providers. If you didn't pay they had to guess or
| connect you another way.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Same reason people use amazon/aws or microsoft/azure.
| shawnz wrote:
| This is a meaningless cliche. Just because users of Google
| products don't pay in cash to use them doesn't change the
| fact that Google has to attract the users to their platform
| in the first place, and keep them there.
| zepto wrote:
| No, Google has paid to be the the default in most cases.
| shawnz wrote:
| Anticompetitive behavior is a different and unrelated
| problem from monetizing your products using advertising
| and personal data
| Iolaum wrote:
| Nowadays you are the product even if you pay. (E.g.
| Subscription news sites including trackers on subscribed
| users, smartTVs siphoning data etc)
| simias wrote:
| I agree completely, that's what's so messed up with this
| "freemium" model that's so popular these days. If companies
| need to develop the ad-ridden version with tons of tracking
| to monetize free users anyway, what's the incentive for
| them to turn it off for paying users?
|
| It's not like 99% of them are going to care and/or notice
| anyway, and if anything it would be more work to test and
| maintain a different version of the code without trackers.
|
| Just pay for the things you use people, and block
| everything you can with browser plugins. This model needs
| to die.
| Agenttin wrote:
| Thing is the TV's you're only half the customer. That's why
| the TV's have gotten so cheap, the extra revenue stream
| from selling data. You can't even buy a dumb TV any more.
| deathanatos wrote:
| My gas pump feeds me ads while I pump gas that I paid
| for.
|
| T-mobile sends me ads over SMS that I paid for.
|
| JetBlue serves ads to paying passengers on the seat-back
| displays.
|
| I hear Windows has ads now, but I got off that ship a
| while back.
|
| Being the customer is no longer sufficient; companies
| have figured out that they can make more money by
| charging you _and_ serving you ads.
| chewz wrote:
| > If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.
|
| This nonsense should belong into Ron Swanson Pyramid of
| Greatness along with: Capitalism - God's way of determining
| who is smart, and who is poor.
| arkitaip wrote:
| 1. It's about the money.
|
| 2. See 1.
| scarejunba wrote:
| It's because most people don't care and if it means that they
| have a better product at the end of it, they'll take the trade.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Google employees are not a random sample of their user base, so
| such experiments would be meaningless.
|
| See the fiasco where they broke Terminal Services last year as
| an example of what can go wrong even when doing experiments on
| the whole user base.
|
| Also consider how to measure the usage of web features Google's
| own websites don't use, but are popular on e.g. intranets in
| Korea.
|
| A/B testing isn't bad, it's a good thing. People are
| notoriously not very good at giving feedback. Experiments and
| usage statistics let you get the ground truth about what they
| really value, and what's really working.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Google employees are not a random sample of their user base,
| so such experiments would be meaningless._
|
| This is a lazy argument. Google isn't some scrappy tech
| startup where 90% of the employees are programmers. Google
| has legions of lawyers, mailroom clerks, accountants, travel
| coordinators, janitors, cafeteria workers, middle managers of
| all stripes, and so much more. Thousands and thousands of
| people it can test on without violating the privacy of the
| general public.
| salawat wrote:
| A/B testing as implemented in industry is -evokes emotional
| responses eerily similar to those evoked when gaslighting is
| noticed -uncompensated -inconsistent with any semblance of
| established research ethics -generally non-consensual
| -completely undermines trust
|
| I'm not normally one to make a big deal about this sort of
| thing, but there is a reason research ethics exist. If one
| can't be trusted to even attempt to follow ethical research
| protocols, one damn well shouldn't be trusted with anything
| important.
|
| Your user's time and information is not yours to share.
| Whether you bury it in the fine print or not.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > I don't understand why Google and some other tech companies
| use their users as involuntary, unpaid guinea pigs. No consent.
| No opt-out.
|
| It's crazy to me to think about when I was in college (in the
| mid aughts), I was doing a lot of research into Native American
| cultures. The amount of releases, paperwork, and other hoops
| you had to jump through in order to just interview subjects was
| pretty daunting.
|
| The fact we have become involuntary research subjects without
| any protections as a research subject or easy way to opt out of
| these companies data collection (which itself is an ongoing
| form of research) is staggering to thing about.
| mam2 wrote:
| I still do'nt understand how people ask these questions when
| it's been it since 30 years.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I hate to say this, but duh. It's a closed-source browser made by
| an ad company. What the hell to do people expect?
| dazbe wrote:
| Wow, I didn't think sensationalist headlines were allowed on HN.
| I'm guessing mods are asleep or just don't care anymore.
|
| Edit: If the mods are listening, I've come up with an alternative
| title for you:
|
| "The Evil GOOGLE Has Installed a MALICIOUS BACKDOOR On All Chrome
| Users Machines To Sell PERSONAL DATA to RUSSIAN HACKERS on the
| DARK WEB".
|
| This will surely get the clicks now. You can thank me later.
| dang wrote:
| The mods were asleep. That happens sometimes.
|
| If you really want to help, suggesting an accurate and neutral
| title, preferably using representative language from the
| article itself, is a great way to do that. We don't know enough
| to get it right in every case, even when awake.
| nacho2sweet wrote:
| Break this company up.
| _jal wrote:
| I was fooled by Google for a while, thinking it was less evil
| than FB. They're just a little smarter about their shittiness.
| CommanderData wrote:
| We need the GDPR equivalent in the US.
| a3n wrote:
| "It's only metadata."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#R...
| dathinab wrote:
| >It's a unique ID to track a specific Chrome instance across all
| Google properties.
|
| >Really curious about your opinion, especially after the GDPR
| explicitly forbidding such tracking.
|
| >Moreover, it doesn't make sense to anonymise user-agent if you
| have such backdoor
|
| Oh, but it does make sense because with this everyone _but_
| google will have a harder time tracking people :\
| d1zzy wrote:
| TL;DR I think whoever posted that is trying to bury the UA
| anonymizing feature by derailing the discussion.
|
| What I'm seeing is an RFC for anonymizing parts of User-Agent in
| order to reduce UA based fingerprinting, which improves
| everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
|
| Then I see someone comments how that could negatively impact
| existing websites or Chromium-derived browsers, comments which
| are totally fair and make an argument that may not be a good idea
| doing this change because of that.
|
| Then someone mentions the _existing_ x-client-data headers
| attached to requests that uniquely identify a Chrome
| installation. Then a lot of comments on that, including here on
| HN.
|
| To me that's derailing the original issue. If we want to propose
| that Chrome remove those headers we should do so as a separate
| issue and have people comment/vote on that. By talking about it
| on the UA anonymizing proposal we are polluting that discussion
| and effectively stalling that proposal which, if approved, could
| improve privacy (especially since it will go into Chromium so
| then any non-Chrome builds can get the feature without having to
| worry about x-client-data that Chrome does).
| dessant wrote:
| This is the equivalent of a protest, people are objecting to
| Google's illegal data harvesting practices in places that
| receive engagement, since that's the most effective way to get
| the word out and warn others.
|
| Google's reasoning that this is not personal data is
| meaningless in the face of GDPR, which considers an IP address
| personal data. Google has access to the IP address when they
| receive the data, therefore they are transmitting personal
| information without user consent and control, which is illegal.
| csagan5 wrote:
| It could be argued that a similar violation is present (since
| March 2019) in Chromium for the Widevine CDM provisioning
| request, see https://github.com/bromite/bromite/issues/471
|
| Basically all users opening the browser will contact
| www.googleapis.com to get a unique "Protected Media
| Identifier", without opening any web page and even before any
| ToS/EULA is accepted (and there is no user consent either).
| dessant wrote:
| I think the Widevine CDM request is needed for the service
| to function, though they could certainly delay it until a
| website requires DRM. GDPR allows the use of personal data
| without consent when it is required to provide a service
| for the user.
|
| The personal data collected with the x-client-data header
| is not required for Google sites to function. Google uses
| the data to gain a technical advantage over other sites on
| the web, this is why the data collection in this case
| requires consent.
| mokus wrote:
| Whether consent is legally required or not, as a user I
| want that service, whatever it is, to not work until I
| consent to the exposure of my personal data. Given that
| it apparently has something to do with DRM, I would be
| disabling the service anyway.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Whether consent is legally required or not
|
| Lets not guess it, lets file a complaint, and see if we
| can get Google sued for n billions of euros.
| csagan5 wrote:
| The poster is the author of Kiwi browser, which unfortunately
| is closed source [0], but I have reason to believe he is
| familiar - as I am for the Bromite project - with all the
| (sometimes shady) internals of the Chromium codebase; it is
| indeed off-topic to discuss the header issue there but I would
| say that there is no explicit intention to derail it (and no
| advantage), just incorrect netiquette.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android/issues/12#issuecommen...
| rvnx wrote:
| https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/google/core/...
|
| Just thinking out loud.
|
| What happens, let's say, if someone malicious buys youtube.vg
| and puts a SSL certificate on it ? Will they be able to collect
| the ID ?
|
| I guess so ?
| gdm85 wrote:
| Yes, but they would also need a valid TLS certificate?
|
| A country's government could also take over the TLD and grab
| its traffic overnight.
| 3xblah wrote:
| The Google employee argues that through UA-CH Google wants to
| disincetivise "allow" and "block" lists.
|
| After many years of testing HTTP headers, IMO this really is a
| non-issue. Most websites return text/html just fine _without
| sending any UA header at all_.
|
| What is an issue are the various ways websites try to coax
| users to download, install and use a certain browser.
|
| Another related issue with Google Chrome is users getting
| better integration and performance when using Chrome with
| Google websites than they would if they used other clients. ^1
| Some make the analogy to Microsoft where it was common for
| Microsoft software to integrate and perform better on Microsoft
| Windows whereas third party software was noticably worse to
| integrate and perform on that OS.
|
| This leads to less user agent diversity. Users will choose what
| works best.
|
| UA diversity is really a more important goal than privacy, or
| privacy in Chrome. The biggest privacy gains are not going to
| come from begging Google to make changes to Chrome. They could
| however come from making it easier for users to switch away
| from using Chrome and to _use other clients_. That requires
| some cooperation from websites as well as Google.
|
| Those other clients could theoretically be written by anyone,
| not just large companies and organisations that are dependent
| on the online ad sales business. It would be relatively easy to
| achieve "privacy-by-design" in such clients. There is no rule
| that says users have to use a single UA to access every
| website. There needs to be choice.
|
| For example, HN is a relatively simple website that does not
| require a large, complex browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox,
| etc. to read. It generates a considerable amount of traffic and
| stands as proof that simpler websites can be popular. Varying
| the UA header does not result in drastic differences in the
| text/html returned by the server.
|
| 1. Recently we saw Google exclude use of certain clients to
| access Gmail.
| unapologetic wrote:
| The original issue is supposedly fingerprinting and privacy
| related.
|
| If that's true then Google should be called out for their poor
| behaviour.
