Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Rimu@piefed.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 950 points –
Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
arstechnica.com

If you can, use Firefox.

191

You are viewing a single comment

We're in a lose/lose scenario here. Google has been inserting ad-tracking and soon will be nuking ad-blockers.

Then you've got Firefox wanting to implement AI soon at the cost of employees.

Is there really anywhere else we can go before both of their shit hits the fan?

I don't think we should equate Firefox's AI plans with other ones.

Firefox's AI will be trained entirely locally with data that you choose to give it, and won't send information back to Firefox.

By the sounds of it it won't be a chatbot either, but rather an aid for finding more sources, pointing out fake reviews, assisting in translation, etc.

My two main issues with "AI" are unethically sourced training data, and hoovering up personal information when you use it. Neither are a problem for Mozilla's "AI" plans.

Well this is the thing here. We're in an era of time in technology where we DON'T want people having as much of our data. Whether it's for good or bad use, we just don't want it. How hard is that for these companies to comprehend?

The internet was fine without this sort of thing. We were fine without AI. Why complicate it at all?

Firefox is open source, bullshit can be excised if necessary

Maintaining a browser is crazy hard. If Firefox goes to shit, it would require some serious foundation to maintain a good fork.

Yes, and expensive. This is often overlooked when people just say don't worry it's FOSS. The enshitification happens slowly, and by the time there is outrage about how bad it becomes the last non intrusive fork might be several years old and take even more work to modernize. I'm not giving up all hope, but you are correct, it would be a very ambitious community undertaking to keep such a thing competitive with the plethora of evil browsers out there.

I chose my wording accurately, I never mentioned maintaining the whole browser

Opera, Vivaldi and Brave are descent alternatives.

EDIT:

Vivaldi (based on Opera, but FOSS and not Chinese) is still good.

I didn't realize Brave inserted referral codes, TIL.

I'd argue Firefox is the descent alternative.

There are a plethora of sources out there of good reasons not to use these browsers. But seriously, Firefox is an excellent browser, treat yourself to better privacy 🦊

I only listed Opera because Vivaldi's based on it, but that's about where it ends. Vivaldi and FF are the only two I use tbh.

We need a federated browser.

Firefox needs to ship with IPFS & IPNS built in, then we'd have a Distributed web. Which is I think what you're asking for maybe?

3 more...
3 more...