Google wants to change the way users are tracked. The technology is FLoC, which aims to give advertisers a way of targeting ads without exposing details on individual users.
So far, FLOC affects only Chrome browser. It will analyze your browsing history to display ads. Check out whether you are “floced” or not here:
I do my hardest to stay away from Google, apart from my Android phone and my email address, they have nothing else. Here in Linux I use Firefox, switch off Google altogether. Duck Duck Go is my search engine of choice and sticking with it I be. Although soon I am going to go for the Google free Android on my phone, already use F-Droid products.
Fed up to the back teeth with the Internet slowing down with all the telemetry hogging bandwidth. Years ago and I’m talking years ago, you would search on the web and whoosh it was there instantly in Firefox. These days Google have the monopoly in their chrome, but at a cost to the user and I think it is disgraceful of them to do legal spying, but like I said in the past, blame all the cyber criminals for Big Brother looking at your every move on the web. Not only that Google have to make some money now, to get back the money they must of lost with Stadia. That’s closing or is now closed??
Yes, it is finally closing. Google is putting one more product of theirs onto the huge graveyard they worked on over the years.
The tech for streaming games just isn’t there yet. They mucked the launch up with hardly anything included and without them launching Stadia saying this is a prototype and is going to be worked on, as we go along. They instead just released it into the wild, without saying anything else about the flaws or the non included stuff, that it was meant to have, or should of had. Bad marketing on their front.
In my view, it’s much worse than that. I do not want it to ever be there. It’s just the most drastic mechanism of “you do not own anything you pay for, you can only ever rent it”. This motto is already a huge problem e.g. in the right to repair discussion in the USA and other countries with similar legislation.
Gamers already have too many subscription opportunities and they really fall for it, because they do not understand what they are doing. Renting of games in this way is the worst sign you can show. Now, with things like Stadia, big corpo tries to completely take away the sense of owning something from the consumers, by making everything pay to use instead of buy to own.
People should always be able to pay once for something and be allowed and able to do whatever they want with/to it. If I pay for a car, I expect to own it, not to rent it and give it back after a couple of years just because it needs an oil refill.
I was in two minds with Steam when it first released, as yes the game is yours, but you can only play it in their app. You have not got the game in front of you, like on a DVD, but I give them their due, you can back the game up onto external, internal drives, without having to fill up your free space on your main machine. I have two drives Linux Games and Windows Games already installed onto two separate 2TB drives.
Plus you know it is yours, as I have three gaming PC’s all with Steam on and able to insert my backed up installs into any of the PC’s apart from Windows Only games of course, but Linux Games run fine and of course Windows games run fine in Windows. We have the monopoly in Linux though, as Steam in my opinion runs smoother in Linux than Windows. When reinstalling a game in Windows from backup it starts to download the game again, so you have to uninstall the installation, then close down Steam, reopen Steam and try again and it installs from your backup. We don’t get that here in Linux, only in Proton.
Steam was what pushed me to stop dual booting ~10 years ago… Two top-shelf titles came out with native Linux support :
Serious Sam 3
Left 4 Dead 2
And Team Fortress with a native Linux port from virtually day one…
As for google, it doesn’t really bother me, I don’t give a “FloC” 
- I’m virtually tethered to my Android phone for work (the only other option being iOS) - i.e. there’s 2 or 3 apps I can ONLY get from the official google play store which I need all day, everyday, to do my job - and then if I was to get adventurous and flash some non-Google ROM to my phone, then sneak into the Google play store from the tradesman’s entrance, I’d have to spend days trying to get those apps to work with my employer’s and my customer’s infrastructure again…
Once upon a time I did have something to hide, I even had two phones at a time sometimes (not quite a “burner”) and force GPS off at all times etc (never have ANY cell phones present when having “confidential” conversations with friends and/or aquaintances)… no longer… and truth be told, I’d rather have ads shouting in my face that know a little bit about my prefences, than shite I’d never contemplate purchasing in a million years… but then you also gotta remember “even paranoid people have real enemies”… and I block ads anyway with PiHole - so I only get about 50% of the adds directed at me anyway…
And - I’m incredibly lazy, and all the google shite is just so goddamn convenient, I really can’t be arsed trying other solutions… e.g. my Google Chrome experience on the 3 Linux computers I use at home, is the same experience as on the Linux computer I use at work, and the Windows 10 computer I sometimes use at work - and it just does it for me using my gmail account…
And anyway (Google Chrome “latest” on Ubuntu 20.04.20) :
It’s true we’re not going to own anything soon, it’s all going to go back to being rented. I can remember our first TV being rented by good old Radio Rentals, when I was crawling around as a child. That video really does bring it home to how greedy companies are, not just satisfied in the consumer making the purchase, but basically want to take control of how the consumer intends to use their product, which he out right bought. Now they’re charging him an extra forty dollars a month for the privilege. No one is going to make me part with my computers, they can get knotted. Even if it means I have to run them in secret, they will never get their hands on them. I built all three myself, out of hard earned cash. By the time this comes around I’ll be gone and am going to have my computers cremated with me.
yes, we should start using browsers like brave and firefox
