>They are inescapable

This seems like a great simplistic unit of measurement for classifying what antitrust action is supposed to target.

When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale. When you basically can't opt out.

> When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale.

I'm not sure that would fit the current anti-trust legal definition (as in: not a lawyer so don't know answer - not that I think it doesn't fit). Equally, I'm not sure it fits under the more general principles of anti-competitive practices. They - I believe - presume willingness on the part of the consumer to access products or services, but where supply is unfairly limited.

Notwithstanding all that, your statement is an excellent principle and very neatly articulates the problem. I don't know what rule of law it would come under, but it's a succinct illustration.

Inescapable indeed,

Special mention to reCaptcha, you just doomed to train there AI and it seems to intensify once you start moving away from google. And I bet it's even worst from the 3rd world...

I guess the "don't be evil" way would be to make all those data public. Or just to provide an alternative way to prove your humanity online, without enslaving the whole world.

I've increasingly been getting literally impossible recaptchas lately.

And I don't mean that they're hard to make sense of or something. But if I encounter a recaptcha on one of my specific devices that's not logged into any Google accounts, recaptcha will simply reject all of my clearly correct answers. It'll ask me to pick all of the fire hydrants, show another screen, show me another, show me another, stop for a second, then tell me I failed and repeat. I pick everything correctly, but it fails because somewhere along the line, the absolute clowns at Google decided an auto-rejecting AI would be a good idea for a user validation system.

We need Google out of the internet. As their evil influence continues to expand, they'll use their powers to lock people who don't willingly buy into their ecosystem out of everything. And worse, since Google is the biggest lapdog around for government-led oppression of speech, they'll just filter out anything that doesn't agree with the status quo. And they'll be able to brush it away as an "oops, sorry, your behavior just makes you seem like a bot. Nothing we can do."

> lineageos

You can be tracked by every android app, plus DNS and connectivity checks - it's only visible part. Sure any advanced security audit will show much more.

> can't opt out of their tracking

How would breaking up Google prevent tracking?

Ideally it would Balkanize user profiles to individual products. It would greatly reduce the harm in using YouTube, maps, and search if they were distinct data silos.

So yea, tracking will continue until people regulate it.

Except with all the various products Google has, search is likely the only one that could stand on its own financially.

That for one. And products like Assistant would become pretty much useless.

Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.

There’s no indication they are capable of this.

Not yet. But they are doing everything possible to lay the groundwork. As much accurate data as possible, hire all the best AI talent, pioneering work on quantum computing and constantly improving tooling.

2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.

Feels like Youtube and Maps have a pretty solid foothold given how very few products can compete at that level. I’m not sure how much they rely on data from other Google divisions but even without it I don’t see why they would fare worse than any other map service.

That’s google’s problem for picking a delicate business model.

So you’re fine with YouTube failing because Google got broken up?

Absolutely.

Sounds like a big negative for the average consumer

> tracking will continue until people regulate it

How are you going to stop tracking?

Whenever you interact with a business, online or offline, you're supplying information that can be tracked.

I think there's a difference between gathering information that's necessary for the service at hand (giving your IP address to a server, or your current location to a cell phone network) and milking the user for all identifying information that can be gathered (asking for the user's gender to create a shop account, browser fingerprinting by scanning plugins and canvas hashing, etc).

Regardless, how is breaking up Google going to stop such tracking?

I've asked this question twice now. We can't just break up companies because they collect data. That's not anti-trust.

Well that's a question for SomeOldThrow, I don't know how breaking up Google would help either.

You’d need something like the GDPR I imagine.

While tracking and anti-trust are only loosely coupled, both are symptoms of an anti-social company.

Thanks for tresorit. That was the only one I hadn't heard of. Their pricing structure is a little hard for me to grasp, but I'll be keeping them in mind.

Don't trust anyone's cloud - encrypt locally first then upload. Rclone makes that easy.

Indeed. I've been using a combination of pixz, GPG and Wasabi for a few months now, without complaints so far. I suggest mixing a combination of tools and services that are easily replaceable, to avoid relying on a single solution. And open source where possible, of course.

I'm actually curious how Google is still tracking you with that entirely Google-less stack? (note: I don't work for Google)

The most obvious are Google Payments (from the merchant side), Google Analytics, Google Ads (doubleclick). Then there's street view cars collecting photos and wifi data, Google registry services siphoning up domain metadata, and of course any information someone else enters about you- if they save their contacts to google and it includes you, you're suddenly part of their graph.

Then there's the direct cell phone tracking-

> Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.

Don't forget about GMail. Everytime you send a mail to somebody on GMail, which might not be obvious with custom domains, your mail will be analyzed by Google. And your email address serves as the perfect ID.

Google maps and Google mail are two apps that have no comparable privacy focused competition at their price point.

Small note, but can't you block Google Analytics with something like Privacy Badger? Google Payments and Google registry services seem near impossible to avoid though. Not to mention the near requirement to use certain Google products in certain lines of work.

Don't forget recaptcha.

This is the main inescapable one for me. I have uMatrix to block analytics and all that, but so many websites simply wont work without recaptcha.

My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)

Through your friends and family that interact with you and who aren't so careful with their data.

Through browser fingerprinting that is shared via channels which are undetectable and unlockable via browser scripts.

Through hundreds of many tiny mistakes you make every day and unknowingly let down your guard.

_Oops, damn, I forgot I disabled uBlock when accessing that important page for work._

You cannot opt out.

None of those channels can be shutdown by breaking up Google or other tech giants, let alone imposing a fine.

As long as there's a very popular communications service / social networking service / etc., or even a few of them (none of which dominates the entire market), you can't stop other people from turning in your data (unless you have no connections whatsoever in this world, or you and all your connections live in a cave). And if you use any popular service or visit any popular website yourself, your data will be collected, it's only a matter of the level of details.

But at the very least my mom's contact list shouldn't be able to be used to send me targeted ads in search or suggest contacts to me in Gmail. It would be isolated to those products owned by that newly split off sub-company.

Sure any 3rd party app I install can track me to some degree, but it can't compare my usage against my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice...

> my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice

GGP was talking about data collected involuntarily, and I was responding to that. Google (or any other company) can't have your entire email history, your travel history, and recordings of your voice without your voluntary participation in one of their services or services of a "partner". Those are way beyond drive-by collection.

But then on top of that they're free to merge it with involuntarily collected data. I'm talking about how you can't agree to just give them X. They take XYZ, and A and B and C about you from someone else....

There is no way to only use a Google service and also disable drive by collection. And because they're so huge and cover so many categories, that drive by info is more meaningful in their hands than just a dozen random unconnected companies. Because of that, drive by collection by other 3rd party doesn't really concern me as much. They can't do nearly as much with it.

AdSense for one.

Don't forget AMP

Source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7486764?hl=en