| lordlimecat wrote:
| >which improves everyone's privacy, that's a good thing!
|
| Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this
| install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
|
| Which means Google competitors are terribly disadvantaged, as
| they cannot use that.
|
| Which not only reduces market diversity (contrary to TAG
| philosophy) but represents a significant conflict of interest
| for an organization proposing a major web standard change.
|
| These issues are very relevant to the original proposal,
| especially in light of the fact that Noone outside of Google is
| terribly interested in this change. Any time a dominant player
| is the strongest (or only) advocate for a change that would
| coincidentally and disproportionately benefit its corporate
| interests, the proposal should be viewed very skeptically.
| d1zzy wrote:
| > Except it does not affect Google, because Google has this
| install ID to use both for tracking and preventing ad-fraud.
|
| So when Apple releases a privacy feature, that doesn't affect
| them as a business, we praise the feature or we say "except
| it doesn't affect Apple" and somehow try to argue how the
| feature is less valuable because of that?
| dessant wrote:
| Apple is not engaged in illegal data harvesting to gain a
| competitive advantage over other services in the same
| space. Google's collection of personal data with the
| x-client-data header without user consent is illegal under
| GDPR.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| This relies on the (unfounded) assumption that this
| pseudonymous ID is being used for tracking purposes and
| that Google is actively lying about it.
| dessant wrote:
| GDPR treats an IP address as personal data. The data is
| not transmitted through an anonymizing network, so Google
| has access to the user's IP address when they receive the
| data.
|
| Anything that is associated with personal data also
| becomes personal information, therefore Google is
| transmitting personal data without user consent, which is
| illegal.
|
| Asking for consent is not required under GDPR when the
| data collection is needed for a service to function. This
| is not the case here, Google services function without
| receiving that header, the data is used by Google to gain
| a technical advantage over other web services.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > GDPR treats an IP address as personal data.
|
| No it doesn't. GDPR only treats IP address as personal
| data if it is associated with actual identifying
| information (like name or address). Collecting IP address
| alone, and not associating it with anything else, is
| completely fine (otherwise nginx and apache's default
| configs would violate GDPR), and through them basically
| every website would violate GDPR.
|
| Edit: and furthermore, even if it did (I see conflicting
| reports), if you collect IP Address and another
| pseudonymous ID and _don 't_ join them, the ID isn't
| personal data.
|
| IOW, the theoretical capability to make changes to a
| system to use info in a non-GDPR compliant way doesn't
| make the information or system noncompliant. You actually
| have to do the noncompliant things.
| dessant wrote:
| An IP address is itself personal data, it does not have
| to be associated with other personal data.
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/refo...
|
| > Collecting IP address alone, and not associating it
| with anything else, is completely fine (otherwise nginx
| and apache's default configs would violate GDPR), and
| through them basically every website would violate GDPR.
|
| See my comment about consent not being required when the
| data is needed to provide a service. Logging is
| reasonably required to provide a service.
|
| > and furthermore, even if it did (I see conflicting
| reports), if you collect IP Address and another
| pseudonymous ID and don't join them, the ID isn't
| personal data.
|
| The transmission of data is already covered by GDPR, you
| don't have to store the data to be bound by the law.
| acqq wrote:
| To help other readers:
|
| "The European Commission maintains this website to
| enhance public access to information about its
| initiatives and European Union policies in general."
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/refo...
|
| "Home > Law > Law by topic > Data protection > Reform >
| What is personal data?"
|
| "Examples of personal data
|
| ...
|
| - an Internet Protocol (IP) address;"
| joshuamorton wrote:
| See my edit. There's conflicting information on this. A
| dynamic IP, for example, isn't directly related to or
| relatable to a specific natural person without other
| context.
|
| But even if that's the case, if you don't tie the
| pseudonymous ID to the IP, it isn't personal data. As far
| as I can tell, the transfer rules you reference are about
| transferring data out of the EU, and can be summarized as
| "you can't transfer data to a non-EU country and then
| process it in a way that violates the GDPR". Article 46
| notes that transferring data is fine as long as
| appropriate safeguards are in place[1], and article 47[2]
| defines what constitutes those safeguards (in general,
| contractually/legally binding agreements with appropriate
| enforcement policies).
|
| This goes back to what I said before: The theoretical
| capability to do noncompliant things doesn't make a
| system GDPR-noncompliant. You have to actually do
| noncompliant things to not comply.
|
| [1]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-46-gdpr/
|
| [2]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-47-gdpr/
| 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
| There has been an EU court ruling on this exact question
| of whether dynamic IP addresses count as personal data
| even in contexts where the website operator in question
| does not have the means to associate it with an
| individual but another party (such as an ISP) does. The
| Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled on this
| and it does count as personal data. [1]
|
| Furthermore, GDPR itself specifically refers online
| identifiers in Article 4 as falling under the definition
| of personal data[2] and then clarifies in Recital 30[3]
| that IP addresses count as online identifiers in this
| context. There seems to be no legal ambiguity in the EU
| on this topic at this point, but I would be not surprised
| to see parties who are not GDPR compliant pretend
| otherwise indefinitely.
|
| [1] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/
| pdf/201...
|
| [2] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
|
| [3] https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-30/
| [deleted]
| mabbo wrote:
| I think the concern is that this disarms Google's competitors
| while keeping them fully-armed.
|
| Ads are a business, and they are Google's business. They are
| how they make money. And like all businesses, they are
| competitive. Tracking is a way to make more money off online
| advertising. By removing tracking from their competitors while
| keeping it for themselves, Google stand to make a lot of money
| off this change.
|
| Their motivations are not honest, but they're pushing them as
| if this is the high road. It isn't. It's the dirty low road of
| dominating the online ad business, made possible by their
| dominance in the browser market. And it's always been the end-
| goal of Chrome browser.
| aidos wrote:
| While I agree with some of your comment, I feel like it's
| harsh to paint the whole chrome enterprise with that brush.
| Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web
| browser and a lot of devoted devs have spent a lot of time
| working on it. There's an advertising aspect that it's right
| to call out, but I think on the whole it was done to make the
| internet better, because the internet is google's business
| too.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The way I see it, both of these can be (and most likely
| are) true. Intentions of the company aren't usually the
| same as intentions of individual contributors (or even
| whole teams). The Web is Google's business - the more stuff
| happens on the Web, the more money they can eventually make
| of it. Advertising is how they make most of that money, so
| this is what they're protecting. But beyond that, Chrome
| answered a real need and a lot of hard-working people made
| it into a best-in-class browser.
| taneq wrote:
| It wasn't some noble mission to free the world. Chrome was
| always about Google controlling the client side of the web
| to guarantee their advertising access to web users. The
| ability to extract additional data from the user was a nice
| bonus.
| euske wrote:
| I think this is a common strategy of big players at any
| industry.
|
| First, they do some dirty thing to gain a competitive edge
| when the industry is still new and unregulated. Later they
| develop an alternative way to achieve the same competitive
| edge, and then criticize other players for doing an old way,
| saying they should be "mature and responsible".
| EastSmith wrote:
| Downvote me how many times you want, but Mozilla needs to fork
| Chromium, degoogle it and fix the web.
|
| Mozilla is the only internet entity I can say I trust, I am
| donating to it, and yet I am using Chrome and Brave on both
| Desktop and mobile.
|
| Just follow the users and fork it!
| jrockway wrote:
| Mozilla makes a web browser called Firefox. You should try it!
| EastSmith wrote:
| I've used it for many years, then switched to chrome and
| since then I've tried it more times that I want to admit. I
| am also donating to it.
| lucasverra wrote:
| Switch to Edgium then - FF user
| ivm wrote:
| Microsoft kind of did it with the new Edge:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...
| EastSmith wrote:
| I am using it, but Microsoft, as Brave and Google is a
| commercial entity I do not trust.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Well Mozilla burnt my trust in them over the last couple of
| years ... maybe Brave?
|
| Some don't like their model to tip content providers but they
| seem - and I've not made rigorous enquiries here (please
| inform!) - to be a relatively trustworthy mod of Chromium!?
| EastSmith wrote:
| Brave is commercial entity, same as Google.
| chrshawkes wrote:
| I noticed this when doing work with Puppeteer lately. I thought
| about reporting it but didn't exactly know what I was looking at.
| KenanSulayman wrote:
| Don't forget that even if the number is varying only in an
| interval of 0 and 7999, this means without cookies a unique
| chrome installation can be identified if multiple users are using
| the same IP, like residential houses with families, etc. -- that
| way it is possible to determine the unique amount of devices
| inside a house.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| Just ask: why does an advertising company make a browser?
| Keloo wrote:
| so that you don't have to pay royalties to other browsers for
| being the main search engine. I mean you have to pay one less.
| And if you have the most used browser, you save a lot.
| josefx wrote:
| In the good old days everyone and their grandmother just
| sideloaded their malware toolbars with freeware crap like
| picasa or maps or outright bundled their bloatware with the
| system like Google still does for Android.
| d1zzy wrote:
| Quite a lot of reasons. I assume you asked that because you're
| thinking it's used to gather information on its users. That
| could be one of the many reasons. At least initially it was
| because Mozilla/Firefox didn't want to adopt a multi-process
| architecture.
|
| In terms of strategic reasons, as a company that depends on
| people browsing on their websites other reasons are obvious:
| avoid lock in that could be pushed by third-party browser
| makers/competitors (say IE becomes the most popular and it
| implements proprietary extensions that work only on their
| websites[1]), ensure there exists a fast secure browser so that
| people can keep browsing even if everyone else stops making
| good browsers out there.
|
| [1] Now before you go ahead and point out how Google proposes
| HTML/HTTP features that get implemented in their browsers and
| on the server side, all such features have public specification
| and source code, so anyone else could implement them too. This
| is very different from the IE days of yore, where MS was
| extending IE through ActiveX. ActiveX was developed in house
| and they were releasing binary plugins/SDKs to develop ActiveX
| plugins, effectively maintaining full control over it (one
| would have to develop ActiveX compatible technology from
| scratch if they wanted it open source, with Chrome all they
| have to do is fork the source code).
| eternalban wrote:
| Google is a total-spectrum surveillance company. Advertising is
| a product they offer to their clients. (No, that is not you and
| me.)
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| A better question is to ask why people continue to let
| themselves be confounded by a browser made by an advertising
| company.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Not sure why this is being downvoted. It hits the nail on the
| head. If you are concerned about privacy around advertising
| then using a browser from the biggest online ad company is
| short sighted.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| When Chrome was first developed, browsers and the web were
| relatively slow, and slowing down due to the popularization of
| Javascript and heavier websites.
|
| Google's worked on a number of technologies to make the web
| faster; Chrome (and V8), their own DNS, image and video
| compression technologies, AMP, HTTP/2 (SPDY), HTTP/3 (QUIC),
| webserver plugins (mod_pagespeed), benchmark tooling
| (Lighthouse), and extensive guides on website speed
| optimization.
|
| The reason is simple; faster internet = faster browsing = more
| page views = more ad impressions + more behaviour tracking data
| points. And it's a win-win for Google as well, because it earns
| them goodwill (well, except for AMP); especially at the time
| Chrome was a breath of fresh air compared to Firefox, and it's
| taken a lot of time and effort just to keep up, with mixed
| results (to the point where a number of manufacturers have just
| given up and adopted Chrome's renderer).
