Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.

With the increase in ads on streaming platforms I've just reverted back to piracy. The enshittification has gone too far.

I seem to have to "change results to English" on google searches at least once a week when it forgets which language I've setup and used for the past ten years!

Google -> Reddit -> open translated post in app -> share in app with browser again -> click on show original.

I’ve never ever let any involved websites actually use my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit.

But you add a lot of entropy to the privacy violators.

I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.

You are generalizing. Google and big providers do that, usually (US)services that need to cater to the whole world. But a huge part of the normal web still uses and _needs_ preferred language. No one wants to be forced to use geolocation.

Just one very common example are info pages for sightseeing, they are usually available in all languages that people commonly visit from and just work if you browse to them. Not to mention that geolocation would be useless anyway in that case.

It is a if the web and browser developers lived in an innocent world

It's such a no brainer, I can't comprehend it.

No browser is safe from capitalistic rot at this point.

Now, all my pay-at-the-pump interactions at gas stations are all in French. A website I was purchasing from flipped to French when I entered my card info. There were a few surprise interactions where my language preference was clearly derived from my bank card setting.

I’m just hoping that being classed as bilingual is doing wonders for my “social” score at some clandestine data clearinghouse.

Google is really bad at handling multilingual users, or even just users that don’t want to use the language of the place they connect from. Now by default Youtube even translates the audio automatically, it’s unbearable.

And I have declared the languages I speak in my Google profile. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Paying for a search engine means that I am the customer, not the product. While you are correct that my data is an asset for Kagi, it is a one shot asset, vs my subscription, which is recurring revenue.

I can look at the privacy policy for Kagi (https://kagi.com/privacy), and see that I am not at risk of having my searches logged or data shared. I trust them because violating that privacy policy puts them at risk of being sued by me, and by any investors in the company.

As you yourself stated: either company is capable of building a profile. One has promised not to do that contractually, and google, more or less, has promised to do exactly that regardless.

Now, I don't speak or read Chinese and couldn't immediately find a way to change the setting back to English. Could probably find it on the internet but .. Oh well, I don't really use LinkedIn so it's just stayed that way now.

I can understand it if someone's sending out something like a Google Doc collaboration invite, especially to a non-GMail address, the email will be in the Google Docs UI language of the sender. But LinkedIn has your profile with all your preferences!

What next, a colleague shares the link to a location, you open it in your car, and your car UI turns into Chinese?

Frankly for a company that's a Spyware company, they sure are incompetent.