New! From Google! "Enhanced" ad privacy!

jimrob4@midwest.social to Technology@lemmy.ml – 949 points –

Got this notification when I opened Chrome when coming back to my desk after lunch.

"We changed our privacy settings to allow us to snoop on what you're looking at and shove you ads accordingly. Feel free to opt out, but we'll probably opt you back in when you aren't paying attention."

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me hugs Firefox

Which is literally kept alive by Google. They have a monopoly, stop deluding yourself intot hinking there are any good guys (except maybe the Librewolf, Mullvad, and Tor devs)

Librewolf is based on FF, you know right? Mozilla does receive Google funding (that's why their default search engine is Google), but adopting FF and derivatives is also about Chromium not being the single dominant engine: that would only strengthen Google's monopoly.

As long as we don't use Chromium-based browsers (and Google services) we're doing good against Google's monopoly already.

While I agree, most people fail to see the bigger picture. They use Firefox to prevent Chromium from having a monopoly for browser features, but what they fail to see is that in most cases, Google already has full control. If Chromium browsers get a feature, Firefox will inevitably implement it in Gecko and the browser so that users don't say things like "Firefox sucks". Firefox does not suck, Google and their monopolistic practices suck. Now it does provide some practical benefit, for example when Google decides to introduce a more restricted version of a pre existing feature, Firefox can opt to keep on using tje less restricted version as well. The most prominent example of this is the whole Manifest v3 mess. But with something like Web Environment Integrity (or as many, myself included, call it, DRM for the Web), Firefox will inevitably adopt it after Google does, so as to not have users upset and leaving.

I agree with what's gonna happen. At the same time, I guess Mozilla won't make it hard for "Google's web DRM" to be either toggled off via user config, or sandboxed from user data. They have interest in catering to people fed up with Google's constant privacy invasions, so I'm currently waiting to see their next actions with moderate confidence and a healthy dose of skepticism as well.