In that case I'm glad to say I'm a happy MX Linux user. I get your point about the OSs especially windows, but what privacy issues are there running intel/amd CPUs?
Only thing keeping me out of using Firefox is the lack of multiple profile (one for work and one for personal).
I know containers exist, it's not the same (they share extensions for example).
It has been requested for many years but they think containers is the way to go which I disagree (or at least think it's not enough)
so... then what's keeping you from switching? the feature exists, you can use it right now -- just create two shortcuts on the desktop, one for personal, one for work. they can even run at the same time!
Profiles have existed in FF for a very long time, I believe even back to the launch of Chrome. I think what Chrome did was made them readily accessible. I might have the history slightly wrong, but FF has had them at least as far back as 2011.
Can you please share where profiles have been requested for many years?
I don't compare it to Google's because it's hidden and not readily accessible like Chromium's version therefore I didn't consider them equal.
The part that has been requested is to make them accessible and first class and not tucked in behind screens that look like internal "power user" screens
The idea is that instead of the dozens of third-party cookies placed on websites by different advertisers and tracking companies, Google itself will track your interests in the browser itself, controlling even more of the advertising ecosystem than it already does. Google calls this “enhanced ad privacy,” perhaps leaning into the idea that starting in 2024 they plan to “phase out” the third-party cookies that many advertisers currently use to track people. But the company will still gobble up your browsing habits to serve you ads, preserving its bottom line in a world where competition on privacy is pushing it to phase out third-party cookies.
Assuming “phase out display / personalized advertising completely” isn’t on the docket, which tbh we should be looking to the state to enforce that rule before we look to the (now public) corporation that invented the field, what else would people here rather them do? If I click around the EFF do they have some more sound/explicit arguments somewhere on that question?
I get why Chrome has to prioritize the things it does, but this kind of reasoning feels so backwards to me.
I'm sorry that blocking cross-site tracking makes it harder for ad companies to make money, but that's just not my concern. My browser is supposed to act in _my_ interests. It's the _user_ agent, after all. I'm not going to give any sympathy to the company that built the internet into the ad-supported hellscape that it is when they now use their browser monopoly to try to protect their business model.
I guess my point is: if you’re mad at this but still support capitalism you’re being inconsistent. The only possible fix for this is government action, and capitalism has led to regulatory capture which means we get basically 0 government action
EDIT: this is disregarding the “everyone boycott display ads companies and we’ll kill the industry with the invisible hand of the market” but I don’t have a ton of faith in that one
So get rid of third-party cookies and also don't add this abomination as a replacement.
(Obvious response: "there are legal reasons why we can't do that, it'd be viewed as anticompetitive". Obvious response to the obvious response: "stop being simultaneously an ad company and a browser vendor and it would no longer be anticompetitive".)
Getting rid of third party cookies is basically the status quo. IIRC if you use Safari or Firefox with default settings, third-party cookies are turned off.
This feature compared to that status quo is worse for privacy.
I think this might be the first time I’ve seen something that promises enhanced privacy instead doing directly the opposite, outside of the realm of malware and scam apps.
Imagine if there was a “save space on your hard drive” checkbox that used more storage space when it was checked. That’s what this is.
As mentioned by a sibling comment Google will be sued for antitrust reasons if they remove third party cookies as some other ad businesses rely on them. So in order to remove third party cookies Google must provide an alternative for other advertisers to use instead.
That may be the case but it's only another argument for why the company that makes your web browser should not be the same company that is the biggest advertising network(s) in the world.
I’m a little confused about that idea because it seems like as the article describes it, this locks out third party advertisers from using third-party cookies while giving Google a loophole for their own advertising business.
Google's dominant position in the online advertising business makes them legally impossible* to do what Firefox and Safari do. It's better for privacy compared to older versions of Chrome; though certainly as good as Firefox or Safari.
The enhanced privacy claim is honest and true; the benchmark is older versions of chrome.
I know I appear to be in the minority here, but I trust google to categorize and share my "interests" more than I do random websites (plus, I use enough Google products that they have that info anyway), and I prefer targeted ads to totally irrelevant ones (like the garbage ads on twitter). I'll be leaving this on, since it doesn't have any tangible negative impact.
Based on the rubbish ads I get on YouTube on my phone I don’t think google are in any place to know what my interest even are.
5 years ago I used to get adverts for things like films which I would often watch the whole way through. Today I get adverts for phones and Chromebook. It’s like google are unable to sell adverts that actually target me and instead just throw their own rubbish I have no interest in, and even if I did they are not using the right features (I think they said that a Chromebook can run something by adobe? A company I haven’t run any tools from for about 20 years).
I guess they don’t have much data on me as I don’t do google other than YT and sometimes maps on the desktop, but the adverts aren’t even based on the types of youtube videos I watch, they feel like very generic adverts for products I don’t want.
My wife and I were talking the other night at a friends who have an Alexa in their kitchen. We were talking about taking a ski trip out West to Colorado or Utah.
We get the car to leave. She pops open her Facebook feed and wouldn't you know? She's getting ads for resorts in. . .wait for it. . . .Colorado and Utah along with the two places were thinking of going.
