2018-2019 is when they officially turned the corner and decided to focus only on ad revenue. But the SEO abuse dove it into the ground by 2014ish. They were making money enough to expand by orders of magnitude into other areas, so they simply didn’t want to tweak their search or strategy and kill their golden goose that funded things like Good Drive and their shit social network and loon, etc.
Let’s say you use a VPN, and all your internet traffic comes from an IP in London. 178.238.10.1.
It doesn’t matter if you have a VPN, if you log in to anything with any account tied to your real name ([email protected]), your email and anything done on that London IP are all linked. Google builds a profile on you based on the activity on that IP. AND your browser profile. Private/incognito window or not, if there’s a Google tracker on the site, they connect it all. Google doesn’t care about private windows. If you go to reddit in a private window on the same IP as your gmail, Google sees that and tracks every page you look at.
So let’s say that you log into your email from work. Google now has a treasure trove of new info about you and people you know. Same for FB, who uses the fact that you and someone else were logged on from the same IP range to suggest new friends.
Let’s pretend that you live in China and still have access to a VPN and want to learn about the Tienanmen Square Massacre. But the government can ask Google about you. What do you need?
Since January Google has been using browser fingerprinting and IP triangulation to track across incognito windows.
Meta wants in the game as well. Nothing done on a phone with Meta apps is done in isolation.
Edit: seems like only vanilla mobile browsers affected. Brave was not vulnerable, DDG minimally so, and I expect Iron/Waterfox with uBlock would also not have allowed tracking.
https://securityonline.info/androids-secret-tracking-meta-yandex-abused-localhost-for-user-data/
No, you use one as the backup. That’s why I said use JShelter, but if a site breaks beyond use, switch IPs and then reload with NoScript instead to be more selective of what is blocked and what’s not. That way I can still block Cloudflare and Google and Apple and still let the actual site load. And JScreep seems (for me, YMMV) to treat each as distinct fingerprints.
IMO if you know you can have multiple fingerprint profiles anyway based on which combo of extensions you use that do roughly the same job, that’s a net benefit.
The why is browser fingerprinting. Which Google started using as of January to track everyone.
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/
So if you go to ANY page with Google trackers, even in private mode, Google knows.
For vanilla FF I use multi - account containers, uBlock, and privacy badger.
For other FF forks like Librewolf, I get more blocky, like JShelter, a random agent switcher, and if that breaks a site beyond use I try Chameleon and NoScirpt.
It is, but it’s a use case that has a shitload of money behind it.
Do you know why we have had reliable e-commerce since 1999? Porn websites. That was the use case that pushed credit card acceptance online.
The demand is so huge that firms would rather stumble a bit at first to save huge amounts for a bad but barely sub-par UX.
This 100%.
Wealthy people essentially pay staff to do make things happen for them, and those staff don’t sign up for IG or FB stressing abou making sure to use their ONE email like [email protected] for everything.
PA staff are both IT staff and human password managers, creating and curating massive sets of logins that are functionally disposable. With enough clout and money, if you DO have a problem with a social media platform, or your phone number, a PA calls an Executive CSR and sorts out the problem.
So it’s that their “privacy” is masked by the haphazard way they interact with things that track them. For them, tracking them is security to ensure you know who they are so that have a frictionless experience. If they want a dummy account to creep on people or be a perv, they get that easily, too.
I don’t hate Arch. Or Vegan diets. Or Crossfit. Or colleges outside of Boston, either.
But the people…well…
Brace yourselves for being told on MSN and Yahoo about the hottest new toy this Xmas! If you don’t buy it, you might be arrested for child abuse!
Anyone know what Linux distro? I assume Ubuntu…
Yes, from a general misunderstanding of how microwave ovens work, and what “radiation” was during the 1960s and 70s.
“Brad, I saw you cheating on Stacy at the club last night” [your pgp key here]
Sorry if it seemed smug at all. The “My my” was more being happy that the Fdroid app repo is pulling it’s weight and a valuable resource that fascists seem to over look.
I do like this a lot.
Since you sort of need to be there with the hat, it makes me wonder of you might get more response and/or geographic spread if you has some sort of leave behind. A sticker, or a card that you can slot in places.
I do think that leaving it as the gpg key is better, not a QR code. It helps ID this for nerds like you and me. I would never scan a wild QR.
My, my. Look at all the open source, privacy focused period trackers in the Fdroid store.
There’s a good chance another seagull ate the body before it was even cold.
It’s toned down since 23andMe was new, but I absolutely know people that will regularly call themselves by whatever European group they think gives them character.
I always ask if they have an EU passport.