Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Firefox. Get it.

If I could upvote you twice, I would.
Firefox all the way!! I don't care all the hate people throw at it.
- People throw hate at it?
People still voluntarily using Chrome

People ever leaving Firefox for Chrome

They get the abuse they deserve
- I left Firefox for Chrome about 12 years ago because Firefox had a major RAM leak. I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago after verifying they fixed the big and have never regretted it. People should use Firefox.

I liked chrome because it was quick and had useful features. Past tense. C-ya.

Firefox has been as fast as chrome on most websites for some years now. Chrome was quick a decade ago, not anymore...
- Yeah for real! They were really really quick and light on RAM in the super early days. But that was due to not having much there compared to Firefox and Opera, or even IE and Safari. Even the original Edge browser was kind of quick due to it just not having everything. All of them lose that little advantage after being around long enough to have the code base be added to along with trying to copy features from popular extensions or trying to add random things to stand out. Even when Firefox got heavy with RAM, I still stuck with it due to extensions factually being able to do more that I wanted. But then they solved the RAM issues dramatically with that Quantum refresh, though it did mean many extensions got nurfed by virtue of not having as much access to the OS level stuff (which is probibly a good thing with regards to security and privacy). Even then they still have better access to being able to really block ads and other privacy related things. And that is because they aren't an ad company that wants to dictate how you are allowed to use the internet.

Stop. Using. Chrome.

As soon as adblock stops working the nerds will move.

Then after a while the non nerds will hear about it from the nerds...then suddenly everyone needs to support Firefox again..
- Anyone still using chrome doesn't deserve the nerd tag. How many neurons does it take to understand the consequences of using it? 3?
- That's called the halo effect, where a small but influential group of people make something popular.
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Man I wish we hadn’t all fallen for the “don’t be evil” motto all those years ago.

This move from Google is utter, utter bullshit.

Well they did remove the don’t be evil motto… guess it didn’t fit their business model
- Spoiler: it fits very few company's business models. Some companies can avoid it, if their owners/board want to. But once they take venture capital, or go public, they lose that choice. And that "don't be evil" promise, and most any other, is void.
- Not too long ago I personally discovered their own AI had some interesting insight about this topic... https://sh.itjust.works/post/1176461
- That is because they are a publicly traded for-profit company. They are legally required to do anything and everything to always make the numbers go up. By any means necessary, which is where any semblance of "not being evil" goes to die. Especially after a product/company was able to get massive popularity for doing/supporting actually good things and/or being known for being "the" name that people think about as being ridiculously well made. So many CEOs and the top controlling shareholders start gutting everything to squeeze out any and all extra profits. Just a hollow shell where massive cuts in jobs and replacing anything that got them there with passive money generating replacements. And since basically all normies just go with whatever they were last really told was good. They don't notice how bad it has become, and don't question it at all (like how many people thought those IE toolbars were just part of IE from an update).
  
  Feel free to skip the next bit as it is more rant about the importance of actually updating the information normies have gotten and just default to.
  
  I on a daily basis have to explain to customers who's computers I work on, that AVG and Avast are beyond bad things to have installed these days. And that they (and really all the major paid for AV products) are the reason that their computer is dog slow. Along with pointing out that all the scary messages they are seeing are from the AV products trying to constantly up-sell them on getting every single one of their pointless products that they will never use/need. Especially bad when you pay for something and think that it will just do the damn thing you wanted without harassment. Just to then get more alerts and pop-up messages trying to scare you more into getting more "protection from X" than you got before giving them any money at all. They just keep using these things all because someone or a few "tech people" that they personally knew at work or before moving somewhere told them it was the best. Same goes for shit like Office and Outlook. So many older folks think they can't use email if it isn't through Outlook and freak the hell out if their drive or OS fucks up. They think they can't create/open documents if it isn't Office (same goes for Acrobat for PDFs). There are randomly people that do need those things, but they also tend to be more aware of stuff like creating backups of PST files.
We all did. It's very much possible that they really meant it at the time. Most companies start with a lot of idealism. And then they become successful and consequently the target of cronies. They feel like they're entitled to everyone else's earnings and the dark pattern begins.

but this is Google, and they control Chrome, and this probably still won't make people switch to Firefox

Yeah. People just simply will not do things that are in their best interest. This is literally the biggest issue that was had with IE. Inertia.

All of my web interaction at this point happens through my Android phone, Google has me by the balls anyway.
- There is Firefox for Android. You're still on Android, but you can have some control left.
- Privacy and digital rights are not a binary "use strange hard to use tools or give everything to google." There are things you can do to improve your ability to own your own data. Giving up immediately is letting perfect be the enemy of good. Running Firefox on your google phone will still win you back something
- Google has me by the balls anyway.
  
  GrapheneOS? Are you on a Pixel?
- Lineageos+microg is a useable de-googled android. I'm using it now without any google services.

Is this the part where I act surprised?

I avoided chrome for a long time. Finally I made the switch because FF was getting too slow on old computers back in the day. Lasted for maybe five or six years before I started getting some bad vibes. Why am I letting google run the web browsing software I'm using? This can't/won't be good in the future.

At least five years ago I made the switch back to Firefox, and haven't looked back. I love having adblocking that works (I use a router level ad block and ublock origin just in case to ensure I block almost every ad on the internet lol).