I was creeped TF out because this wasn't the first time its happened and the other two times, we weren't near a listening device like an Alexa and similar things have happened.
If they don't know your preferences, then you're doing something right.
It's also likely that the conversation about the ski resorts was preceded by (or concurrent with) people Googling around about these things, or visiting ski related topics on FB, etc.
If you care at all about privacy and the future of a free Internet, this really should be that watershed moment that makes you take your head out of the sand.
Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.
What does a "free" internet look like without ads? Serious question, because right now ads pay for a lot. Ads are why we have reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like.
Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student.
If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".
They're not talking about free as in no monetary cost, they're talking about free as in freedom. Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows. I have repeatedly come across sites that don't even test on Firefox because Chrome is just the default now.
If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
I know what they're saying. I'm asking what the internet is going to look like when there's no advertising, and I'm pointing out what advertising currently allows for.
> Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows
What does that have to do with privacy or advertising?
> invades your privacy
I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
You set up a false equivalence. Why is the choice between these kinds of features, which lock Google in as the sole controller of online advertising, and no advertising?
I don't think I'm setting that up, but maybe I'm not understanding. Because to me what Google is doing is a clear attempt at maintaining the status quo of an ad-funded internet while removing the ability for fine-grained 3rd party tracking.
So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for?
What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
It's a threat to the "free" (as in freedom) internet in that with this as the tracking mechanism, Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests. It effectively makes "serves you ads and tracks your interests" a core part of what it means for a browser (Chrome) to be a browser.
Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction.
The problem here comes from Google being the ones who monopolise on the user data, leading them to be the only credible source of truth on the user interests. This is an outstanding move from them, business wise.
I agree that I prefer, privacy wise, to only deal with one company. But, this leaves them in a considerable advantage. It's ultimately, bad for consumers. And, from the beginning, bad for other businesses and market.
Correct, with the caveat that if you have Chrome profile sync enabled (without a sync passphrase set) then the advertising data tracked by Chrome likely gets uploaded unencrypted to Google-operated servers. I don't know if their privacy policy permits them to look at this data, or if they would look at it in practice.
True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about.
I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
Wordpress was founded, and hosted-Wordpress services ran for years, in an era where there was only non-personalized advertising. Why do you feel it would be unsustainable? As long as you limit media storage space and plugins, simple blogs cost extremely little to host per user.
I didn't say it's not sustainable, I'm saying it's potentially not sustainable. Sustainability of tracking-free ads would be a good conversation to have.
I believe it can be pretty good. I go to goodreads to track new releases and yeah, I wouldn’t mind ads if it were non invasive. Everyone that goes to goodreads is interested in reading and books in some form, so why not show ads about books here, instead of when I’m looking for music gear?
The internet existed without ads and big centralized sites. People ran their own sites, link rings, email and other services. The big guys have taken away so much of the ability to effectively self-host, but fundamentally we do not need them and we do not need ads.
You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist.
The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
There a plenty of non-ad-driver services that allow hosting blogs for free. Github, cloudfare’s free tier, and many others - and you can certainly find a one-click vm deployment of a blogging platform for less then 5$. I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
Hosting a static cheap is cheap. And even something powered by a CMS can be hosted on a cheap droplet. No one really expects you to share contents like video and music for free (and even that can be done cheaply if you’re only loking at a few TB of monthly bandwith). So yeah, someone should pay for it, but the internet itself isn’t free and everyone is paying for it.
The problem with provider supplied services like hosting and email is that people understandably don't want to tie cloud services to their home internet connection. What if you move, or find a provider that offers better/cheaper internet service.
As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.
My experience was that it was incredibly accessible. I easily set up a web server on my home internet connection because my line was synchronous and static IPs were easily available.
I don't see how one has to do with the other. Saying that the internet was accessible, and showing that by saying "I just had to set up a server" is insane.
It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine
Geocities had a tiny fraction of the users that forums attract these days and was not free for a major portion of its lifetime.
All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.
OK so are proposing that we shift the internet to a completely decentralized system somehow? And we'll just kill ads in the meantime while the entire world switches off of the current infra?
It was good, and you probably would have been to write your blog for free.
Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.
Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. And that would be less without all the crap needed to serve ads and track users and monetize everything.
I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
> Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month.
I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career.
> and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle
How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon".
> Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services
All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising.
> Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity
So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.
When I was a teenager, I found and installed Apache. WordPress apparently had existed for a year or two, but I didn't hear about it for several years after. I memorized my IP address and would link people to that, and never bought a hostname or anything.
If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.
It's not a requirement; it's a $0 option. You could also pay someone a few dollars or befriend a local computer nerd. My memory is fading now, but I think ISPs used to offer web hosting and email as part of your Internet package, so they could always bring that back (I think they still give you email). Once upon a time, Windows came with a web server. You could imagine that sharing a folder on the web could be as easy as it is (was?) to share a folder through SMB (just open folder properties, click "Share", and give it a name).
You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.
