Google settles $5bn lawsuit for 'private mode' tracking
Large technology firms have faced increased scrutiny of their practices in the US and beyond.
Why would anyone not using an Android use Chrome? If you're tech savvy enough to be installing alternate browsers, why choose the one whose parent company actively harvests everyone's data (and which is more bloated than Edge, FF, and Safari)?
Firefox on Android works great too. I'm slowly degoogling my life, and this was by far the easiest step.
Same. The tab sync from desktop to mobile is also really cool.
There's also Firefox Focus, which is like being in incognito mode all the time.
Absolutely, I use FF on my android phone, I just don't expect normies to install separate browsers on their phones. That's why it's so perplexing to me that someone who knows enough to call it something other than "the internet... app" like my dad did this past week, would go and install the worse option if it wasn't the default.
too
Funny that you say that. I always get the low end phones so I don't expect much performance-wise. I didn't even know it was possible for me to have a reasonable mobile web browsing experience because Chrome was always so awfully laggy while also making everything else lag and I didn't expect Firefox to be any different. Then I actually tried it, and holy shit the internet actually works. Not only that, I can't even tell that I'm browsing on a shitty low end phone.
Because for years chrome was a solid choice, and most people don't actively research browsers
I would have agreed with you about Edge when it was MS’s own engine. It was lightweight and fast. Even early builds on the Chromium stack were decent. Lately, Edge is more bloated than Chrome! It’s really showing MS’s true colors these days.
Because people are lazy to switch. 10 years ago Chrome was a far better browser than anything else & people have their google account filled with their passwords & bookmarks now. Most don't even know how easy it is to migrate all that to Firefox, or that Firefox is actually good since Quantum.
Also why would you use Chrome on Android? On Android at least you can switch to other stuff, unlike on iOS.
I wasn't arguing people on Android should use Chrome, it's just the default browser, so I don't expect most people to replace it.
It doesn’t matter what browser you’re using. Everything Google was tracking here is the stuff all browsers send in incognito mode. This lawsuit was totally frivolous
That wouldn't make it frivolous, that would just mean the others should be sued too. :P
The irony with this is if incognito was really untracable then the government would be pushing to make it less secure just like they're already actively trying to force backdoors in Signal and other actually private services because "think of the children".
I just want to chat with my friends in private, we're not talking about anything bad just video games
But the children, Scrubbles, think of how they'll be exploited
No I think there are other ways to solve that problem that don't involve reading all of my messages. What about hashing word combinations, or AI that could give a warning indicator to companies without giving out all of the...
THE CHILDREN, THEY NEED OUR PROTECTION
o ok.
Well if you're not doing anything wrong why try to hide it at all?
/S
Probably preaching to the choir in the largely tech savvy world that is the Threadiverse, but going to PSA nonetheless. If you're concerned about privacy, don't use anything associated with Google. Because IMO this is entirely unsurprising.
I want my $2
So what exactly are they alleged to have tracked from incognito users? The article mentions search history, which of course they're going to continue to track because Google the search engine is not the same as Google Chrome the browser and the search engine has no business knowing or caring if you're in incognito mode or not
Chrome sends the text, progressively, as you type it into the address/search bar, so it can auto-complete results. This is what I believe they were referring to. Even if you don't use Google as the search engine, it still sends those characters to Google.
If you set up ZAP/ Burp/ etc you can watch the requests go out in realtime.
Oh right, I suppose they could've not done that that's true
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Google has agreed to settle a US lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of users by tracking them even when they were browsing in "private mode".
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers put a scheduled trial for the case on hold in California on Thursday, after lawyers said they had reached a preliminary settlement.
It said this had turned Google into an "unaccountable trove of information" on user preferences and "potentially embarrassing things".
It added that Google could not "continue to engage in the covert and unauthorized data collection from virtually every American with a computer or phone".
Earlier this month, the technology giant said it would pay $700m to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of US states that accused Google of quashing competition to its Play Store on Android devices.
The video game company sued Google in 2020 for unlawfully making its app store dominant over rivals.
Saved 63% of original text. :::
