Google can totally explain why Chromium browsers quietly tell only its websites about your CPU, GPU usage Running a Chromium-based browser, such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge? The chances are good it's quietly telling Google all about your CPU and GPU usage when you visit one of the search giant's websites. The feature is, from what we can tell, for performance monitoring and not really for tracking – Google knows who you are …
Their search-reach is not the problem. It's one of the sub-problems, but it's not the actual problem. Not using their search does not prevent them from strip-mining you for data.
The more root-adjacent problem is that Google has become so ingrained in how the WWW (and to a large degree the Internet as well - they own massive amounts of physical infrastructure that makes up the Internet) works, that it is virtually impossible to not touch them.
If you want to test this hypothesis out: block any and all google-owned domain, not just www.google.com, but all of them. Block any and all AS that they use. Then tell me how well you get by... You'll quickly realize how many things online use assets pulled from those AS's (e.g. gstatic), or rely on assets located there (app store, cloud functions in GCP, firebase, the list goes on). Simple example: if you use an android phone and block all google AS's, your phone suddenly thinks it is constantly offline because the connectivity check (which goes to google) fails.
In a way, the internet - which was designed to be decentralized as a mitigation for a decapitation strike - has failed at that part of its experiment. We've re-centralized the Internet in the hands of a couple of large players who now have a complete stranglehold over it. Some others on that list of oligarchs are microsoft, amazon, cloudflare, and (to those that have fallen for the reality distortion field) apple(*).
(*) same deal, if you want to see how ingrained they are, block any one of those entities and tell me how well you can still function on the internet.
Yeah, like this site works perfectly well with links to
www.googlesyndication.com
www.googletagmanager.com
BLOCKED.
Google.com is also blocked and only opened up in one tab when I have to fill out one of their stupid captcha things. Google software is banned in my home.
All my internet access is via a VPN apart from YouTube which seems to have taken umbridge to serving videos via a VPN recently so I have one old laptop that is only used for Google/YouTube. No other access is allowed from it.
FSCK Google and all its slimy business stands for.
Just to make sure I understand, you are acknowledging the huge dependence on google as a system, is this correct? Sites use captcha, you use youtube, ... Blocking www.google.com is not "blocking google", that is just papering over a particular poster google put up on the wall.
Every time any of your systems touches any system owned by google, it provides them with information about you: where you are, what you ask for, when you do things, meta-data about the device/software you use, how frequently you do things, your pattern of life, the list goes on. All of this surveillance just to sell you to the highest bidder of advertisement. It's a kinda sad business model to be honest.
"All my internet access is via a VPN apart from YouTube which seems to have taken umbridge to serving videos via a VPN . . . "
I know this the obvious one but do you have the ability to change VPN servers and hence IP? I have the same problem here with The Register blocking me if I'm on certain VPN IPs. A simple change to a different VPN server and IP address fixes the problem. Never had a problem with YouTube though. Not sure what's up with that for you.
But it doesn't matter what I nor everyone else doing the same do. There are too few of us to make any difference to what happens in the market. The fact that 80% of the world (excluding China) is using Android with all the Google bits means that most of the world is dependent on Google, and of course plenty of iPhone users will use Google for something if not on their phone then on their PC.
Indeed. At least those of us who do take steps to avoid Google know that we are not part of their monster LLM data model. Isn't nice to be on the outside for a change?
I block all Ads and yes, I do change my VPN Point of presence weekly.
Yes, I have to use Google from time to time. Those stupid capctha things require me to open up access to google.com. Once past the captcha, it gets closed down. As for Youtube?
All YT access is done using an old Laptop that is used for nothing else. No data to slurp and the username for the login bears no resemblance to my own or anyone in my houses' name.
FSCK Google and all it stands for (and MS and Apple and Oracle and all social-media platforms).
Yours,
Grumpy Old Man who had tickets for the cricket at Lord's today. (It ended yesterday).