You don't need resources if you are small and unknown. Run it at your house until you have a few thousand users, and then move to something like Hetzner (if you're one of those Swiss people with 25 Gb/s Internet, skip step 2). If I'm interpreting their grafana[0] right, Wikimedia gets ~20 edits per second and usually peaks less than ~200k requests/second across all projects, and it looks like traffic has not exceeded 7 Gb/s over the last 90 days across all data centers. Even the largest projects are not a lot from a technical perspective these days.
But ads aren't going away. Maybe eventually all tracking goes away (probably in the EU first), but ads never do.
And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.
And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.
Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
I went as far as uninstalling chrome ~1 year ago on my daily driver personal desktop.
I use firefox as much as possible at work, but it is "not supported" by our IT department.
Confluence doesn't even work properly with firefox, its insane. Try pasting a photo you copied into your clipboard (by selecting the file) into confluence and it wont work.
With the future of the open web and privacy at stake, it's imperative that we stop letting the IT department or some random web service from dictating our choice of web browsers based on their convenience. If something doesn't work on Firefox, we should be collectively putting pressure on those in charge, letting them know that their laziness and lame excuses amount to forcing us to install spyware on our system.
You can report websites that don’t work in Firefox on webcompat.com and Mozilla web developers will test and diagnose the problem. When possible, they attempt to reach web developers at the site (using personal contacts or referrals when official channels aren’t working) to share the bug report and a suggested fix. In other cases, Firefox can include a site intervention script to patch the site or send a different browser User-Agent string to make it work.
Also, switch to something non-Chromium if at all possible.
Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
You seem to think that a choice of two things isn't a choice. If/when Firefox disappears and you only have chrome, that is what I would call not having a choice.
To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.
...which leads to yet another paradoxical situation: 80-90%+ of Mozilla's yearly revenue comes from google [0]. they keep firefox afloat (with 3% market share) with the sole purpose of avoiding antitrust action vs. chrome. IMHO if Firefox starts gaining traction big G takes the gloves off and employs different tactics to protect the vertical integration.
The more people that use Firefox, the more revenue Mozilla will earn as there are various ancillary services they sell and integrate into Firefox, along with things like sponsor links.
i dont have any degraded experience of "google services on firefox"; sounds quite false. Of course i dont have my browser feeding into google 24/7 like folks do with chrome now (but even that "feature" is still relatively new).
People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to use to harvest data; unlike today where chrome is the tool that the data-collectors use to harvest people
Google did start advertising chrome, but the speed of chrome (and stability) was not fake and it won over the early adopters.
Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise.
May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.
unfortunately, such a feature is so niche that almost nobody cares about it, and so does not move the needle in the fight against chrome.
According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.
i do wish FF shipped the multi-account-containers bundled with the install of FF; it is quite possibly the #1 most used plugin - esp with each tab being a random temp containter. It might be confusing for some folks with the advanced bit; but professionally it saves the day when testing front ends and peoples instructions are "clear your cache, find out how via your browser ect" - nah just open a new temp container
I've switched to Firefox after a long time on Chrome in preparation to avoid the Manifest V3 changes and it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Overall performance feels slower (although not drastically so, they've made big strides since last I used it) and some newer features (Nvidia Super Resolution is the big one for me) work only half the time.
Use Firefox for anything app-site-ish, but something else for the rest of the non-JS "document web".
HN doesn't need much in the way of a browser, for example. Ditto for a lot of other forums out there. The sooner we get rid of the notion that the only browsers we're supposed to use are Firefox or something else by Big Tech, and the sooner developers stop drinking the Goog-Aid of "progress", the more true browser diversity will occur.
Fully agreed; i also enjoy using an actual video player to play videos vs letting the now operating-system-sized-javascript-cruft-in-browser to try to do its thing. there are alternatives out there, use them; its called "the open web" for a reason, that "source code" fed to us can is code that we can choose to render, or not
I enjoyed Suckless Surf, although I always had the vague, nagging suspicion that Firefox must be doing something extra behind the scenes with privacy and security…
If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.
People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.
Afaik they want the same thing as google, our data, just geared their way. We are not protesting that Google is doing it, but more the general fact that it is done.
How much more evil do you want Google to get before it’s problematic that they control the portal through which most people interact with the web (both browser/engine and search)? And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already?
> And why not use Firefox (or Safari/WebKit) already?
Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.
3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.
I like Brave, but I cant recommend it to my less-than-techie friends because of the bullshit that you have go through to disable (VPN, Wallet, advert related stuff, etc), which confuses people and gets in the way.
> Today, I upgraded to Firefox 106. Upon opening Firefox, I received a very creepy message saying:
> "Thank you for loving Firefox".
> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.
I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.
Agreed that was fun to read. I can relate as sometimes I too get angry and rant at marketing copy. And really, why does Mozilla want me to pick a color for Firefox when I just want to use it? I guess I'll stop now.
> why does Mozilla want me to pick a color for Firefox when I just want to use it?
Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol
> If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web
My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.
My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"
I’m not defending Google. I completely excised them from my life almost a decade ago already.
I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.