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| So, an extremely unique identifier for tracking purposes, that
| effectively no one knows exists, and no one knows can be changed
| at all?
|
| With an obscure white paper that allows Google to claim they
| comply with the law because "they totally offer a way to change
| that and they even published that information to the web for
| anyone to find"?
|
| Gotcha.
| vkou wrote:
| Your comment is factually incorrect.
|
| 13 bits of entropy is not an extremely unique identifier.
|
| The first three letters of your first name have more bits of
| entropy than that. It would be quite a trick to uniquely
| identify you by the first three letters of your first name.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| I fear the factual incorrectness isn't mine: the random
| string used is 13 bits of entropy _only if usage statics is
| disabled_ , which isn't the case by default. By default, it
| uses an unspecified entropy (and you can bet real dollars
| that it'll be more then 13 bits worth).
| x0x0 wrote:
| Are you talking about the same thing? Because the identifier
| above is claimed to have 13b of entropy. Is there another high
| entropy identifier?
| rvnx wrote:
| 13b, if usage statistics are disabled (not the default).
| Otherwise, unspecified amount of entropy.
| x0x0 wrote:
| thanks. and ugh.
| rvnx wrote:
| Just referred as High Entropy: https://cs.chromium.org/ch
| romium/src/components/metrics/entr...
| clarry wrote:
| 13b plus IP is already huge, but browsers leak so much more
| than that.
| rvnx wrote:
| By default it's much more than 13b. Seems to be 13b only if
| you disable analytics/crash reports.
| reddit_clone wrote:
| Reminds me of this.
|
| "There's no point acting all surprised about it. All the
| planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in
| your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of
| your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any
| formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss
| about it now"
| Lio wrote:
| Beware of the leopard!
| [deleted]
| winternett wrote:
| Don't be evil...
|
| Until we are deployed enough that users don't have a choice...
|
| Now that Google has cornered the market for Internet browsing,
| they're using that foothold to change how it works to suit
| their dominance. This is why they are not concerned about per-
| site tracking that Google Analytics does, as long as THEY as a
| company have direct browser-based tracking, they no longer need
| to provide tracking services to other private companies to know
| what is trending everywhere. This is also probably why they're
| trying to kill ad blockers and certain browser privacy
| extensions.... But they won't really matter to Google if
| everything is done at the browser level to begin with from now
| on. :/
|
| If they make moves to scale back [free] Google Analytics, which
| they probably will at some point, it will only highlight this
| ideal... They may turn to selling their privately collected
| metrics and qualitative studies to companies after Google
| Analytics is rendered useless, and then that's unadulterated
| monopolistic profit for them and shareholders...
|
| Diabolical.
| tigroferoce wrote:
| True. But luckily you actually have a choice. Many opt for
| DuckDuckGo on Firefox, for instance.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| You are right, but they also know most people won't switch.
| They have an entire generation of folks that don't even
| think about privacy.
| K0SM0S wrote:
| There's also the subset of all of us who must use Chrome
| because <solution X> needed for work requires said
| browser. Google's dominance through Chrome extends to the
| whole ecosystem. Same thing with Apple inside their own
| (which is nowhere near a monopoly at 10-15% market share
| worldwide, thus totally fair game by comparison).
| Ygg2 wrote:
| On the other hand, people hate ads, so going to Firefox
| might actually be better option for new users.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| They might and I used to be one of them, but now I use
| Google on Firefox isntead, because DuckDuckGo no longer
| yields useful results. The number of times I don't go "oh
| ffs, fine, !g" has been in steady decline over the last
| year, and at this point I've given up.
| klipt wrote:
| You can probably be identified on Firefox too:
| https://amiunique.org
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't be
| evil"? It's not been applicable for half a decade now, and
| even in 2015 when it was officially removed from the last
| company documents, it was already a dead phrase.
|
| Google had already cornered the market back in 2012, when it
| surpassed every other browser, with an absolute majority
| dominance (>50% market share) achieved way back in 2015.
|
| Google has been in control for a _long_ time now.
| gowld wrote:
| Please don't post blatantly false statements that are
| trivial to refute.
|
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| Because of the deep irony? If you have a moto that binary
| and later decide to remove it, what is the world to infer?
| darkarmani wrote:
| > Why do people still dredge up Google's historical "don't
| be evil"?
|
| Historical? It's not like it was 50 years ago.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac
| users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and
| to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with
| apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/
|
| These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to
| require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.
| throwawa66 wrote:
| Safari as well. Almost anything but Chrome. Both Safari and FF
| are good. Im only using these 2 myself
| Kiro wrote:
| Safari is horrible for HTML5 games. Dealing with all sorts of
| issues to the point where I've more or less given up and just
| tell my Safari players to use something else.
| ainar-g wrote:
| Some of my front-end colleagues like to tell me that Safari
| is the new IE 6. Not in terms of the market domination
| (that's Crhome for you), but in terms of dragging the front-
| end back with unimplemented features, quirks, and bugs. The
| amount of hacks they have to add _just_ to support Safari is
| uncomfortable.
| yohannparis wrote:
| No, they are confusing developing for Chomium first and not
| testing on all browsers.
|
| Safari is behind in terms of W3C features. But implementing
| unsupported features does not mean you are hacking to
| support Safari. They should look into the progressive
| enhancement principle and CSS @support feature.
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm strictly talking about the canvas and audio
| implementations, forcing me to use all kind of different
| hacks just to get a reasonable FPS in Safari. Audio I've
| given up on long time ago and don't get me started on
| Mobile Safari.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and
| sucks.
|
| My biggest gripe is I can't update it without updating the
| entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you
| ever need to unregister a service worker.
| pb7 wrote:
| For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-
| issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter:
| speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the
| Apple ecosystem.
| chatmasta wrote:
| Agreed. Although Firefox is probably better for general
| purpose browsing if you are a non-dev power user,
| especially one who cares about ad blocking.
|
| The integration is a good point.
| arh68 wrote:
| Have you tried Safari Developer Previews? It's been a while
| since I've used them myself.
|
| [0] https://developer.apple.com/safari/download/
| pb7 wrote:
| +1. Safari is great. Super fast, great on battery life, and has
| most, if not all, of the extensions you would look for.
| izacus wrote:
| Safari has the same kind of AdBlock limits that Chrome team
| wants to implement. Also it's kinda behind the curve on iOS
| when it comes to features.
|
| Not to mention the fact that iOS users are forbidden from using
| any competitive browser, including Firefox.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by forbidden? Chrome and Firefox
| (and other browsers too) are readily available through the
| iOS app store.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| Those iOS browsers you see in the app store are just
| wrappers for the same Safari browser engine.
|
| They all use Safari to display the page, they just wrap the
| Safari browser engine with their own toolbars and other
| features.
| sneak wrote:
| WebKit is not Safari.
| sneak wrote:
| And they don't open when you click links on the device,
| only MobileSafari does.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
|
| Firefox and DuckDuckGo, folks. Today's Google is no more
| benevolent than yesterday's Microsoft.
| dragonsh wrote:
| This is another instance that google doesn't care about users
| privacy and track without their consent by using chrome
| installation Id. This probably might be against GDPR, so Chrome
| installed base in Europe multiplied by per day fine, hopefully
| runs into a years revenue of google.
|
| Another lesson don't trust for profit companies with privacy
| protection especially advertising technology company like google
| with motto like don't be evil or organize world's information
| designed to mislead.
| mateo1 wrote:
| Honestly, it's 2020, even if your technical understanding is so
| low that you have no idea what a "browser" is, you _know_ that
| Google will do anything in it 's impressive power to track down
| everything you do with legal or illegal means. Thanks to
| Snowden, this is no longer a conspiracy theory. It's a fact.
|
| Google should be fined for this but they probably won't be.
| Havoc wrote:
| I've taken to using FF for browsing With noscript etc and chrome
| for when I need something to work well and can accept some
| tracking
| [deleted]
| woho wrote:
| I use (sometimes/often) mitmproxy and remove or change suspect
| headers. It is also nice to remove all the fb, google and more
| crap from the html. And much more. It is a lot of work not to
| break a website. I don't know whether I am more trackable or not
| - this is the 'only browser' without x-client-data header.
| cft wrote:
| Just in time for their announcement that they plan to abolish
| third party cookies by 2021. Talk about monopoly.
| Ohn0 wrote:
| What a mess
| jkepler wrote:
| Am I correct to understand that this backdoor tracking of
| individual users applies to the standard Chromium browser (i.e.,
| the non Eloston ungoogled-chromium) as well as the Chrome
| browser?
|
| If so, its incredibly consistent with Google's surveillance
| capitalist business model.[1] Wow. I'm thankful for Firefox.
|
| --
|
| [1] "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", by Shoshana Zuboff,
| reviewed here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-
| of-surveil...
| fnord77 wrote:
| Can browser plugins control what headers go out? If so then a
| simple browser plugin could put a stop to this.
| 8ivek wrote:
| Got this from google white paper: "run Chrome with the command
| line flag "--reset-variation-state" to reset the value."
|
| I tried this and my "x-client-data" header changed.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Is this at the "Chrome" level, or baked in at the "Chromuim"
| level? And therefore also an issue for Brave, Opera, Vivaldi,
| new-Edge, and anything else jumping on the browser engine
| monoculture?
| [deleted]
| robin_reala wrote:
| Seems to be Chromium judging by some issue comments:
| https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/ccd149af47315e4c6f...
| pier25 wrote:
| I don't see it in Brave
| 98codes wrote:
| I just checked Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge, and it isn't
| sending the headers.
| jakoblorz wrote:
| Don't forget Electron! Like Atom, VS Code etc
| nornagon wrote:
| Electron maintainer here. Electron doesn't send this header.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Thank you for that.
| aloknnikhil wrote:
| This is specifically on Chrome, it seems.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| FWIW, running Chromium 79.0.3945.130 through mitmproxy (on
| Debian sid), I don't see this in the headers when visiting
| gmail.com or youtube.com.
| gunn wrote:
| To give them some credit: it's not sent when in incognito mode.
| macinjosh wrote:
| How thoughtful of them!
| drderidder wrote:
| New motto: "Don't get caught being evil".
| nurettin wrote:
| Please do not destroy vital testing apparatus.
| BLO716 wrote:
| With that said, one can simply filter out these analytics with a
| c:\Windows\Systems32\Drivers\etc\hosts -> pointing to 0.0.0.0 or
| PiHole solution (https://pi-hole.net/), yes?
