What happens when every time your browser sends data to a tracker it makes a beep sound?

heyfrancis@lemmy.ml to

Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 351 points – 5 months ago

social.wildeboer.net

video

Found post in https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/112320305177390840

EDIT: converted to a text post instead of link. hoping someday there's easy way to re-toot Mastodon post to lemmy

Watching the counter on uBlock Origin skyrocket on any google or meta page is the same feeling.

My uBlock Origin is showing 73 blocks on THIS PAGE here on lemmy after allowing the scripts to play the video. Without the video, only 1.

0 on mbin, even after playing the video.

The video is a link from a mastodon instance (masto.host). So they use trackers here?

Mine sits at 3.5 million and this isn't even that old of a setup.

I built this computer just under 3 months ago and I'm at 5.26M.

I've been using ublock on the same browser for over a year now and I'm only at 2.3M. What kind of sites are you guys on?

Probably majority piracy sites because considering my habits I hit a combined count of a 1 year old desktop browser + 1½ year old mobile browser 993k in total. And I am online for an unhealthy amount already.

Might be related, but even youtube, after 8 minutes of video that tab has 90 blocks.

8? My subsciption tab is about 2h open and collected 619 blocks. Ridiculous.

It went up by 2 while typing that comment!

Where are you all browsing? My PC is about 1 year old and in all it's lifetimeshas seen 700k blocks.
Now mind you I am browsing a fair bit mobile and watch YT on my TV but even with mobile firefox + ublock combined it's 993k in total.

there should be an ublock origin plugin that beeps every time

It's like a Geiger counter for privacy.

I run uBlock origin on every device I can. I use PiHole on my home network. I've canceled every streaming service in favor of self-hosting, and IoT devices are blocked from the internet. Incoming connections are geoblocked. Meta is blocked at the DNS level. Suffice to say I have put a lot of effort into privacy and security.

I still can't get rid of Google, though, solely because of Gmail. I've had the same address for so many years (ever since the invite-only days), it would be an absolute nightmare to try to change it.

Forward gmail to new provider and then use new email from now on. Eventually you'll want to go in and update your email address for all the other sites you frequent..takes a few hours but you'll be free.

Did it last year and it was relatively easy.

Buy your own site and actually contrill your email. Like 20 a month and I have full control.

Nah, just get some email provider with a good reputation and setup gmail to forward all mail. From there you can start to change the emails in all your accounts one by one. And hey, even if takes you 5 years to complete, it's still worth it. Oh, some else had the exact same recommendation. I should have read the other comments first. Oh well

That's what i did. Took me ~8 months to have everything migrated over. But it's so worth it

And you think it will be easier to change if you wait a few more years? :)

Create a new account and set up email forwarding and that's a start.

I certainly don't think it will be easier in a few years, but I also think that after 19 years of using gmail, a few more years aren't going to make a huge difference. It's really kind of sad to think about how far Google has fallen. I started with gmail in 2005. At the time, Google was starting to become the "go-to" search engine. They had better results than Yahoo or AltaVista; the "do no evil" slogan was also a great "feel-good" factor. I don't think anyone at the time expected how different things would be in 2024.

I can host my own media on my own server. I use Nextcloud Talk for IMs (also hosted on my own server). Just about any online service can be self-hosted, except for email. I have certainly tried in the past, even hosting email on a VPS. You run into so many issues, though. Your server isn't trusted, websites don't recognize your domain, a whole litany of problems. Email is just one of those things that you really can't self-host.

Sure, I could switch to a new email provider, forward gmail, and slowly over time update my email address for everyone who's sending to my gmail account. What happens then when my new email provider decides to start harvesting my data for profit? Email is one of those things where you can't live without it, but you're forced to use a service that isn't your own and could fuck you at any time.

I had my gmail account since the early invite days too! Your final point is valid, there really is no way to tell if sometime down the line a company may change gears and we end up in the same BS we're in now.

That being said, proton seems to have a good track record so far and unless they get acquired down the line I can't see them moving so drastically away from their focus on privacy.

Yeah I was also on Gmail when it was new, but it became appearent that Google was a bad actor many years ago. So I've been on fastmail for like 5 years now. It's never been down. And it's always very fast, and has many features Google doesn't have at all. They do care about privacy but since it's hosted in Australia which is part of the 5 eyes pact, all data is shared with the NSA. To me it's OK. I just want my email to be in a better place than Google.

But yeah I would also self host it if I could. I have a proxmox cluster with tons of virtual machines at home, running nomad to schedule jobs on them. I have pihole as a dns server so i get a lot of tracking protection just from that.

That's why you need your own server for email I guess.

I just got my own domain and set my Gmail account to auto forward. Gradually moving away from using it (I was in the same boat).

Edit: Of course my backend is Microsoft for the time being so 'into the fire' I guess.

This hurt to hear tbh. If there’s a solution, I hope you make it known

1 more...

Did some digging -- This story is two years old. Old repo is here:

https://github.com/berthubert/googerteller

There's a shit-ton of forks so I bet someone has made something more modern with the concept. I know very little C++ so I'm useless.

I am wrong they are all just forks with no commits.

Some of the forks have commits. It loaded in the GitHub app for me so I don’t know where you’re looking.

Perhaps the stars, as most forks had no stars.

What would you like as something more modern for it to do instead making an audible sound?

I might make a fork of it if it sounds interesting.

For some reason I imagine that scene in of one of the first few episodes of the HBO mini-series Chernobyl, when they wade into the water near the exploded reactor and their flashlights just immediately die due to the massive amount of radiation and the episode ends in darkness with the crew’s Geiger counters just going absolute ape-shit sounding like a singular continuous tone.