I'm honestly surprised it took people this long to decide to move away from Chrome.
- Firefox really became awesome after the quantum update. It really is the best browser to date imo.
- Agreed.
  
  My personal browser history:
  
  IE - came with Windows, before I didn't really know what a browser was; we also had Mozilla, but only my dad used it
  
  Firefox - as a teenager, I think I started at 1.5 and used until 3.5 or so
  
  Chrome - it was faster than Firefox, so I used and recommended it to a lot of people; this is also when I started to care about web standards (tried to get IE users to use Chrome)
  
  Opera - used for a couple years until they announced 15, which was going to be Chrome based
  
  Firefox - I used Firefox off and on throughout, and remember the switch to rapid releases, and I've used it nearly exclusively (aside from Web Dev testing) since 2013 or so
  
  Once Opera switched to Chrome-based, I started heavily recommending Firefox. So I saw the writing on the wall about 10 years ago, and now I'm stubborn about avoiding Chrome where possible. I hope others choose to switch too.

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It used to be the fastest, but nowadays I find its performance doesn't surpass Firefox and Edge that much. Actually, I haven't used Chrome much at all recently, so maybe it doesn't at all nowadays. I definitely haven't noticed it's absence now that I've been slowly returning to Firefox thanks to Google and Microsoft's constant privacy snafoos.
- These days Chrome can be slower than other browsers. The days of it having a performance advantage are over. Still, it's worth picking a browser that's not based on Chromium, just to make it a little harder for Google to dictate how the web works.
- But Edge uses pretty much the same software stack as Chrome, just with some other stuff thrown on top.
Brand name, and people don't know any better, or even considered the possibility that other browsers exist.
Just like with IE in the distant past, I'm noticing websites that insist that you use Chrome to use their systems, lazy Devs can't be arsed to make their code platform agnostic. Or more likely, management took the decision. Where I work we have transitioned to Edge because it works with our back end systems. But there are still some SaaS systems I use that only guarantee compatibility with Chrome.

I use Firefox at home, natch.

Edit; I use Firefox on my Sony phone as well, have uninstalled Chrome but now I find that ChatGPT only works with Chrome. Agghhh
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Ignorance and the unwillingness to accept change (even if it is for the better)

So they're baking user behavior tracking into the browser but calling it "privacy"? What's the difference between this and colors cookie tracking?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page.

The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users.

This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done.

Users should see a pop-up when they start up Chrome soon, informing them that an "ad privacy" feature has been rolled out to them and enabled.

That's actually what started this whole process: Apple dealt a giant blow to Google's core revenue stream when it blocked third-party cookies in Safari in 2020.

Google says it will block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024—presumably after it makes sure the "Privacy Sandbox" will allow it to keep its profits up.

The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The Federated Learning of Cohorts and now the Topics API are part of a plan to pitch an "alternative" tracking platform, and Google argues that there has to be a tracking alternative—you can't just not be spied on.

They say this is meant to be an eventual replacement for tracking via cookies, but there is literally no way this won't become supplemental to current tracking methods. And I think they know that.

While I don't agree with what Google does, they want to remove third-party cookies entirely next year. So it's indeed a replacement, not supplemental.

Librewolf!!!!!

Gonna be hilarious when we hear about it lowering productivity at work.

Gonna be hilarious when hackers figure out how to hijack where this reports back to. Particularly since Google recently got rid of most of their senior devs you know, the ones who can actually make secure code.

Any news on when this hits chromium?

probably already has. They put things into chromium first, then move them to chrome usually.
Vivaldi will never have it
It's been in there for weeks/months: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/main/components/privacy_sandbox

Most if not all other Chromium-based browsers have disabled it though.

Aww good for Google. Meanwhile I’ll keep using a FOSS browser that doesn’t screw its users with every new feature.

..and which one would that be?
- Firefox?

And then hoodwink people into upgrading with the promise of Material You themes 🙄

I hope Chromium-based Vivaldi is still okay. I'm pretty invested in some of its features (though I have to admit it is getting more bloaty).

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No. There are a whole bag of tactics to get you to enable it like "Whoops, got re-enabled in an update. Our bad.", which has happened before, or a myriad of dark patterns. By changing the name of this at least twice now when it got backlash from users, Google has shown it doesn't care about Chrome users' preferences, only that it wants this to fly under the radar so that every Chrome user won't know to disable it.

Change to a browser that actually gives a crap about your privacy. As a bonus, changing helps reduce Google's ability to dictate what happens to the web via Chrome's huge user base, like the recent "Web Environment Integrity" push.
- Specifically, use Firefox (or Librewolf) and not a Chromium-based browser. Using Chromium still helps Google dictate how the web works.
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Yes, and companies can lie
Lol, oh sweet child. You have much to learn about what a corporation says, and what they're forced to do by government regulations. Without them, corporations can (and will) do anything they want for the sake of more profits.

Unfortunately, with a country run by a bunch of geriatrics who hardly understand the concept of the "internet" and hardware/software, let alone the nuances of different social media platforms or how different communities within the internet interact.
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Duplicate (on the same community 2 hours before)

Sorry about that. Lemmy usually warns me if a link has been posted already, but it didn't this time.