There's alot of developers who think Safari is the new Internet Explorer[0][1][2][3][4][5][6]
As for my view, I think thats a bit extreme, though until relatively recently, Safari was slow to update and support many standards that came out in the last 4-5 years, though I think this is largely resolved, Apple does have some security and privacy concerns with APIs like the proposed File System Access API[7] that some feel is overblown and still holding the web back as a platform, specifically around gaining access to native functionality, particularly with iOS.
Also until very recently, their PWA support for things like push notifications were non-existant, they have slow rolled any web platform gains being supported on iOS and that could be perceived as protecting their App Store as the web platform becomes more app like.
My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but this is the overall scope of the complaints summarized
I'll switch to FF when they let the scrollbars be styled properly so my got-damn apps don't look like got-damn 1999 with those ugly ass scroll gutters.
Between that and the embed situation FF is clearly engaged in some sorta self-sabotage cycle.
I’m far more worried about attestation features that will force you to use the browser sites want you to use than I am about any browser-specific targeting “feature.”
I stopped using Chrome in all my personal stuff years ago, but its getting harder and harder to find a browser not based on Chrome.
My work? Yeah, they switched from Firefox to Chrome since Chrome updated their license faster. If you want to get FF installed on your laptop now, it takes an act of congress. Even as a developer you have to go through a process to get it installed; they discourage it that much. You also get a FF version that is about 4 versions older than the current stable version.
Hear hear. Of course, on my workstation Chrome is "the recommended browser for internal applications" and firefox is a developer special request which is not allowed to support add-ons
So in the org I work for, we aren't allowed to add through the normal chrome extensions process. Instead you must request the add on in an intranet app, assuming it's preapproved, and then reload your desktop applications.
I now use Firefox Focus as my default phone browser. It's great! Lacks a lot of the gestures that make Chrome good. But it deletes tab history by default on closing the app which makes it an adequate sandbox to open one-off links in
Same here. Firefox Focus has worked excellently as my default phone browser for years. I feel confident clicking randomly on cookie popups, knowing all the cookies will be gone by the time I close the page so they don't matter.
When set as the default brower, it also provides the in-app web view to other apps (e.g. inside LinkedIn). There it works fine too (also with that cookie-deleting confidence), and it has a drop-down to "Open in Firefox Focus", which is rarely needed but I found it useful for the full experience outside the app web view. That opens near-instantly without reloading, as it just transfers the already open page state.
I've treated chrome like I used to treat explorer... I use it for work because saas and internal apps are often only tested on one platform. I use ff for everything else. Funny thing is chrome is breaking a ton of internal Amazon tools as they're killing tamper monkey which is used to a very high level inside.
Every single person could switch and it wouldn't make enough of a dent to change anything -that, and also change to what? Firefox? Who's one of the the largest sponsors of Firefox -if not the largest- again?
You're absolutely right. Google has no respect at all for people's privacy and it's pointless to endlessly change settings in their adversarial browser to keep some (but not all) of our data from leaking.
Google is just going to keep coming up with new options we'll have to change, or silently change our settings following an update to allow more data collection, or even just ignore our settings and do whatever they want anyway.
You can't use untrustworthy user-hostile software and expect to not be constantly taken advantage of. Taking people's private data and handing it over to Google is what chrome was designed to do from day one.
You can write a bot in Python or any of the free versions of RPA software to make random searches and go to random sites to poison the data that they get.
Its not that easy, but poisoning the data can be done.
> “If you just clicked the big blue button that said “Got it” to make the pop-up go away, you opted yourself in.”
The screenshots in the article clearly illustrate a concerning trend: users are often subtly coerced into opting into certain features or settings without full awareness. This usually happens when they hurriedly click a prominent button like 'Got it' just to dismiss an annoying pop-up. It highlights a significant problem in UX where clarity and consent are traded for corporate gain. We need for more robust laws governing terms of service agreements, transparent pricing during sign-up processes, and the design of preference dialogs to ensure they are user-friendly and transparent. This is extremely user hostile.
It's also not legal in GDPR lands. It has to be easy to understand, the default have to be to opt out, and you are not allowed to block usage for people that opted out. Oh, and the message has to be short. I have seen "a sentence or two" mentioned as suggestion.
I think we almost always need to assume that dialogs like this are user hostile. The action your brian immediately wants to take is likely not the right action to take.
Yeah, this is gross. "Got it" sounds like they were just telling me something, not me agreeing to let them share my personal information. That dialog was clearly designed to make users click "Yes" while giving some sort of ass-cover that they got consent even though they clearly didn't.
At this point I'm so used to evil defaults, reverse psychology could work. Make the "deny all" button bright blue and the "gimme ads and viruses" button pale gray, and you might just catch me.
People would still opt in anyway. You have to realize that the only people who care about this are the subset of the population who know who Stallman is. Avg Joe couldn't care less. I think that's the real problem.
