The reaction back in October 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769178

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

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

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

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

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

After that last little cookie shitty in combination with their auto-sign in feature, which Google pulled off recently I won't touch Chrome with a 10foot pole and will not let it near any computer, which I control.

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

Sounds exactly like IE6 in “Microsoft shops”.

Actually, that is horrifying. That their webapps are usable only through their browser. Google, I guess, achieved what Microsoft couldn't

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

Eww, so you can have your data harvested by an even more evil and scummy company? Why not just use Ungoogled-Chromium or Firefox today? Hell, even Safari would be better.

Try brave https://brave.com

Chromium with built in adblocker, it also has native mobile versions.

This. I switched to Brave a few months ago and have had a great experience so far...

For me Brave has incentive problems too. They are aiming to replace the adtech market, but I'd rather a browser was made by someone seeking to abolish rather than replace that broken incentive space.

Yes MSFT are cancer on a telemetry perspective. I signed up for “new outlook web access” today and it was hammering the shit out of their servers with telemetry hits. Ublock Origin turned these into console errors.

They are simply the worst.

Telemetry is for software developers to learn how you are using their product. This isn't as bad as what Google is doing. Google is interested in everything you are doing, and then they sell that harvested information to advertisers. Microsoft doesn't sell any of your info to third parties. That's not the purpose of telemetry.

I don’t care about them selling it. I care about them having it to start with.

>>I care about them having it to start with.

Having what? Data regarding what features of their product customers are utilizing and what features are not being used? If you were a software developer would you not want to have that kind of data? Nothing nefarious about this.

The problem comes is that you are not in control of the scope of the data or the processing of it.

Just because now is ok, it doesn’t mean tomorrow will be and once data is leaked unintentionally (look at their disastrous QA at the moment) then the data protection liability lands on your feet.

If you don’t control the software you use then you are at risk regardless of the proposed purpose or promise.

I find this attitude of accepting product surveillance (telemetry is an unfairly nice term) totally negligent.

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

What about Firefox?

When Firefox goes Chromium-based, swarms of locusts will erupt from the ground, the moon will turn red as mars, and apparitions of RMS will be seen wandering the streets, telling people "I told you so."

I think gp didn't mean wait for Firefox to use Chromium rather: why not use Firefox already?

Come for the better browser, get spyware free as a bonus ;-)

> Come for the better browser, get spyware free as a bonus ;-)

Unless I misinterpret you, that really needs a hyphen.

That is a really good point :-)

Yes, there should have been a hyphen there.

The best thing about firefox is the containers - so I can easily have different cookie spaces for different tasks, I only use my Gmail container for Gmail, so my general web browsing isn't attached to my Gmail profile.

That sounds like a bug, but knowing Google, it's a "bug".

This is why I use Brave on mobile and Firefox on desktop

Why not firefox on mobile? Been using it for months and about as hapoy with it as firefox on desktop

I wanted to switch back to Firefox, but it seems to consume every resource on my machine. I’m currently using Safari and miss FF of old (I used FF exclusively from 2005-2013; switched to Chrome; and just can’t seem to like FF again).

Does this actually happen? Sounds like a bug if so, and not intended behavior if the setting is off.

The reasoning behind why that happens makes sense considering the 99.99% non-technical users who do not understand why Chrome is signed in vs Gmail, or vice versa.

Why not try Firefox today?

I think a better example would be:

Try to make an appointment on the california dmv website without signing into google.

This no longer happens to me on Chromium 71. Maybe it's a Chromium-specific thing?

cough Vivaldi cough

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

Tell your friends and family to ditch Chrome for Firefox.

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

https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/archive/20160325-201...

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

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

Wait wat!? Source, please?

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

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

1) Google is a large, powerful entity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What part seems untrue to you?

It is not and never been a major defense contractor. The only majorish thing was Maven and thankfully cancelled.

You are overlooking the privileged (red carpet) access to private data granted to warrant holders.

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