|
| I mean, this is probably not the holistic solution, but this is
| why we have a firewall, vpn, antivirus, filters to just keep DNS
| in check, yes?
| GrayShade wrote:
| So are you suggesting people should DNS block google.com and
| gmail.com?
| janvidar wrote:
| Yes, you can if you are willing to block google.com,
| android.com and youtube.com.
|
| doubleclick.com might not be terrible for most, though.
|
| Interesting enough, it does not add headers when accessing a
| country specific google domain in the EU - such as google.de or
| google.fr. Is that GDPR kicking in - with a nod the the
| brexiteers given that google.co.uk gets these headers... ?
| ins0 wrote:
| Not sure, but my chrome will send the additional `x-client-
| data` header even when i'm on eg. `google.de`
| krick wrote:
| Lol, is it news? I mean, it worked like this as long as I can
| remember, privacy conscious users were complaining for years,
| helplessly watching as Chrome market share grows, but nobody
| really cared, so... And now, suddenly, people act like this is
| big news and they are outraged by such blatant and unexpected(!)
| intrusion into their privacy.
|
| Wow. I don't even know how I feel about it anymore.
| jgon wrote:
| U S E F I R E F O X
|
| That is all.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it
| another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and
| battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing
| features like tracking protection enabled by default and
| extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent
| tracking even further.
| [deleted]
| dheera wrote:
| The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox
| (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic
| and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their
| widget library?
|
| https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu
| pier25 wrote:
| I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's
| just not as polished as other options.
|
| Edit:
|
| I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum
| too many times on HN.
|
| See these other comments of mine:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567
| sgsvnk wrote:
| Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to
| like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for
| me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience,
| I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the
| same on FF.
| ritchiea wrote:
| Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank
| the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Long ago.
| dropdrive wrote:
| As a firefox user, they are spending more money on PR and less
| on quality. Their UI has gotten progressively worse. And I'm
| not taking about xul deprecation. Please Mozilla come back to
| your strengths. SIMPLE: Provide a great alternative.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked
| if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-
| identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale.
|
| ... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with
| one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative
| to alternatives.
| wayneftw wrote:
| The days of Firefox are over. Every site I work on has less
| than a few percent of Firefox users. We don't even test with
| Firefox, because fuck 'em - I never liked the way Mozilla did
| anything anyway and their painfully obviously false, preachy
| holier-than-thou brainwashing campaign that they're constantly
| running in order to keep getting daddy Google's money has
| always been annoying.
|
| I'd rather use MS Edge. It's actually even faster and lighter
| than Chrome. So, I've already started using it on my Windows
| and Mac machines and I'm just waiting for it to be released on
| Linux so I can use it on my main workstations.
|
| I bet Edge exceeds Firefox market share any day now. Maybe
| Google should start giving Microsoft money too! But even if
| Edge market share doesn't grow I'll be quite comfortable since
| it's the WebKit/Chrome/Blink lineage and compatibility that I
| care about.
|
| Fuck that piece of shit Gecko. I'm tired of hearing about it
| from the extremely tiny but loud minority of Mozillatroids. Now
| do your duty and fade my comment in your petty attempt at
| censoring my words. You can't change the truth.
| f1refly wrote:
| I think Mozilla is a horrible leadership spending money on
| all the wrong things and I'd rather lose my job than donate
| to them. But, in all fairness, they're still way better than
| both Microsoft and Google. At least Mozilla isn't actively
| trying to make my life worse every single day.
| eternalny1 wrote:
| > We don't even test with Firefox, because fuck 'em
|
| You are the types of people who are slowly destroying the
| internet, nice work.
| wayneftw wrote:
| Incorrect. Mozilla is responsible for their shitty market
| share, not me.
|
| I don't test with the Opera, QQ, Yandex or Sogou Explorer
| browsers either - just to name a few other tiny niche
| browsers... Do you??
| Shaaaaaaare wrote:
| Wow, you seem very upset. I suggest going for a walk. Take a
| couple deep breaths. Calm down. It's just a browser.
|
| By the way, what sites do you work on? I'd like to make sure
| to avoid them.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond to a bad comment with another one.
| That just makes the thread worse. Doubly so for personal
| attacks, which are a bannable offence on HN.
| wayneftw wrote:
| What was so bad about my comment? Saying that I don't
| support Mozilla/Firefox or just not being anti-Google
| enough?
|
| Also, the guy that you're responding to simply said that
| I seemed angry. How is that a personal attack? Somebody
| else responded that I'm ruining the Internet and somehow
| that's not flagged?
| wayneftw wrote:
| I enjoy ranting against Mozvillains though :) They're not a
| browser, they're just very annoying preachy people who need
| to be refuted and since I have no problem doing it, I feel
| that I am doing God's work.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance
| advantage of Chrome without the tracking.
| Diederich wrote:
| Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that
| will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for
| example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list.
| Thanks.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I use Chromium; you can still Netflix. It does, however,
| require installation of "WideVine", which is an opaque,
| closed, binary blob. (But you're getting that with Chrome,
| too, I believe.)
|
| You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the
| same mechanism.
| gruez wrote:
| >You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the
| same mechanism.
|
| It's somewhat better on Firefox because they run the
| binary blobs in a sandbox.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is
| really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading
| stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's
| stuff from it.
| ColanR wrote:
| This is my question as well. Additionally, I've wondered if
| there are non-explicit behaviors of the browser that are
| used for fingerprinting.
| prophesi wrote:
| https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
| chromium/blob/master/do...
|
| "those binaries that cannot be removed do not contain
| machine code."
|
| I'm not sure what's meant by them not containing machine
| code, but it does seem like some of the binary blobs are
| retained that can't be built from source or substituted.
|
| Honestly, I'd just switch to Firefox to be safe, though
| Ungoogled-Chromium does automatically set a lot of sane
| pro-privacy defaults that you'd have to manually change
| in Chromium/Firefox.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Is there actually still a performance advantage these days?
| Would be curious to see some benchmarks.
|
| I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but
| that's obviously not a fair comparison.
| autonomuzw wrote:
| Yes, there is definitely a performance advantage especially
| on mobile. see for example some benchmarks for brave
| browser, and also a couple of recent tests for desktop
| browsers.
|
| [0] https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-
| methodology...
|
| [1] https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/
|
| [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-
| battle-...
|
| [3] https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Brow
| sers_...
| cdubzzz wrote:
| The conclusion of the linuxreviews article doesn't really
| make a strong case for any major difference between the
| browsers --
|
| _It is hard to declare an absolute winner. Brave and
| Chromium, seem to be the overall winners but Pale Moon,
| SeaMonkey and Firefox are not bad choices if you never
| visit pages with fancy WebGL or WebAssembly ever.
| Chromium may be the best choice if you watch a lot of
| video on a laptop if your distributions Chromium package
| has the hardware video acceleration patches._
|
| Lots of "ifs" in there for all conclusions.
| nkcmr wrote:
| As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to
| Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU
| and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they
| aren't!)
|
| I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few
| times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)
| mooreed wrote:
| It seems like a reasonable time to bring up the reformer project
| 'ungoogled-chrome' [1]. I have used it and new versions of
| Firefox for over 3 years and have seldom had to jump back to
| `Googlified Chrome.` Do know that installing via `brew` [2] means
| no - standard browser auto-update. Which in this case, makes
| sense to me.
|
| Aside: It seems to me the realist punk / anti-the-man software
| one can work on is a user respecting browser. I don't work on
| these, but I am very grateful for those out there who do.
|
| -------
|
| - [1]: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium#downloads
|
| - [2]: Brew install via: `brew cask fetch eloston-chromium &&
| brew cask install eloston-chromium`
|
| Enjoy old school browsing with new school development benefits.
| bprasanna wrote:
| Obviously! What else to expect from Google! In the user
| personalization...
| kick wrote:
| "Backdoor" this, "backdoor" that. Proprietary software company
| releases proprietary software that allows them to spy on you, how
| shocking.
|
| In which they sacrifice privacy to allow their ad network to
| target you better.
| https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/building-a-more-priv...
|
| In which they explicitly track you more under the guise of
| protecting your privacy. https://github.com/jkarlin/floc
|
| For every single claim Google makes about being pro-privacy,
| their definition of privacy ("data shared between you and Google
| and no one more") is implicit.
|
| It's a surveillance company that makes proprietary software to
| sell you ads. As soon as you get that into your head, you'll be
| much less shocked.
|
| "We personally get to track you" is not a unique stance, and it's
| far from a backdoor. It's just another vile move from a
| surveillance company that's pretty explicit that that's their
| goal.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Sure, the general pattern of behaviour is familiar, but I
| didn't know about this specific manifestation, and now I do.
| What's the use of being so dismissive about specific
| information on which one can act?
| kick wrote:
| It's not a backdoor! Calling random anti-consumer behavior a
| backdoor is the privacy-equivalent of Godwin's law.
| sub7 wrote:
| The sad part is that most times Google violates your privacy,
| it's just some PM who thinks having some data will be super
| important and in most cases they're wrong.
|
| Caveat here is that in 99.99999% cases it's also the case that
| nobody ever looks at your individual file but the fact that they
| could is bad enough.
| masterfooo wrote:
| How about Electron apps?
| scoutt wrote:
| PII concept is not the same for everyone/everywhere. For GDPR we
| have:
|
| > Article 4(1): 'personal data' means any information relating to
| an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an
| identifiable natural person is one who can be identified,
| __directly or indirectly __, in particular by reference to an
| identifier such as a name, an identification number, location
| data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to
| the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural
| or social identity of that natural person;
|
| If this chrome browser ID is matched against a (for example)
| google account, then they can track every single person. And that
| is just a couple of IDs, let alone all the quantity of data they
| have.
|
| It's against GDPR to not be clear about this kind of ID. If my
| browser has an unique ID that is transmitted, then this ID can be
| coupled with other information to retrieve my identity and
| behavior, so it should be informed (in the EU).
|
| EDIT: TD;LR, hiding behind "there is no PII in that ID" is not
| enough.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad in
| its definition of PII; it denies even innocuous feature-mode-
| distinguishing headers intended to allow for bug-identification
| of massively-distributed software installs.
|
| If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and "better
| software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better software
| quality."
| scoutt wrote:
| Me too. Then a breach happens and someone with a straight
| face tells you: "we take your privacy very seriously", asking
| apologies, because the breach used some of your data to push
| some political campaign or to bother you with spam/extortions
| because that night you were watching some porn.
|
| Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete software
| as is, and start releasing software that works. Otherwise
| upper levels have an excuse to do all this "experience"
| telemetry, and we all are smart enough to see the
| consequences of a data breach.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Programmers should stop pushing buggy or incomplete
| software as is, and start releasing software that works
|
| If you demand a perfection-of-function guarantee from
| something as complicated as a web browser, you'll never get
| a web browser with more features than the ones released in
| the '90s (and I'm not even sure we'd be that far along by
| now).