When I first saw this I was really confused about what to do as it seemed I was turning privacy off by turning these off. The use of the term privacy with this feature is confusing
As someone who works in adte h my opinion this was started by Apple's 'privacy' features which just means you opt in to apple tracking everything instead of other companies. The issue I have there is that Apple is the company that knows your real name. They used this to become a late monopoly in iOS advertising.
Google took note and is now building and offering more "privacy tools".
Exactly this is an excuse to centralize more power to Google. Of course they’d rather not take on the work, but if regulators force them to end up in a position where they control even more data? Well, they are begrudgingly happy to oblige.
I recently noticed that even when using a VPN to another country and in Private Browsing in Safari and with Location turned off, Google Search still shows results based on my location!!?
Its BS that Google makes these settings per browser and not per account, so you have to make these changes on each computer\phone you use. Anyone know if these settings apply to a private browser session.
Third party cookies were used without your opt in consent to create profiles based on your behavior by companies like LiveRamp or Oracle. Apple and Google have eliminated or will eliminate the covert tracking based on 3p cookies and mobile ad ids. I don’t support dark UI patterns but privacy sandbox and Apple AppTrackingTransparency hurt advertisers, publishers, and ad platforms but improve consumers privacy. It is not a black and white situation given the monopolistic size of these two tech titans but their privacy solutions are based on aggregated and locally stored data vs cloud based covert 1:1 identifiers - which you couldn’t control.
I checked “ad topics” (I do this occasionally) and there are more topics, but they are still really generic and seem entirely harmless in my case. Yes, it’s personalization, but only barely.
On the other hand, website domain names are often very specialized, which means that “Site suggested ads” can be very specific. These are the ads that follow you around. So far I’ve just deleted one that annoyed me.
Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before. For an epoch a site can only get at most 1 topic. The browser will return topics for up to the last 3 epochs (the site only gets data for the epochs it has called the API in)
I believe tropic interest is calculated locally by the (Google) browser, though it might be repeatable on the Google server side for users syncing their browsing history to a Google account.
The Topics API itself only returns up to three topic IDs to websites, not 500 bits for all topics. But that still gives trackers up to 500 * 499 * 498 (124,251,000) topic combinations that can be paired with other fingerprintable user information like GeoIP, language, browser version, and operating system.
Google is an advertising company that only makes money with the shitty part of the internet which is why that part is expanding.
The chrome plated gmail cohorts have been educated to read for free and publish for compensation. They need a shitty internet to thrive, post and "make something awesome" in.
The shitty internet is doing fine and raising the participants it needs.
The free internet is indestructible and made by people who care. And of course it belongs to the minority.
My two cents is that while browser tracking matters, people should also be conscious of not giving away their email and cell number when signing up for accounts or making purchases. Every time you do this, the company sells the data to Google and Meta and it gets joined together on those primary keys, creating a comprehensive profile of your interests. Use Apple’s “Hide my email” and I also like the company “my pseudo” which creates throw away e-mails and cell numbers. It’s silly to be all up tight about browser tracking, but then register everywhere with your real personal information.
I hear this a lot, but I have never understood the details. How is the data sold to Google? What program are these websites participating in, where Google is paying them for customer email addresses, phone numbers, and purchase history?
Yes, Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) do allow businesses to upload customer email addresses and phone numbers for advertising purposes, under specific conditions. This process is part of what's known as "Custom Audiences."
1. *Google Customer Match:* Google allows businesses to upload a list of email addresses through their Google Ads service. This feature, known as Customer Match, lets advertisers target or retarget their advertisements to these customers across Google products like Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail. Businesses must comply with Google's policies and data protection laws.
2. *Meta Custom Audiences:* Similarly, Meta (Facebook) offers a feature called Custom Audiences, where businesses can upload lists of emails or phone numbers. These are then used to match users on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms in Meta's network for targeted advertising. The data is hashed to protect user privacy, and the businesses must have the right to use this data.
Both companies emphasize privacy and the necessity for businesses to have obtained the data lawfully and with the user's consent. Users also have tools at their disposal to control their ad preferences and understand why they are seeing certain ads. It's a balance between effective targeted advertising and user privacy, governed by both internal policies and external regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Google and Meta are building social graphs across this uploaded information.
204 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadit didn't feel like my ad privacy had been enhanced
You're using the product of a company who's main business is selling ads, what privacy are you expecting to get?
That's like using McDonald's & Coca-Cola for the school cafeteria catering service and expecting to get a heathy and nutritious meal.
Having full access to your computer's memory, display, network, and all input devices.
Use Firefox instead. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Profiles have existed in FF for a very long time, I believe even back to the launch of Chrome. I think what Chrome did was made them readily accessible. I might have the history slightly wrong, but FF has had them at least as far back as 2011.
Can you please share where profiles have been requested for many years?
The part that has been requested is to make them accessible and first class and not tucked in behind screens that look like internal "power user" screens
I'm sorry that blocking cross-site tracking makes it harder for ad companies to make money, but that's just not my concern. My browser is supposed to act in _my_ interests. It's the _user_ agent, after all. I'm not going to give any sympathy to the company that built the internet into the ad-supported hellscape that it is when they now use their browser monopoly to try to protect their business model.