I am sure they will shortly be putting out a statement that they don't use that API to gain any kind of market advantage or for any purposes that might be illegal.
You might have to wait a few days for that statement though, they have to delete some code first...
Considering its a preinstalled extension that can't be disabled by the end user means its built in Google spyware, and I really wish more mainstream news would cover this sort of thing as it might make people think twice about using Chrome. As since it also works with incognito mode its trivial for Google to use it to track when you visit one of their sites using a private browser window.
I can fully understand why Google put it in Chrome. It's anti-competitive, increases the browser's attack surface and is slightly (but not all that) creepy. So fits Google's MO perfectly.
But what advantage to Microsoft and Brave get from shipping it? It does nothing for them. Do they not review Google's code, and just copy and paste their browsers with a new badge on?
It also gives Google the chance to optimise their websites to say work more slowly if viewed in Firefox - stuffing as much crappy Javascript at them as possible - while sweetly putting up ap pop-up to say, "why not use our lovely Chrome browser" it'll work much faster. And then make sure it does. I'm sure they wouldn't do that (probably?) because they also want people using their other services, not just their browswer - though controlling peoples' browser gives you much more access to their data...
Google already has popups etc all over the place trying to get people to use Chrome, as well as still installing via drive-by downloads from 3rd parties like Adobe, it's largely how they got so dominant in the browser market (and the alternatives from MS up until recently were crap as well).
Wonder if they're just seeing what they can get away with though, the adblocker queries they've been running on Youtube and other sites are under investigation IIRC.
But what advantage to Microsoft and Brave get from shipping it?
They don't want to give users a reason to change their browser. Remember at one time users left Firefox because it didn't play well with YouTube because YouTube used an API that was only implemented in Chromium browsers?
So Edge and Brave are coming along for the ride. That's the price of using a megacorp's "free" browser engine.
In a healthy ecosystem with many browser engines, Google couldn't do that.
I get a popup periodically asking me if i want to open a url in the Edgey browser on my pixel. I can of course set the default browser on my phone, but it's not a big deal as far as i'm concerned. The edge thing does bother me. Unfortunately i have to use outlook for work email, and i believe that's where the problem is. I get message when i open a link from inside and email. no plans to install another browser.
That link points to twitter.com.
I thought that had been renamed to X, following the lunatic's preference.
So, I'm guessing it was too much of a bother to actually rename everything. Apparently, he just contented himelf by redoing the logo and stuff the rest.
Of course, given that he had already fired all the competent people, it's pretty obvious that His Muskiness doesn't have the nous to change the domain name.
My experience with Google is that if the version of Chrome on my phone is more than a couple of releases out of date, the site will sulk and tell me that I can't continue because I'm using an insecure browser.
At which point I switch to Firefox and stuff works. I tried it once with a really old version of Firefox (like double digit version number) and...it still worked.
I guess it's nice that Google is being honest about the state of their browser.....
They are instilling learned helplessness/dependence. They are positioning themselves as feudal lords: "come within the confines of my castle's wall, I will keep you safe, and don't go outside because there be dragons, and thieves, and murderers. You can only trust me to keep you safe".
And once you start believing that, you're (quite literally) a captive audience.
It's not even only google's fault; as an industry we have been extraordinarily bad at educating and empowering those who use the things we build. From the get-go, there were folks in white lab-coats huddled in front of a big iron telling that young'en who wanted to use that machine as well that "this is a serious machine, for serious people, you need to know very advanced maths, and logic, and stuff, you are too dumb for this. Also, you need a white lab coat which you don't have, so go on, off you go, let this be for serious people, don't fret over this because your tiny, little brain would never understand any of it anyway".
The result of this is that (normal) people file "how computers work" in the same mental cabinet as "stuff I couldn't possibly comprehend so why even bother" - which in the end is a huge disservice to them and to the field.