|
| If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and
| "the software ever having the features I want to use" I'm
| also going to lean towards "the software ever having the
| features I want to use." And we know this is true for users
| in general because of the number of users who had Flash
| installed back-in-the-day in spite of the fact that it
| allowed a total bypass of the browser security model,
| because it had features that the browser lacked otherwise.
| scoutt wrote:
| Instead of giving my privacy away, I prefer software like
| anything that you have installed from a CD-ROM back in
| the 90's and didn't needed a weekly update. Games,
| 3D-Studio, Autocad (to name a few) were more complex than
| a web-browser ( _a today 's web-browser_) and didn't
| needed a weekly update or the hunger for _user-requested_
| features, let alone dialing home _because_. The world
| worked relatively fine without the _up-to-date_ wankery
| we see today.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I remember them.
|
| They were also buggy and could crash their resident OSs
| all the way to a stuck state, and if they did, the
| solution was "Try not to trigger that bug again."
|
| Software quality has significantly improved in the era of
| easy patch access and auto-patching.
| scarejunba wrote:
| Holy Jesus. Those things were chock full of security
| holes. If you used a web browser that arrived on a CD ROM
| you'd be advertising massive pwnability.
|
| In fact, you could easily simulate this by using last
| year's Firefox.
| labawi wrote:
| Firefox, chrome, linux ... all are full of unnecessary
| complexity. The point being - we need daily patches to
| keep it from falling apart.
|
| I have links (or lynx) on an old SuSE, maybe even a
| Mandriva CD. Would they be massively pwnable?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Hard to say, but not necessarily a great example;
| exploits on software are a function both of attack
| surface / complexity and installed userbase (i.e. nobody
| bothers to see if lynx is pwnable because a zero-day
| against that browser will be worth, what, twenty bucks to
| gain access to the five people who use it?).
| labawi wrote:
| Perhaps. Perhaps not. As a thought experiment:
|
| How long would it be safe to go without browser updates
| with a browser of complexity/capabilies of links, if 50%
| of people used it?
|
| With many people combing through it, would it become
| effectively unexploitable?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > you'll never get a web browser with more features than
| the ones released in the '90s
|
| I would actively prefer a web browser that lacks the
| features added since the '90s.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| That's understandable, but it isn't what most people want
| ---developers or users alike.
|
| Browsers aren't just thin-clients to support HTTP
| protocol and HTML rendering. They've grown to adopt a new
| distributed computing paradigm, not unlike UNIX and its
| descendants grew to support a new multi-user-cum-multi-
| process paradigm. The things web development offers---
| location agnosticism, platform agnosticism, combined
| multimedia interaction, a workable security model for
| multi-source aggregate-component content---are eating
| software development, and the browser is becoming the OS
| of the modern era. We know users want this because users
| were willing to use Flash (even though Flash broke out of
| the security model of the old browser).
|
| There'll always be a place for small text-based pages
| much as modern computing will always have a place for
| command-line tools, but the genie is out of the bottle
| and it won't be put back in.
| flukus wrote:
| The mozilla suite in 1998 included a browser, an
| email/newsgroup client, an IRC client, an address book
| and an html editor.
|
| Modern browsers for all their bloat actually have less
| features.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > This is why I consider the GDPR to be unrealistically broad
| in its definition of PII
|
| And I consider it far too narrow.
|
| > If I'm given a forced choice between "more privacy" and
| "better software quality" I'm going to lean towards "better
| software quality."
|
| Fair enough. I would go for "more privacy", personally. There
| is no technical reason why both of our preferences couldn't
| be honored.
| Mirioron wrote:
| Who's going to raise this issue though? And what if they put
| this in the browser's T&C?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I thought they needed explicit consent. T&Cs ain't that.
| scoutt wrote:
| > Who's going to raise this issue though?
|
| I'm sure there is someone out there who takes these kind of
| things seriously. Not me. I use firefox for that matter.
|
| > And what if they put this in the browser's T&C?
|
| Then the rest of GDPR applies: a clear message about the
| browser sending this info has to be shown, explaining why,
| with who they'll share it, the time they will keep this info,
| plus no auto opt-ins, the possibility of asking Google (or
| whatever) all the info relative to this ID and the option to
| cancel all the data, etc.
| bamboozled wrote:
| You should also donate to Mozilla because it's an insanely good
| piece o software for the price!
| kick wrote:
| Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla is a
| mistake. They waste a lot of it, their executive compensation
| rates are way too high (especially given that MoCo just laid
| off employees), and Mozilla still hasn't kept up with promises
| they gave years ago (that Pocket is still proprietary being a
| notable and depressing example).
|
| Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a
| lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
| alharith wrote:
| Better yet, donate to Brave who doesn't share the same
| conflict of interest as Mozilla does with Google, as Google
| is Mozilla's #1 source of income. Best of all you get a
| browser just as fast, if not faster than Chrome because it's
| Chrome without all the junk.
| asymptotically2 wrote:
| But I don't want to participate in dodgy cryptocurrency
| scams.
| kick wrote:
| While Brave not taking the "Search deal with Google" route
| is commendable, you shouldn't donate to it, either.
|
| Venture-funded for-profit startups don't need donations,
| and again, donations will be more heavily felt by the
| people maintaining the software you use every day that _isn
| 't_ created by behemoths.
| driverdan wrote:
| > their executive compensation rates are way too high
|
| Just because they're a non-profit doesn't mean execs should
| be paid far below market rates.
| [deleted]
| Spooks wrote:
| I agree, I never understood that argument. We have a fairly
| large and wonderful kids hospital that looks for donations
| and some of my friends said they wouldn't donate because
| their CEO makes 500k and he should donate his money
| instead.
|
| I had to explain you want to recruit great talent, and that
| 500k is less than he could make some place else.
| coldpie wrote:
| Right. What people actually want is some form of income
| equality, which would bring executive level salaries in
| line with their actual worth. You're not going to achieve
| that by starving non-profits of executive talent in the
| meantime.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I bet a non-profit like that could find many qualified
| executives for much less money. There's an amazing amount
| of talent in the middle of most org structures that never
| make much past $100k/yr. I'm certain that a handful of
| these people would excel if given a chance and promoted
| to the top.
|
| This doesn't happen because most boards are a good ol'
| boys club where networking matters, not because of a lack
| of available talent at a price point.
| kick wrote:
| I respect you a lot, but how is what Mozilla's doing in
| regards to that at all respectable? It's not "starving
| them of talent" to not increase Baker's pay as Mozilla is
| laying off employees? She's been there since (almost) the
| beginning, and the performance of Mozilla has gotten
| worse over the last decade.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'm responding to the general complaint that executives
| at large non-profits are paid too much, and therefore the
| non-profit is not using money wisely, and so should not
| be donated to. There's a certain pool of people who are
| qualified to run companies of these sizes, and in order
| to attract that talent, you need to pay a competitive
| wage. The non-profit-ness of the company can be a factor,
| but like it or not, money is a major motivator, and will
| affect what kind of talent you can recruit. The problem
| isn't that a given non-profit executive is overpaid, the
| problem is that all executives are overpaid.
|
| This isn't a Mozilla problem, it's an income equality
| problem. Punishing Mozilla by restricting the size of the
| pool from which they can recruit won't solve the problem.
|
| I can't speak to the current Mozilla executives'
| performance. I'm not qualified to judge that. I will say
| that browser market share seems a poor metric, especially
| given the reach and pocketbook of Mozilla's primary
| competitor.
| kick wrote:
| In general I definitely agree with you, certainly.
| kick wrote:
| The Mozilla Corporation laid off like 70 employees the
| other day, and Baker's compensation has been inversely
| tied to the performance of Mozilla.
| ddalex wrote:
| I doubt it has been tied, as in a contractual goal.
|
| The word you're looking for is "correlated".
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You're assuming the $500k guy is great talent.
|
| Our local YMCA pays the Executive Director $400k/year.
| The child care workers make $11.50/hr + free membership.
| (ie. minimum wage) The Y is great, but I'm not donating
| anything to them.
| sstangl wrote:
| Mozilla engineers typically accept a salary that is below
| market rates.
|
| Recently they have been increasing salaries to be more
| competitive.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| Also, Mozilla made donations to political entities in the
| past
| kevlarr wrote:
| Which ones? Eich donated like $1000 to a political group
| that (I would hope) most of us disagree with, but Eich !=
| Mozilla, and he was removed because of the backlash
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| RiseUp, from their about-us page:
| https://riseup.net/pl/about-us Riseup's Purpose.
|
| The Riseup Collective is an autonomous body based in
| Seattle with collective members world wide. Our purpose
| is to aid in the creation of a free society, a world with
| freedom from want and freedom of expression, a world
| without oppression or hierarchy, where power is shared
| equally. We do this by providing communication and
| computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against
| capitalism and other forms of oppression
|
| >> We do this by providing communication and computer
| resources to allies engaged in struggles against
| capitalism and other forms of oppression
| kevlarr wrote:
| That's... interesting.
|
| Does being a "trending project in-network" mean they
| received money from Mozilla?
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| 100k to improve security in an email client
| https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/10/03/mozilla-awards-
| half...
| arexxbifs wrote:
| I'm a Firefox user but I'm doubtful about donating to the
| Mozilla Foundation.
|
| They at least endorse some really far-out organizations
| on the Mozilla Foundation homepage[0], such as Riseup
| Networks.
|
| [0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?utm_source=www.moz
| illa.or...
| kick wrote:
| Riseup is absolutely with Mozilla's mission statement,
| though, and all things considered pretty good:
|
| "Riseup provides online communication tools for people
| and groups working on liberatory social change. We are a
| project to create democratic alternatives and practice
| self-determination by controlling our own secure means of
| communications."
| arexxbifs wrote:
| They have an actual anarcho-communist star in their logo
| and their website features revolutionary imagery and
| policy statements like "all labor is valued equally" and
| "the means of production should be placed in the hands of
| the people".[0]
|
| I'm sure it's a fine organization if you subscribe to
| their views. I do not, and I'd rather not fund them,
| directly or indirectly.
|
| [0] https://riseup.net/en/about-us/politics
| jupp0r wrote:
| I did not know about riseup (or Mozilla funding them) and
| parent provided insightful information about them. Given
| the funding structure of Mozilla, I could see this being
| a red flag for donations for some
| organizations/individuals.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| I don't share their views, but I'm thrilled that their
| project exists and very happy with Mozilla donating to
| help improve their email client security, since it's a
| major player in the pro-privacy ecosystem. If I had to
| agree with the philosophical beliefs of everyone I gave
| money to, I'd starve.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| If I donate to a FOSS project, I want the money to go
| into the development of their software and not turn into
| some proxy funding of other projects and organizations -
| especially not ones I disagree with. In fact, I think
| that's a pretty reasonable expectation.