EDIT: this is disregarding the “everyone boycott display ads companies and we’ll kill the industry with the invisible hand of the market” but I don’t have a ton of faith in that one
It's pure doublespeak. Privacy is surveillance.
(Obvious response: "there are legal reasons why we can't do that, it'd be viewed as anticompetitive". Obvious response to the obvious response: "stop being simultaneously an ad company and a browser vendor and it would no longer be anticompetitive".)
“From what?”
“From what we’re gonna do to you if you don’t pay us for protection.”
This feature compared to that status quo is worse for privacy.
I think this might be the first time I’ve seen something that promises enhanced privacy instead doing directly the opposite, outside of the realm of malware and scam apps.
Imagine if there was a “save space on your hard drive” checkbox that used more storage space when it was checked. That’s what this is.
Fox guarding the hen house.
(Disclosure: until 1.5y ago I worked at Google, including on things related to the privacy sandbox.)
The enhanced privacy claim is honest and true; the benchmark is older versions of chrome.
*: See the UK CMA https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/62052c52e90e0...
Of course, we all know why that can’t happen.
5 years ago I used to get adverts for things like films which I would often watch the whole way through. Today I get adverts for phones and Chromebook. It’s like google are unable to sell adverts that actually target me and instead just throw their own rubbish I have no interest in, and even if I did they are not using the right features (I think they said that a Chromebook can run something by adobe? A company I haven’t run any tools from for about 20 years).
I guess they don’t have much data on me as I don’t do google other than YT and sometimes maps on the desktop, but the adverts aren’t even based on the types of youtube videos I watch, they feel like very generic adverts for products I don’t want.
I would consider this a good thing.
My wife and I were talking the other night at a friends who have an Alexa in their kitchen. We were talking about taking a ski trip out West to Colorado or Utah.
We get the car to leave. She pops open her Facebook feed and wouldn't you know? She's getting ads for resorts in. . .wait for it. . . .Colorado and Utah along with the two places were thinking of going.
I was creeped TF out because this wasn't the first time its happened and the other two times, we weren't near a listening device like an Alexa and similar things have happened.
If they don't know your preferences, then you're doing something right.
It’s much more benign, but Facebook definitely does advertise things to a whole group it guesses (usually correctly) were located together.
i bet you were also talking about a bunch of other things, that didn't show up in the FB feed.
I know logically and rationally how it works in a broad fashion.
But yet I swear that sometimes it feels like something is listening to my conversations!
For instance:
the other night in my Hotel Room, I watched Last Week Tonight which was about Elon Musk.
I turn off the TV, and shortly afterwards check Instagram.
And Boom! I’m seeing Ads for Starlink.
It does freak you out a bit!
I had only my iPhone with me. So no Alexa or Google devices.
But still…. Coincidence or not, it’s disconcerting!
Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.
Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student.
If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".
If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
> Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows
What does that have to do with privacy or advertising?
> invades your privacy
I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for?
What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction.
Hence the EFFs warning.
But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features.
> "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government."
But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance.
> The point is that it hands over a lot of control.
But you can disable it.
> What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas?
That would suck, but:
a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous
b) That would be insane
I agree that I prefer, privacy wise, to only deal with one company. But, this leaves them in a considerable advantage. It's ultimately, bad for consumers. And, from the beginning, bad for other businesses and market.
It's not like it goes to Google first and then it goes to advertisers. Chrome is what decides which data leaves the browser. Or have I misunderstood?
I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
> I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
I'm saying someone has to pay for it.
Look up geocities maybe, most providers gave you some free space anyhow
Providers didn't offer free space, you paid for it with your subscription, and you would lose if you changed provider.
Yeah it had ads but without much targeting
Providers: you still pay for internet subscriptions; you used to get several services included for a fair price
As a result, few people use them, and because they stopped being a competitive advantage, providers stopped offering them, and when they do, it is usually not free and a borderline scam. A way to add fees to unsuspecting users for something they won't even use.
> I easily set up a web server
I can't believe you can write one after the other.
It would be very healthy anyhow if setting up a server (or any kind of self-hosted service) were less fraught upon, it really is much simpler than many people imagine
Other than the hurdles that the giants have put in the way it could be incredibly fast today.
All of that, and worth noting still that Geocities was extremely unique in what it offered when it offered it. It's not a very compelling model for the entire internet, at best it was an experiment that ultimately failed.
It arguably failed because of Yahoo, and it was just one hosting service, not a model
Yes a lot of crappy sites would not exist; very expensive ones such as (ads-filled) YouTube probably wouldn't either, but YouTube was the beginning of the downfall; we'd definitely have been better off without it.
I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career.
> and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle
How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon".
> Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services
All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising.
> Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity
So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
If you just want to host a blog and maybe dabble in PHP, Apache works great. These days as an adult who programs professionally, my personal site is just a directory that I point nginx to with xhtml/xslt/css files that I hand edit + things like photos. I do have a domain name these days, but it's not like you need one. If you wanted something to be permanent to avoid link rot, you should want browsers to support ipfs so you could use that.
