You need to stop using Chrome NOW. It’s not hyperbole: Google just rolled out a change to Chrome that tracks the sites you visit, builds a profile, and shares that with any page you visit that asks.
Ex: you’re a teenager living in a highly conservative state. You’re visiting sites your ultra religious family don’t want you to. Google tracks you NATIVELY IN THE BROWSER and informs 3rd parties of your interest in LGBTQ sites.
My family already knows I'm a weirdo, but for security reasons - cuz a famous right wing piece if shit doxxed me and wrote an article about me that put my life in danger - I switched to the brave browser. I use Google as a search engine, but I erased any personal info from Chrome.
The ONLY reason I don't get rid of chrome altogether is because I have a YouTube channel and evidently if I erase Chrome completely I'll lose access to my channel
@wtwagg@glyph@CosmicTrigger@semioticstandard
Here's a reminder that Brandon Eich, head of the Brave project, is an omniphobe who gave up his position as Mozilla's CEO after a nothingburger of an 'apology' to LGBTQ+ folks, because he didn't want to work for a company whose values include supporting gay marriage.
This was in 2014, but I've heard little to suggest that his stance has changed at all for the positive.
@wtwagg@glyph@CosmicTrigger@semioticstandard The guy that's in charge is a sexual assaulter who hates LGBTQ people (he paid money out of his own pocket to stop gay marriages from being legalized).
All I know is that after I exported all my bookmarks and passwords into Firefox, the next day every bookmark disappeared.
Half of them had a gray globe for an icon and the name of the original webpage, but the url was changed to Mozilla's website.
The other half were replaced with the icon for mastodon. Again, the names of the websites were visible, but the links sent me to Mastodon.
And there was nothing I could do about it except take a screenshot of my bookmarks and deleted all of them.
I don't want to use Chrome, but the Firefox glitches are an absolute pain in the ass
@bubblefizzpop@voron@semioticstandard what a weird symbol. It's be a bit like saying ' women are welcome here'. Or people of a certain religion can come to this restaurant. It shouldn't matter at all what sexual orientation a customer has. If a restaurant puts up a sign like that I'd think they are mesjoche
@semioticstandard Hopefully the other Chromium based browsers aren't stuck offering this as well. We could really use more meaningful competition in the browser space.
@semioticstandard You are actually describing the status quo. That's happening all the time right now. If Google's privacy sandbox works as intended, no one will have a clue about who is behind this list.
@publictorsten@semioticstandard Yeah this is what drives me nuts about this whole discourse. The status quo of tracking, which collects 1,000+ data points about you and stores them forever in places you don’t even know about, knows your sexual orientation. Topics/the privacy sandbox doesn’t have the means to ask or know, by design.
But nobody kvetching about it has read the spec, at all.
@Rusty@semioticstandard Not to mention that Brave's creator is a well-known homophobe (see Proposition 8 in California) and most of their staff aren't LGBTQIA+ friendly. Best to use a ethnic browser such as Vivaldi, Tor, or LibreWolf.
@joeo10@Rusty@semioticstandard Vivaldi is Chromium based so should be avoid the same as Chrome itself. That really leave only Firefox and it's clones as choices since everything else uses Chromium as its base. Yes, it has gotten THAT bad that there is only one non-Chromium option left.
Just to add to the alternatives, Epiphany browser uses WebKit.
Konqueror is optionally untouched by Google if you have it use the KHTML rendering engine and pretty much so even if you use KDEWebKit (which incorporates some stuff from Blink but leaves a lot behind - Google Blink itself is a fork of Apple's WebKit fork of KHTML)
@semioticstandard I don't use Chrome. But as far as I understand it, the new "profile" is based on the sites you visited in the previous four weeks and only returns your top interests in that time.
i.e. if you looked at cat videos, Xboxes, and pasta recipes then advertisers would get "pets, video games, cooking".
That's less scary than current third party tracking, browser fingerprinting, etc...
@semioticstandard
> Google just rolled out a change to Chrome that tracks the sites you visit, builds a profile, and shares that with any page you visit that asks
Thanks for the warning.
We must be careful not to stop finding this kind of DataFarming as shocking as it is. But it's hardly unique. Windows and other BorgSoft products do it. All the Meta apps do it. Apple devices do it. It's the standard business model of surveillance capitalism.
@semioticstandard I do kind of like the idea of being able to say "here's the categories of ads I'm interested in" as a browser feature (though would want it in a privacy preserving way), the building profiles as you browse is just creepy.
I'm more thinking something like as you browse, a seller could go "hey, we'd like to advertise to you, can we add that information to your ad preferences?" but idk how it'd work in reality
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