Google Safe Browsing is blocking small Mastodon servers

Re:Google Safe Browsing is blocking small Mastodon servers by olliej on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @05:49AM (#33529696)

The goal is to avoid leaking the url you actually loaded. In principle you could make a hash of every url and work back from there, but if you’re Google you already have much more effective ways of tracking what sites someone is visiting, that are “acceptable”, if Google or some other vendor were discovered to be attempting that I suspect there would be fairly substantial and immediate blowback.

There are obviously ways that you could improve the privacy aspects of this - you could have two versions of the database hashing urls with slightly different initial conditions. A client can keep one up to date and only fetch the other when the get a collision. Assuming SHA256 is pretty good then we can just multiply the false positive probabilities (I think?).

And alternative would be for the client to request multiple regions at a time.

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Re:Google Safe Browsing is blocking small Mastodon servers by Tozen on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @09:01AM (#33531704)

If you login into a Google account (Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, Google drive, etc...) and have not adjusted your personal preferences (which even then may not mean much), they are tracking every place you go and more. The amount of information they are collecting on people is astounding. To include they will lock people out of their accounts, for whatever, and keep the information as long as they want or hand it over to whoever 3rd parties that they please.

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