We've been practicing this horrible attitude continuously for the entirety of the existence of the field. We continue to do this to this day and cement it even further with things like forced upgrades, and relentless patching that we don't explain except for "if you don't patch, then bad things will happen to you, and you don't want that, do you?" (this is - I kid you not - a verbatim quote I've seen in an e-mail sent around a large-ish organization to justify why it enforced windows update on its machines) and 'security alerts' that just scare people.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkon, Google is probably perfectly fine with you doing that:
> Falkon (formerly QupZilla) is a free and open-source web browser developed by KDE. It is built on the QtWebEngine, which is a wrapper for the Chromium browser core.
Unless they've stripped that out (and I'm not saying they have[n't]), it makes zero difference. In fact, it probably is detrimental because it continues to contribute to the browser monoculture that is chromium-based browser.
Those small modifications maintain the mono-culture. Making small tweaks to a daisy does not make it not a daisy. I'm not saying that the ability to modify isn't a big deal, it is, but that's not what will stave off the mono-culture.
The mono-culture is not about (the ability of) ungoogling chromium, that's nice, but in reality just a band-aid and a canard. It's about the the return of "This site works only in IE4.0^WChrome". Remember those days? When sites hard-needed IE to work, weren't they "great"?
When sites only work in chromium-based rendering engines because those are the only browsers around (mono-culture), then google has the entire internet by whichever dangly bits it chooses, that is when they start making changes to the requirements on sites (like what happened with IE) and to dictate what makes a website a website, and thus available. They can (and will) arbitrarily make changes to the requirements to render 'correctly' in their browser, the cost of not rendering in that browser will make every single site fall in line in less than a New York Second. And those imposed changes will not be for the benefit of anyone but google. That is the problem with the mono-culture.
The solution is that you need multiple families of browsers! Right now, we have 2-and-a-half: Chromium, Safari, and Firefox. We used to have Presto (Opera in the before-times) as well as Trident (IE).
So all the *.google.com sites snoop around for CPU, GPU, RAM, etc data so that they can provide a good experience on meet.google.com. If Google's intent was truly benign and harmless, they would only snoop that data on sites that actually use it. They wouldn't be doing that slurp for every Google on-line property. I call bravo-sierra.
Zoom, so far as I know, doesn’t use Chromium code and crucially doesn’t host meetings on a Google domain. So the DMA should tell them (or more likely, themselves) to stop whining and write their own version of this if they want to. Likewise any other conference software provider (WebEx, Teams etc).
The DMA seem to be very good at dreaming up work for themselves. I voted remain but I’d also vote for them to get out more and stop being so picky.
And not be allowed to develop any client side browsers, so long as it is so deeply embedded in the web on the server side with an effective monopoly in search, and large shares in cloud, email, etc.
Trying to play whack a mole with all the ways Google is able to abuse their dominance in client side to help their share on the server side and vice versa isn't going to work. I find it hard to believe that the EU is going after Apple on multiple fronts to such a degree that they are being forced to open up access to a single radio (NFC) to third parties, but they have so far completely failed to take any action against Google.
In fact, taking action against Apple to force them to allow full third party browsers will likely end up handing Google a monopoly on browsers, or at least it will if the same ends up happening in the US. Because then web sites will be able to design/test for Chrome/Edge alone and put up a "best viewed by" badge on their sites, since iPhone users will be able to download Chrome. They can't do that today because the massive installed base of iPhones that can't run anything without a Safari engine prevents it. The meager share of Firefox sure won't stand in the way - any more than it did when this happened with IE6 despite the anemic share of Netscape at the time.
In all honesty.....
We who know how to use googles services whilst blocking (most) of their nefarious backend activities (if you cant beat them use and abuse them) have enjoyed using their services for free for a while now
The great unwashed who get abused by them help them pay googles bills and make extortionate profits
Unfortunantly I see a time coming where the shitty advertising model breaks down and we the self empowered will have to open our pockets for the services they currently provide for free
Damn, oh well, all good things come to an end :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