You asked what a free internet would look like without ads, but you need to keep in mind that ads have distorted the market that we have today. Even today, it's easy for a curious teenager to set up a web site for free on their computer, and it could be made even easier if the demand weren't being satisfied by people dumping onto markets.
So I would say, not the whole internet would go away without ads, but probably the worst parts and what remains is worth visiting.
They got funding because they are large and have reputation behind them.
If you tried starting up a new Wikipedia to compete, guess he much non-advert funding you'd get?
Look at how quora tried and failed hard, and have to sell out to survive. Look at stack overflow these days?
They made lots of bad choices, leading to users (including me) leaving the plattform.
And in general I don't think that you need that many wikipedias, my point was, that donation funded websites work -> if people want it to work.
[0] https://grafana.wikimedia.org
And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers.
And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too.
Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.
I went as far as uninstalling chrome ~1 year ago on my daily driver personal desktop.
I use firefox as much as possible at work, but it is "not supported" by our IT department.
Confluence doesn't even work properly with firefox, its insane. Try pasting a photo you copied into your clipboard (by selecting the file) into confluence and it wont work.
Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
yeah, so lets make that happen and then find out what the response is.
right now we're stuck in the "tried nothing and all out of ideas" state.
People won't switch when you get a degraded experience of Google services on Firefox.
Similarly, if Firefox was as easy to embed as Chrome we'd probably see a lot more alternatives based on it.
People switched when google (having the site everybody went to daily) started advertising on the home page "use our browser" - must be nice; and in the start it seemed like a tool for users to use to harvest data; unlike today where chrome is the tool that the data-collectors use to harvest people
Firefox dropped the ball at the time, and now even tho it has mostly caught up in speed and stability, their market share doesn't grow because it's not substantially better feature wise.
May be the adblock wars can change that, because chrome seems to be going towards eliminating adblocker.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
According to a quick statistic search, firefox has about 363 million users, while the multi-account addon has about 368,938 users - that's 0.1% of users. Compared to ublock origin, which has 7,388,295 and thus is at least within 2% of all users.
HN doesn't need much in the way of a browser, for example. Ditto for a lot of other forums out there. The sooner we get rid of the notion that the only browsers we're supposed to use are Firefox or something else by Big Tech, and the sooner developers stop drinking the Goog-Aid of "progress", the more true browser diversity will occur.
If tomorrow Google turns next-level evil in terms of privacy / steering the web, Microsoft will have forked Chromium within a week, and everyone (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc) will swap their upstream immediately.
People have this illusion that Google has an ironclad grip on Chromium, but they don’t. It’s maximally permissively licensed, the only reason they get to decide much is because they put in (pay) the dev hours.
Mozilla these days seems more happy at pumping out tech-woke messages rather than being privacy first. Hell, they’ve refused to add an adblocker to their iOS browser for years now.
3rd party WebKit browsers are more rare, thus less well-developed.
I’ve settled on using Brave.
Brave does it via their extras. Mozilla mostly via their search deal with Google.
> "Thank you for loving Firefox".
> I really resent the presumptuousness of this message. I never told you I "loved" Firefox. How could anyone "love" a Web browser? It's a functional tool: a doorway to the Web.
I am dying. This has to be one of the funniest things I've read all year.
Guess I just don't care. Some people want it. I mean I change my theme. But there's defaults and I don't have to think about most of these things and they don't affect me or anyone I know, so why care? lol
Or, Microsoft will be happy with this "next-level evil."
My fear isn't that tomorrow Google will start doing the browser-monopoly equivalent of kicking puppies and twirling a black mustache.
My fear is that Google has gradually accustomed everyone to their monopolistic dominance over the web, to the point where they can engage in blatant monopolistic privacy-destroying activities like privacy sandbox and people will still rush to their defense saying "but they haven't broken out the mustache twirling yet!"
I’m simply freeing people from the illusion that Google has “won the web” or whatever. Google is effectively giving everyone a free ride with Chromium. They aren’t forcing anyone onto Chrome (where the real tracking happens), and if they did by making Chromium private from now on, again, forks and upstream swaps would happen at lightspeed.
I get everyone hates on Safari but it is legitimately also a different engine and they have shown to be privacy conscious.
Orion in particular is very good IMO
As for my view, I think thats a bit extreme, though until relatively recently, Safari was slow to update and support many standards that came out in the last 4-5 years, though I think this is largely resolved, Apple does have some security and privacy concerns with APIs like the proposed File System Access API[7] that some feel is overblown and still holding the web back as a platform, specifically around gaining access to native functionality, particularly with iOS.
Also until very recently, their PWA support for things like push notifications were non-existant, they have slow rolled any web platform gains being supported on iOS and that could be perceived as protecting their App Store as the web platform becomes more app like.
My own opinion is somewhere in the middle, but this is the overall scope of the complaints summarized
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming...
[1]: https://blog.logrocket.com/when-will-safari-finally-get-it-t...
[2]: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
[3]: Even here on hacker news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377890
[4]: Dev advocate for Safari Team addressing the statement headon: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1491064075987873792
[5]: Op-ed by Nolan Lawson on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...