| kevlarr wrote:
| Donations go to Mozilla "the non-profit organization" rather
| than Mozilla "the corporation".
|
| Mozilla (the corporation) has the typical/bad corporate
| structures and ridiculous executive compensations. Mozilla
| (the corporation) had the layoffs. Mozilla (the corporation)
| bought Pocket with money that comes from deals with search
| engines.
|
| That being said, though...
|
| > Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go
| a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!
|
| ... is still a great point.
|
| (Updated this because "Mozilla, Org" and "Mozilla, Inc" were
| inaccurate)
| marcinzm wrote:
| That still doesn't answer why should I donate to Mozilla
| the non-profit? What do they do with my donations?
| According to another post they don't use them to fund
| Firefox or presumably any project run by the corporation
| side.
|
| As I see it if I wanted my donations to go to political or
| other activism there's more direct and better organizations
| to donate to with less middle management involved.
| coldpie wrote:
| > According to another post
|
| Respectfully, HN comments aren't a great primary source.
| Here are some places to start your research:
|
| https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq/
|
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
| fdn-201...
|
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/
| marcinzm wrote:
| According to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ the
| donations go to:
|
| * supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key
| internet issues [looking at them they all focus on
| advocacy and social issues rather than working on things
| like Firefox]
|
| * connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest
|
| * publishing critical research in the Internet Health
| Report
|
| * rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect
| the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life.
|
| Or in other words, exactly as the HN comment said, none
| of it goes to corporation projects but rather privacy and
| social advocacy.
|
| edit: I'm guessing the Foundation actually takes money
| from the Corporation to fund itself since the financial
| statement seems to cover both, anyone know if that's the
| case?
| [deleted]
| kick wrote:
| The Mozilla Foundation controls and owns the Mozilla
| Corporation, and the executive structure looks more or less
| the same. Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with
| performance, and she runs both.
| frandroid wrote:
| > Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with
| performance
|
| You've mentioned this twice in the thread now. "Inversely
| tied" is quite a strong and unusual claim for
| compensation. Care to prove it?
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Their salary has gone up, and firefox market share has
| gone down, its neither is a controversial statement
| kick wrote:
| Happily!
|
| 2.5 million, 2018:
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018
| -fo...
|
| 2.3 million, 2017:
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017
| -fo...
|
| 1 million, 2016:
|
| https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla
| _Fo...
|
| <1 million, 2015:
|
| https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-
| US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found...
|
| Firefox market share has been in decline (30% to <5%) for
| over a decade now:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/StatC
| oun...
| frandroid wrote:
| That's not "tied", which would imply a contractual
| relationship...
| oarsinsync wrote:
| inverse correlation between executive pay and browser
| market share, if semantics are necessary.
| eganist wrote:
| 'Tied' in relational contexts is generally used to
| describe a correlation, relation, connection, or a
| consistency between events in the English language. It
| can--but does not have to--describe a contractual
| relationship, and it does not generally describe one
| except in very specific and obvious cases, e.g. what one
| _would_ expect to be true: "bonuses are tied to
| performance milestones."
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tied?s=ts
|
| https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/correlated?s=t
|
| But in this context:
|
| > Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with
| performance
|
| No reasonable person would assume that a person's comp
| structure from Company would be contractually bound to
| _increase_ as Company 's performance _decreases._ At
| which point, the interpretation of "tied" would swing
| towards generally accepted usage, i.e. "there's a
| potential relationship between these two things."
|
| ameister14 suggested "associated with" would've worked
| better, and that's true. But "tied" isn't technically
| wrong.
| kick wrote:
| That's malarkey. Tied is _not_ exclusively used to imply
| a "contractual relationship," and that's (if anything) a
| minority-usage of the idiom of tied to/with.
| ameister14 wrote:
| I think you probably should have used 'associated with'
| instead of 'tied to' as when discussing remuneration
| contractual ties is not a minority usage of the idiom.
| eganist wrote:
| I'm not Kick, but while you're correct that "associated
| with" would've been better for clarity, no reasonable
| person would assume that "inversely tied" describes a
| contractually mandated drop in performance for an
| increase in pay (my other comment here links to
| dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, both good references
| for this discussion). Couple that with the generally
| accepted usage of 'tied' and the usage by Kick was
| correct, if perhaps ambiguous to a narrow population.
| ameister14 wrote:
| Kick's usage is correct except within the business world
| and especially financial and executive populations,
| which, while admittedly narrow, are what we were
| discussing. When you say that an executive's pay is tied
| to the company's performance, within these communities
| it's generally understood that this is a contractual
| relationship.
|
| ex. "John's salary is tied to performance - if the
| company is valued at over 100 billion, he'll get another
| 5% stock" etc.
|
| or "bonuses are tied to performance milestones"
|
| If you are simply observing that an executives pay rises
| while performance falls, associated is a clearer term.
| poxrud wrote:
| https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/121751770391464345
| 6
| kevlarr wrote:
| Owns, yes. That is radically different from "funds",
| though.
|
| Not going to dispute anything about executive structure
| or Baker's compensation and (mis)management, but a lot of
| people here are acting like donations either go directly
| to the corporation or funnel to it through the _actual_
| recipient of the donations, but there isn 't really any
| evidence being presented.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| I think the Mozilla Foundation is starting to look a lot
| like a sinecure employer for friends of friends in the non-
| profit biz.
|
| Here are a few seemingly similar titles listed on their
| leadership page[0]: VP, Advocacy
| Director, Digital Engagement Director, Communications
| VP, Global Programs Director, Partnerships
| Director, Events and Training Interim Director,
| Leadership Programs
|
| [0]https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/leadership/
| zapdrive wrote:
| Do you care how Apple pays its executives when you shell out
| 3-4k on their laptops or 1-2k on their phones? The OP just
| said that Firefox is a great piece of software available for
| free, and they deserve to be compensated (in form of
| donation). Now, I'm totally on board with you that they waste
| money, that's not even debatable.
| coldpie wrote:
| > Firefox should definitely be used, but donating to Mozilla
| is a mistake.
|
| These seem at odds with each other. If you want Firefox to be
| used, how do you suggest its development be paid for?
| kick wrote:
| They're already getting more than enough to fund
| development with the Google deal, which they've shown no
| willingness to let up on, despite it seriously compromising
| user privacy. Donating to Mozilla at this point is just
| encouraging organizational bloat.
| coldpie wrote:
| I guess we'll have to agree to disagree (which is fine!).
| I'd rather continue donating to them to show there are
| funding sources outside of advertising, which is a
| business model I despise.
| eitland wrote:
| I thought like you.
|
| There seems to be a huge problem though: for some reason
| it seems they aren't allowed to use donated funds for
| what I thought was the main reason for Mozillas
| existence: development of the Firefox web browser.
|
| Instead donated funds seems to go to outreach etc.
|
| I have nothing against outreach but if this is the case
| I'd rather donate to such organizations directly (or
| rather increase my monthly donation to Amnesty
| International).
| coldpie wrote:
| Sure. I guess to me that feels like an implementation
| detail. I like Mozilla and I want them to exist so I give
| them money. If they stopped making Firefox, I would
| probably stop giving them money. But whether my money
| goes to Firefox development is up to them, they know
| their financial arrangements better than I do. I
| understand if you don't agree with that policy.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Donations are not used for Firefox development -- they go
| to the Foundation, not the Corporation.
| chopin wrote:
| As long as they keep Firefox available they can waste my
| money as much as they want. Why should they owe me anything?
| I am taking their browser.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236328.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| So I pay for Pocket Premium as it is wholly owned by Mozilla as
| a way of diversifying their income away from search and
| donations. I like and use pocket and get something in exchange
| for my money (which makes me more likely to keep a rolling
| payment going on). II know it's not open source, but tbh that
| doesn't hugely bother me given that Firefox itself is.
|
| Does anyone object to this indirect way of funding Firefox?
| Does it cause indirect harm by making them prioritise pocket
| over Firefox?
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't object. Personally I'd be happy to pay for Firefox
| Send, or better still for tech support in self-hosting
| Firefox Sync and Send.
| newspheasant wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time considering Pocket Premium but the
| price point is just too high. Maybe if they roll in features
| from feedly and have a really nice RSS reader.
|
| I also hate spending money on news that isn't going to
| journalists.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| Well that's why I factor it in as a donation to Firefox
| instead of paying for the features (which I agree with you
| the price point is way too high for what you get).
| 45ure wrote:
| I agree with the endorsement as a FF/TB user. However, I would
| stop at charity shaming, as there is always a different side to
| the story.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Sorry, I can't bring myself to trust them after pocket, mr.
| robot, and of course the time they fired that guy for having a
| fetish. I might use their browser product if it ever seems like
| it'll be better for my needs but I'm certainly not giving them
| money.
| dgudkov wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation which makes the browser doesn't accept
| donations.
| throwawa66 wrote:
| Do you know why that is?
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| because otherwise users would have a saying in the
| direction web browsers evolve and Google would be sad
|
| Half kidding there
| throwawa66 wrote:
| So they're accepting donations after all?
| maeln wrote:
| Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company. Depending on
| the legislation it is sometimes forbidden to take donation,
| or at least very difficult/limited for company.
|
| Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit organization (and they
| do take donation).
