We need an Internet reset.
privacy
Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.
Partners:
- community.nicfab.it/c/privacy
Gemini is having a go at it.
Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between hosted files. Both the protocol and the format are deliberately limited in capabilities and scope, and the protocol is technically conservative, being built on mature, standardised, familiar, "off-the-shelf" technologies like URIs, MIME media types and TLS.
That looks really cool. What would incentivise companies to use it over a regular website with tracking and whatnot?
Absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately this.
Not only would companies not want to use it because of no incentives like what they get from the internet with monetary gains, it'll likely only exist as an incredibly niche thing because not many people will hear about it due to the first part.
That said, maybe that's the best part of the whole thing. With less things to exploit, it wards off companies and "influencers" just using it to make money and it becomes more focused around hobbies like the internet once was.
a protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, like http. A hypertext format, which http was intended for. Using mature technologies such as a bunch of stuff that http already uses.
This is just http with extra steps. The problem is not in how the data is sent, but what data is sent. This is the equivalent of noticing people sending a lot of hate mail via snail mail, and the "solution" to that being to use square envelopes instead.
Fire that fox up! Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is for people with big cocks
Jokes on you Google, but I dont want to see ANY ads...
Hey you're in luck! For just $99.99/mo* we'll remove those ads.
But we'll still collect way more data than you think and in a couple months we'll raise the price for the True Unlimited* plan
**True Unlimited plan has like, so many ads, because fuck you.
But how will the already-profitable company make more profit at your expense?
Firefox it is and was for over a decade and more. Add uBlock Origin, uMatrix and some smaller stuff and the web suddenly becomes accessible.
Chrome stopped being good 6 to 8 years ago.
Piggybacking here to let people know that hitting "no thanks" on that dialog only disables 1 out of the 3 new tracking methods added to Chrome. Besides turning off "ad topics" you need to go to preferences and also disable "site-suggested ads" and "ad measurement".
Ah yes, "hey instead of us tracking you, can you just save us the computation effort and just tell us what you're into? We'll still keep tracking you though." And this is somehow a privacy FEATURE? Even though they clearly say they'll be sharing thisvinfo with websites you visit? Boggles the mind
Exactly. It's corporate newspeak.
You guys see ads?
Yeah, sometimes. Archive.org has a nice collection of vintage ones.
Firefox has always been my main browser but I don't get OP's point.
Isn't this a good feature because it allows personalized ads without tracking?
Can someone explain to me?
"To stop everyone else from stealing your data, let us steal it for them!"
It's like trying to stop a fire by committing arson.
It's like trying to stop a fire by committing arson
I get the point you’re trying to make, but we regularly actually start fires to prevent fires.
According to this popup, Chrome is essentially sending my entire browsing history god knows where in order to build a user profile that is then used by advertising companies to display targeted ads on the websites I visit. But it allows me to control which topics get shown or hidden and somehow that is a "privacy" feature.
I just don't want my browsing history to be used for anything except finding what pages I visited in the past and that's it. I'm sick of being tracked and having my whole god damn digital life being shared to fucking greedy corporations who want to send me ads to buy crap I don't need.
There is a lot of misinformation being shared in this thread.
A good excerpt from Steve Gibson covering Topics on SecurityNow #935
What I do know, though, is that user profiling via tracking represents the height of privacy intrusion. As far as I know, an immutable record of every website I have ever visited is squirreled away in multiple massive hidden and inaccessible-to-me profiling databases. And I have zero control over that. That's the world we're in today. But if Topics succeeds, and Google would appear to be in the position to singlehandedly deliver its success, it is a far less intrusive profiling technology. And in addition to being a much weaker information gatherer, Google has chosen to provide its users complete control over the Topics their browser presents to the world, including turning it off altogether for full anonymity. I'll explain that further in a minute.
So if only on that basis, Topics at least represents a huge step in the right direction. Yes, by default some interest profiling remains. But the means of obtaining those significantly weakened profiles is no longer tracking. And users have complete visibility into their online profile and are able to curate, edit, and even delete any of it or all of it as they choose. So it's a compromise. But there are many websites begging for our support. My feeling is, if voluntarily letting them know something about who we are allows them to generate, as they claim, significantly more revenue from our visit, is that too high a price to pay? Again, it's an individual decision. But now, in a world with Topics, at least, it's one we're able to make.
...
Okay. So here's how Topics works. The essence of Topics are individual topic tokens - zero, one, or many - which are assigned to individual websites. For example, my GRC.com site might be associated with Computers and Electronics/Network Security, and Computers and Electronics/Programming, and Networking/Internet Security. So when someone visited GRC.com, their own web browser would record their interest in the topics associated with GRC.com, those topics, those three. But their visit to GRC.com itself would never be recorded other than in their regular local browser history as is always done. The only thing retained by the browser to indicate their interest in those topics would be those three numbered parameters.
For example, in Google's current 349-topic list, which they refer to as a "taxonomy," there's "Arts and Entertainment" as a general topic if nothing more specific is available. But then there's "Arts and Entertainment," and then under that "Acting and Theater," and "Comics," "Concerts and Music Festivals," "Dance," "Entertainment Industry," "Humor." And under "Humor" is the subtopic "Live Comedy." And it goes on like that with "Arts and Entertainment" having a total of 56 token entries before we switch to "Autos and Vehicles," which has 29 subcategories, which brings us to "Beauty and Fitness" and so on. You get the idea.
So here's how Google's specification explains this. They said: "The topics are selected from an advertising taxonomy. The initial taxonomy proposed for experimentation will include somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand topics." They said: "Our initial design includes around 350." And I counted them, it's 349. "As a point of reference, the IAB Audience Taxonomy contains around 1,500 individual topics and will attempt to exclude sensitive topics." And they said: "We're planning to engage with external partners to help define this. The eventual goal is for the taxonomy to be sourced from an external party that incorporates feedback and ideas from across the industry."
...
Google explains: "The topics will be inferred by the browser. The browser will leverage a classifier model to map site hostnames to topics. The classifier weights will be public, perhaps built by an external partner, and will improve over time. It may make sense for sites to provide their own topics via meta tags, headers, or JavaScript, but that remains an open discussion for later."
Time to switch and start donating to Mozilla.
I was still using Chrome for some things at work, just because that's our assumed default, but I know enough to switch over there too now. Maybe I'll update the documentation to help other people switch too...
Insert "I'm doing my part" meme
I turned it off the first time I was asked. Something on my phone opened in Chrome, rather than Firefox, and this came up again with a different question. I was pretty sure I said no but wasn't convinced that what I had chosen was doing what I asked. Sure enough diving into settings it was enabled.
I've loved Chrome for years but this is bullshit. Firefox isn't perfect but I love that I can use uBlock Origin. Fuck Chrome.
The fact that they want you to do this again every 4 weeks is downright laughable.
The fact that anyone in /privacy/ uses any google products or services is also quite laughable.
You’re in the wrong if you still have chrome installed.
Use Firefox now!
Was it ever fun?
Definitely! I remember how awesome and exciting it was when Google was handing out all this great free stuff, before we learnt how we were paying for it.
I deleted Chrome a couple of months ago. Haven’t missed it in the slightest.
Are you really quit posting about a keylogger/distributed compute platform posing as a web browser like 10 years too late?
I love how they position it as a privacy feature, and then fail to explain how it does anything to increase privacy.
It was never great.