[6]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/09/safari-team-asks-for-fe...
[7]: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
Between that and the embed situation FF is clearly engaged in some sorta self-sabotage cycle.
My work? Yeah, they switched from Firefox to Chrome since Chrome updated their license faster. If you want to get FF installed on your laptop now, it takes an act of congress. Even as a developer you have to go through a process to get it installed; they discourage it that much. You also get a FF version that is about 4 versions older than the current stable version.
I don't recall this to be the case for Firefox (that may have changed by now?). So you can only use vanilla Firefox in a corporate managed profile.
When set as the default brower, it also provides the in-app web view to other apps (e.g. inside LinkedIn). There it works fine too (also with that cookie-deleting confidence), and it has a drop-down to "Open in Firefox Focus", which is rarely needed but I found it useful for the full experience outside the app web view. That opens near-instantly without reloading, as it just transfers the already open page state.
Just goes to show how cocky megacorps have gotten.
Google has been taking steps to decouple Chrome from the base OS for a bit now[0].
0. https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-...
Google is just going to keep coming up with new options we'll have to change, or silently change our settings following an update to allow more data collection, or even just ignore our settings and do whatever they want anyway.
You can't use untrustworthy user-hostile software and expect to not be constantly taken advantage of. Taking people's private data and handing it over to Google is what chrome was designed to do from day one.
Instead of asking users to uninstall Chrome, ask web devs to make sites compatible with something other than Chrome.
As an example, I would use Links a lot more if OpenWrt forum would work.
Its not that easy, but poisoning the data can be done.
The screenshots in the article clearly illustrate a concerning trend: users are often subtly coerced into opting into certain features or settings without full awareness. This usually happens when they hurriedly click a prominent button like 'Got it' just to dismiss an annoying pop-up. It highlights a significant problem in UX where clarity and consent are traded for corporate gain. We need for more robust laws governing terms of service agreements, transparent pricing during sign-up processes, and the design of preference dialogs to ensure they are user-friendly and transparent. This is extremely user hostile.
Looks like this https://blog.incogni.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/enhanced...
Not the first time and not the last time they treat US customers differently because of this.
Google took note and is now building and offering more "privacy tools".
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It's reminiscent of turning off Bluetooth and WiFi in the Settings on iPhones, only to find out they still emit radio waves.
1. Try using the Privacy Sandbox APIs on your own site to confirm they don't work.
2. Examine your Chrome profile to make sure it doesn't contain ad topics or ad measurement data.
3. Sniff network traffic to ensure Chrome is not sending anything sensitive to Google (using SSLKEYLOGFILE so you can decrypt HTTPS connections).
EFF's article ought to be clearer that all of the privacy sandbox logic happens on your own device rather than Google servers.
The opposite--tying it to a persistent widespread account--seems creepier overall.
On the other hand, website domain names are often very specialized, which means that “Site suggested ads” can be very specific. These are the ads that follow you around. So far I’ve just deleted one that annoyed me.
It seems pretty controllable.
Wait. Doesn't that just mean that google collects 500 bits of information about you? How is that not considered an ID? I don't understand.
Other than when it returns a random topic, the browser only reveals a topic to a site if that site has observed the user on a site with that topic before. For an epoch a site can only get at most 1 topic. The browser will return topics for up to the last 3 epochs (the site only gets data for the epochs it has called the API in)
The Topics API itself only returns up to three topic IDs to websites, not 500 bits for all topics. But that still gives trackers up to 500 * 499 * 498 (124,251,000) topic combinations that can be paired with other fingerprintable user information like GeoIP, language, browser version, and operating system.
Google is an advertising company that only makes money with the shitty part of the internet which is why that part is expanding.
The chrome plated gmail cohorts have been educated to read for free and publish for compensation. They need a shitty internet to thrive, post and "make something awesome" in.
The shitty internet is doing fine and raising the participants it needs.
The free internet is indestructible and made by people who care. And of course it belongs to the minority.
Yes, Google and Meta (the parent company of Facebook) do allow businesses to upload customer email addresses and phone numbers for advertising purposes, under specific conditions. This process is part of what's known as "Custom Audiences."
1. *Google Customer Match:* Google allows businesses to upload a list of email addresses through their Google Ads service. This feature, known as Customer Match, lets advertisers target or retarget their advertisements to these customers across Google products like Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail. Businesses must comply with Google's policies and data protection laws.
2. *Meta Custom Audiences:* Similarly, Meta (Facebook) offers a feature called Custom Audiences, where businesses can upload lists of emails or phone numbers. These are then used to match users on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms in Meta's network for targeted advertising. The data is hashed to protect user privacy, and the businesses must have the right to use this data.
Both companies emphasize privacy and the necessity for businesses to have obtained the data lawfully and with the user's consent. Users also have tools at their disposal to control their ad preferences and understand why they are seeing certain ads. It's a balance between effective targeted advertising and user privacy, governed by both internal policies and external regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
Google and Meta are building social graphs across this uploaded information.