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| They probably can take donations just fine but there is
| no tax deduction for the donor.
| throwawa66 wrote:
| I'm going to start donating to Mozilla every month.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I assume they do get quite a bit of money from Mozilla
| Foundation, which does.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| The Foundation does not provide money to the Corporation.
| Look at the annual financial statements.
| dgudkov wrote:
| I asked the Mozilla Foundation if anything from the
| donations goes to the browser, they said no, not a single
| penny.
| [deleted]
| troseph wrote:
| No Facebook Firefox PiHole is my Live Love Laugh
| bilekas wrote:
| Jesus.. It gets better and better..
| eitland wrote:
| I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it
| is, but one thing seems clear to me:
|
| From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly
| anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
|
| I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some
| real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was
| fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing
| browsers and ridiculed by Apple ads. On a case by case basis I
| think some of this will be well deserved, some less so, but few
| outside of employees and shareholders will cry.
|
| I also _guess_ a lot of people, including certain owners and many
| in management hasn 't deciphered the writing on the wall yet, and
| in that case it whatever comes next will be surprising.
| morley wrote:
| > From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and
| hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
|
| To me, the explanation is simpler: people don't want to defend
| Google on HN because they'll get downvoted or shouted down
| because of it.
| simias wrote:
| >From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and
| hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
|
| Be careful, most of us on HN are part of a very small echo
| chamber. "What you see" is a small, non-representative portion
| of "techies". If it wasn't Firefox wouldn't be at sub-5% in
| general usage surveys and AMP would've died years ago.
| skybrian wrote:
| There is little point trying to correct misinformation about
| Google on Hacker News anymore, because people will just make up
| more tomorrow, and it will get hundreds of upvotes if it looks
| vaguely plausible.
|
| So, people who want to dislike Google will find everything they
| need to confirm their biases here.
| eitland wrote:
| IIRC it's not that long ago that trying to criticize Google
| here on HN was an exercise in futility.
|
| I won't say that the current situation is perfect but I can
| see why. In my view Google had earned the current criticism
| by hard work:
|
| - mismanagement of services people loved to the point were
| Google always running 3 different more or less incompatible
| message services, while closing services east and west has
| become a meme,
|
| - shoving other ideas down people's throats (hi identity and
| real name part of Google+)
|
| - etc
| throwawa66 wrote:
| More and more people are blocking ads. Google's business model
| is under threat. They will turn into hyenas in order to
| survive.
| eitland wrote:
| Good point. Although I feel their hyena nature has been
| visible for a while now and what we are now seeing is hungry
| hyena :-)
| throwawa66 wrote:
| Oh it will get worse. Youtube will be riddled with ads
| every 5 minutes or so. Will take the cable tv path soon.
| The good news is that their greed will eventually crash
| themselves.
|
| Hey, i dont mind a little ad here and there even though I
| give 0 fucks about any product being advertised. But the
| quantity is becoming hard to process without adblockers.
| Had they not taken the full evil mode path I'd have
| considered paying for youtube.
|
| I think im better of weaning myself off almost completely.
| Or alternatives...
| kmlx wrote:
| i think their business model is just fine: https://www.google
| .co.uk/amp/s/9to5google.com/2020/02/03/alp...
| falcolas wrote:
| There's a certain irony of linking to an amp site on
| Google's domain as part of a larger discussion about their
| business ethics.
| [deleted]
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Is this better? https://search.yahoo.co.jp/amp/s/9to5goog
| le.com/2020/02/03/a...
| falcolas wrote:
| How about just https://9to5google.com/2020/02/03/alphabet
| -q4-2019-earnings/ ?
|
| No amp required, under 1 second to display content. I
| will say that it's a bit beefy at 5mb total, though the
| AMP site loads the same amount.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You complained that it was hosted on Google specifically.
| I tested that Chrome specifically copies the canonical
| URL and not the location bar URL when I share that AMP
| page, which doesn't fit your narrative.
|
| Also, the reason the AMP page is faster is that it
| prerenders above the fold from a SERP, not due to total
| page weight.
| falcolas wrote:
| AMP is, hosting aside, a problematic project when it
| comes to Google's business ethics.
|
| And the differences in rendering speed were negligible,
| to my eyes. IIRC from the dev tools, it was about 1/10th
| of a second difference to get readable content.
| throwawa66 wrote:
| AMP is basically gobbling up other contributor's content
| and shamelessly profits at the expense of the content
| owner. As an end user I also don't like amp. Im on
| duckduckgo now
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > And the differences in rendering speed were negligible,
| to my eyes
|
| Reread my previous post. You didn't load it from a SERP.
| That's what AMP is useful for, instant loading from link
| aggregators.
|
| > AMP is, hosting aside, a problematic project when it
| comes to Google's business ethics.
|
| How, especially considering that Google's browser does
| not share AMP URLs? Is RSS a problematic project? How
| about GTFS or microdata? All three give the user a better
| experience at the expense of the publisher.
| falcolas wrote:
| > instant loading from link aggregators
|
| Per research tests which look at load times and
| abandonment, under 1 second has the same retention as
| instant. So, AMP provides no practical benefits here.
|
| > How [is AMP problematic]?
|
| A large number of electrons have been spilled on this
| topic. I recommend reading one of those. It really comes
| across as an attempt to argue in bad faith by ignoring
| these well-distributed (especially on HN) concerns; even
| worse to try and paint RSS and similar as harmful.
|
| Thank you for the conversation, good luck!
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > Per research tests which look at load times and
| abandonment, under 1 second has the same retention as
| instant.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| > A large number of electrons have been spilled on this
| topic.
|
| Most of those electrons have been spilled by people who
| do not understand what AMP does, which included you until
| you had read the GP post. Those arguments dare
| nonsensical to somebody who does understand what AMP
| does.
|
| > even worse to try and paint RSS and similar as harmful.
|
| I do not think RSS is harmful, but your stated reasons
| for claiming that AMP is harmful apply equally well to
| RSS. Your argument is therefore inconsistent with itself.
| glyxbaer wrote:
| When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of
| the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but
| nevertheless..). Working at that company has always been a
| dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of
| the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture.
|
| Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in
| terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil that
| even Microsoft has a better standing among my peers..
|
| Would love to hear some insight from ex employees on what
| changed on the inside of that company, but from the outside it
| doesn't even seem to be the same any more. Maybe they're just
| worse at hiding it..
| dleslie wrote:
| We thought Microsoft was evil because of how they treated
| their partners and competitors.
|
| We didn't consider that a greater evil would arise, and all
| it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal
| privacy.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| To my knowledge Google still hasn't done anything
| comparable to the worst offenses of Microsoft in its prime.
| These "tests" don't really help though.
| eitland wrote:
| Eh. One of the things Microsoft was actually punished for
| was bundling IE, and it didn't help that they were
| actually hostile to other browsers as proven by the fact
| that their documentation pages would work if Opera faked
| the IE headers.
|
| Googles pushing of Chrome and disregard for other
| browsers across their web properties comes dangerously
| close in my opinion.
| Kovah wrote:
| I think that Googles' push is even worse. Just think
| about how many possible devices Microsoft could target
| back in the days. 300-500 million devices maybe? Google
| not only invaded desktops in the past decades, but
| completely owns the Android platform, which comes bundled
| with Chrome and Google as the primary search engine.
| Desktops with Chrome plus the Android platform must be
| far more than 2-3 billion devices.
| dleslie wrote:
| > > and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity
| of personal privacy
|
| ;)
|
| I would have been aghast if you had told me 30 years ago
| that by now our movements, purchases, letters, phone
| calls, photos, rolodex, walkman, television, and more
| would all be connected to a central database and used to
| produce models to coerce us into changing our behaviour.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside
| the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as
| evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing
| that's changed is people's perception of the company and -
| very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was
| mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media
| industry that wanted money (see: link taxes).
|
| Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was
| actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to
| stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it.
|
| In fact what Google sees is:
|
| 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep
| server side logs that reveal every button click, every
| message you type, every email you send, every search you do.
| Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give
| great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without
| batting an eye.
|
| Hacker News readers in particular should understand this.
| It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire
| livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a
| service". There's nothing special about Google in this
| regard. The entire software industry has moved away from
| privacy in the last 20 years because ...
|
| 2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're
| provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact,
| despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast
| majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not
| just convenience, also ...
|
| 3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but
| they _hate_ getting hacked and tend to blame the service
| provider if it happens. They have very little patience for
| explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously
| not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we
| didn't use any of it ... for your own good!"
|
| 4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what
| they value or what their actual experience of using an app is
| like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad
| business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and
| data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to
| steamroller their legacy competitors.
|
| Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B
| tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy
| features since the company first began. All that's changed is
| it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think
| about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world
| is full of companies collecting and using data for the
| benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and
| Facebook that get the vitriol.
| emmelaich wrote:
| You have good points.
|
| You have to be diligent in your efforts to show that Google
| is actually doing wrong before accusing them.
|
| If you don't -- you're playing into the hands of their
| rivals, especially "old" media companies.
| Proziam wrote:
| So, Google (And others) _are_ evil, but because customers
| don 't value privacy until it's too late, it's _okay_ to
| abuse them for profit?
|
| You aren't ethical if you only act ethically when you are
| forced to.
| Yhippa wrote:
| > 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep
| server side logs that reveal every button click, every
| message you type, every email you send, every search you
| do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that
| give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever
| without batting an eye.
|
| I think people here might be shocked at the amount of
| surveillance going on in the most basic web apps. Lots of
| telemetry like you describe and other ambient data is being
| captured all as part of the terms and agreements you
| probably clicked through with the website. Google is not
| alone in this.
| throwaway41968 wrote:
| Your points are sound, but I'm puzzled by your last line:
|
| >It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
|
| The way I read it, it seems as though it's unfair that they
| get away with doing questionable stuff when "others do
| worse". Why yes, if you have nefarious intentions but no
| power to act them out, people are going to throw less
| "vitriol" at you than if you _do_ act them out.
| tartoran wrote:
| Thats right. Is google the most evil? Well, no, I really
| don't think so. But they exert a lot of evil to the world
| because of their size, power and ubiquity more than
| others. Same with Facebook and Amazon.
|
| I always keep in mind the motto Google carried when they
| stepped in: "Do no evil". I used to love Google back
| then, but they were something else.
|
| They killed good products that people loved, they abused
| their trust, they are what they are not because they keep
| on innovating but because of their current size. They
| killed a lot of small fries who in aggregate could have
| given us a lot more value.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| I think it's key that I never see any kind of comparative
| behavior. Does Amazon do this, does Facebook do this, do
| private platforms do this? How does this compare to
| tracking done by apps? Based on my experience and
| knowledge, Google falls on the ethical side of the spectrum
| among its peers.
|
| I get ads from Microsoft now (in app in some cases, other
| free services). I know this is a Mac/Linux heavy forum, but
| I would also love to see how this tracks with Windows
| telemetry (to the point made about security). I am sure
| that every Windows 10 install has higher fidelity
| fingerprinting sent with telemetry.
|
| What has changed is how easily people can be manipulated on
| social media and how they can be programmatically
| orchestrated with much less effort than before 2000-2005.
| mafuy wrote:
| Most people use default settings and have no idea about the
| software they are using at all. "everyone would hate it"
| assumes people know about these things, but they do not.
| Don't use this as a point.
|
| ad 3), you make it sound as if it was one xor the other.
| This is sometimes the case to some degree (like checking
| urls for phishing sites), but far from always.
|
| ad 4), it is not my problem as a user that you have trouble
| doing tests. If you need information for your business,
| then spend the money and effort to acquire it. Do not abuse
| your users without care. Your business case is not more
| important than people's privacy. And if others do this to
| gain an advantage over your business, don't whine, sue
| them.
|
| When I was involved in user tests we had a lot of trouble
| due to our ethical concerns, but we did not consider
| dropping these concerns.
|
| edit: I may add that I'm German. We were taught about the
| value of privacy in our history. "boring statistics about
| religion" led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of
| Jews. Disregard for privacy led to the atrocious human
| rights violations in Eastern Germany. I cannot understand
| why Americans, who explained this to us Germans after WW2,
| apparently forgot all about the _reason_ for privacy.
| pb7 wrote:
| >hundreds of thousands
|
| Millions.
| alleyshack wrote:
| As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and
| one thing didn't.
|
| The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much,
| much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late
| 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling
| about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come.
| Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps
| and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in
| ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require
| with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what
| little I know of frontend development includes that they need
| to be able to see certain information, like your browser
| type, in order to provide effective services.)
|
| The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers
| building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much
| less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated
| consumer, and much more interested in the features and
| services they can build for themselves and others which
| happen to require huge amounts of personal information to
| function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to
| think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great!
| If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest
| tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool
| things."
|
| The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working
| on advertising products have that mindset and access to
| Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or
| a violation because _they_ don 't mind targeted ads, _they_
| don 't mind giving up their data in exchange for services,
| and _they_ don 't (want to) understand why people who aren't
| them might object.
|
| It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while
| the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only
| player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and
| social influences at play. This is just to answer the
| question about what changed at Google.
| dleslie wrote:
| > They don't consider it a problem or a violation because
| they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up
| their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want
| to) understand why people who aren't them might object.
|
| And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never
| really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.
| alleyshack wrote:
| Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks
| this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.
| dontblink wrote:
| Seems to equally apply here though. Many people are
| perfectly fine with targeted ads in exchange for free
| useful services. I would even propose the majority
| (otherwise these services wouldn't be popular in the
| first place!).
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > > > Most users never really had the opportunity to
| provide informed consent.
|
| > Many people are perfectly fine with targeted ads in
| exchange for free useful services. I would even propose
| the majority
|
| I feel like these two remarks should be taken together,
| and not in isolation. My straw poll of a few non-
| technical folk in a highly-technical firm is that they're
| broadly unaware of these kinds of things (but everyone
| has anecdotes...)
|
| Speaking for my own perspective, I was perfectly fine
| with Gmail when it first launched (1GB of free email
| storage in exchange for a computer scanning my mail and
| showing me text adverts on the side? DEAL!), mostly
| because in 2003 I had no idea what my data was worth
| (individually, very little. in aggregate along with
| eevryone else's? $GOOG indicates it's in the ~trillion
| range). Facebook? For sure! Have my favourite books,
| albums, movies, tv shows, all my photos, why not?
|
| It took many years before the implications of that
| decision that we (collectively) made came through. Not
| everyone has the bandwidth to focus on this, and so it
| just becomes background noise.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| There's been more than a few departures at Google recently. You
| have the profile departures of C-level execs; You've had
| prominent open source folks leaving projects like Angular.
| While some attrition is personal circumstance, you have to
| wonder how much is attributable to the changing identity of
| Google itself.
| clarry wrote:
| > From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and
| hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
|
| From what I've seen is it's like it's always been: people are
| upset for a day or two and then continue to not care, and
| continue to (directly or indirectly) support the evil they were
| upset about. It's incredibly difficult to get even geeks to
| support a cause if it requires more than pressing a like button
| or posting a comment.
|
| Also, it's not like Google's wrongdoing are recent news. Anyone
| remember Google Watch (the site)? People have been warning and
| predicting things since very long ago, yet the geek crowd never
| seems to hesitate to embrace the next soon-to-be evil company
| and their proprietary offering.
| c16 wrote:
| Chrome explicitly having a line [1] of code to not send the
| `x-client-data` header to Yahoo made me laugh.
|
| [1]
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
| jcl wrote:
| FWIW, it looks like that's a test case -- it is not part of
| Chrome itself. They most likely just wanted an example of a
| third-party website, and could have used any non-Google site
| there.
| c16 wrote:
| Yes, But they tested Yahoo of all websites to make sure they
| don't send tracking data, and not an unrelated website like
| wikipedia or archive.org. The only non-google test case too I
| might add.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I've long seen it almost as a tradition to use yahoo for
| things like testing if the internet is working, e.g. "ping
| yahoo.com". I suspect this isn't much more than that.
| gruez wrote:
| It's a test case I wouldn't read too much into it. Maybe
| it's evidence of a massive anti-trust conspiracy at google,
| but it could very well be because it's the first domain
| that came to the programmer's mind at the time.
| jmccorm wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this, but it still seems like a thread
| worth pulling on. You're assuming, right? The reason I
| ask is that using any third-party company seems
| inappropriate. Even more so when Google has plenty of
| domains of its own to test against. Even more so when it
| is against a media/advertising company. And again, even
| more so against a company that changed from Google to
| Bing to power their search function. It seems to be an
| inappropriate or poor choice, doesn't it?
|
| There's no smoking gun here, but I don't think that
| concern might be dismissed out of hand. It might be good
| to see what Yahoo's take on this. This could even evolve
| into participation by the US Attorney General. I'd like
| to know more, either way. Like if Yahoo was independently
| added to the list at a later date, or if it was there
| from the start?
| zerocrates wrote:
| The functionality is the functionality: it targets the
| header to Google sites. If there's a legal issue it
| really stands or falls there, not on the presence of
| another company's domain in the tests. There's nothing
| Yahoo-specific about what Chrome is actually doing.
| quotemstr wrote:
| It's an arbitrary test string, not evidence of evil intent.
| A sufficiently uncharitable interpretation can make
| anyone's writing look evil. It's not so.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Is this also true for all the standalone binaries that embed
| chromium?
| carlsborg wrote:
| If you strace chrome on linux it also picks up /etc/machine-id
| (or it did back when I looked), which is a 32 byte randomly
| generated string which uniquely identifies you and on some
| systems is used as the DHCP ID across reboots.
| throwaway8941 wrote:
| Which (among many other things) can be faked with firejail, if
| you absolutely have to run Chromium (e.g. for testing):
| --machine-id Spoof id number in /etc/machine-id
| file - a new random id is generated inside the sandbox.
| Example: $ firejail --machine-id
| GrayShade wrote:
| Chromium doesn't seem to read that file.
| xfs wrote:
| First I thought reading /etc/machine-id would be expected if
| Chrome uses D-bus or pulseaudio libraries which depend on
| D-bus, and /etc/machine-id is part of D-bus. But no, they
| really use it for tracking purposes.
|
| And in a sick twist they have this comment for it:
| std::string BrowserDMTokenStorageLinux::InitClientId() {
| // The client ID is derived from /etc/machine-id //
| (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-
| id.html). As per // guidelines, this ID must not be
| transmitted outside of the machine, which // is why we
| hash it first and then encode it in base64 before transmitting
| // it.
| jabedude wrote:
| That really is a cynical comment. It almost bothers me more
| than this header.
| mc3 wrote:
| > which is why we hash it first and then encode it in base64
| before transmitting it.
|
| This made me chuckle. "As per the rules, we'll put on a
| boxing glove before we punch your lights out". You wont get
| privacy, but at least there is some security!
| chias wrote:
| In fairness, the guidelines they reference suggest you do
| exactly what the comment says they're doing (assuming they're
| keying the hash). The guidelines seem explicitly written with
| the idea that unique identifiers _derived from_ this value
| are not similarly quarantined, provided that you cannot take
| the derived value and "reverse" it back to the original
| identifier.
|
| Quoting from
| https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-
| id....:
|
| This ID uniquely identifies the host. It should be considered
| "confidential", and must not be exposed in untrusted
| environments, in particular on the network. If a stable
| unique identifier that is tied to the machine is needed for
| some application, the machine ID or any part of it must not
| be used directly. Instead the machine ID should be hashed
| with a cryptographic, keyed hash function, using a fixed,
| application-specific key. That way the ID will be properly
| unique, and derived in a constant way from the machine ID but
| there will be no way to retrieve the original machine ID from
| the application-specific one.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What else is going to break if one randomises that ID (per
| boot or per hour, say)?
| mc3 wrote:
| What about running Chrome inside a container?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| What about not running Chrome?
| chatmasta wrote:
| When puppeteer first came out I was nervous to use it for
| scraping because I could totally see Chrome pulling tricks like
| this to help recaptcha in identifying the bots. I'm still not
| convinced they aren't.
| commotionfever wrote:
| firefor / tor also read this file
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| What does tor do with it? Maybe pass it along in packet
| timing intervals, or something ... ;o)
| augustk wrote:
| And this is a legal thing to do?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| This it outrageous. Browsers are user-agents, not advertising
| accelerators. They should hide as much personal identifiable
| information as possible. This is exactly why using a browser from
| an advertising company is not a good idea. They use it to improve
| their service... The lie gets old...
|
| This comment was sadly written in Chrome, since I need it for
| testing...
|
| edit: pretty much exactly 10 years ago they already tried their
| shit with a unique id. We should have learned from that
| experience.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Well when the browser is created by an advertising company...
| ec109685 wrote:
| You can see all the domains they add the header to here:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/comp...
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034849
| tbodt wrote:
| Actual list:
| https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/google/core/...
| [deleted]
| robocat wrote:
| Security flaw? Surely some entity is squatting youtube on
| some TLD?!
|
| If there is a country TLD of X where Google owns google.X but
| entity Y owns youtube.X then entity Y gets the X-CLIENT-DATA
| header information. See usage of IsValidHostName() in code.
| rvnx wrote:
| like youtube.vg that is available ?
| robocat wrote:
| Note this would be a privacy flaw which is not covered by
| the Chrome Rewards program (it only covers security flaws)
| so I haven't bothered logging it as a bug since I don't
| want to waste my time verifying it for nothing!
|
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/doc
| s...
| chatmasta wrote:
| This seems like a cut-and-dry case of getting caught in
| monopolistic behavior. The code is right there. The Chrome
| codebase has special features for Google's own web
| properties.
|
| I hope all these AGs suing google have some good tech
| advisors. It's hard to keep track of all the nefarious things
| google has been up to over the past decade.
| c0restraint wrote:
| Perhaps you can send a summary to them, including the
| evidence?
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| Can scripts from non-google sites making XHR requests to google
| domains see the outgoing request headers?
| bsharitt wrote:
| Everybody imagine going back 15 years and tell yourself that
| you're using a web browser made by the parent company of
| DoubleClick. Your 15 year ago self would think you're a moron
| (assuming that 15 years ago you were old enough to know what
| DoubleClick was).
| antisthenes wrote:
| Doubleclick ads were, originally, what prompted me to seek an
| adblock extension.
|
| I think it was around 2006 that I got the extension for
| Firefox; Google bought them about a year later.
| comboy wrote:
| Well, it depends. Do I get a funny animation following my
| cursor if I do it?
| Andrex wrote:
| I can only speak for myself, but myself from 15 years ago would
| not have cared so strongly about the choice of browser. I
| believe I was using the newly-ad-less Opera at the time, and
| new/cared little about the company making it.
| kokey wrote:
| My 15 year ago self would have taken a double helping of
| DoubleClick if my only choices were that or Internet Explorer
| 6.
| rplnt wrote:
| I always believed that tech-savvy people using Google Chrome
| are morons. It's the perfect blend of Google being evil trying
| to force it to everyone, the browser being dumbed down to
| masses so much it's missing the most basic features, and I
| guess privacy concerns too when using browser from advertising
| company.
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