We have to learn to live with that… the internet is a bit of a free lunch for advertisers… they can bombard us with heaps of material at very little cost.
If we could find a way to make advertising expensive, that would remove some of the motivation for data collection.
There seems to be no way of making privacy breaches accountable, so maybe we could make the data less useful.
How do you know ?
Imagine they have that for all internet users the simple storage space needed
How long do they guard it for?
I am always surprised if i go back through my history thats not local the distance i can go back
I dont look at anything interesting to the world, mainly linux things so they wont get much from my data
Monopolies need to be broken up to make the market more competitive. Just like central banks regulate interest rates, set price floors / limits to control inflation, over / under pricing etc
I would prefer for Chrome to continue to be an open source project but if “Chrome” itself as a product was to be separated into a company, then idk what their business model will be? Like the whole point of Google Chrome is to drive Google’s ad business (Search).
Sorry do not agree.
Browsers exist from other suppliers, firefox, edge, opera, safari so users do have lots of choice
Search engines also, bing, yahoo, msn, duckduck go, there is a big choice.
The difficulty is education to seperate the 2
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That’s simple. You do a GDPR-request (maybe that feature is disabled outside of the EU). I think this was the link I followed:
How long do they keep it? It’s nuanced, and here you find it:
https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US
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That’s true as long as one player doesn’t get overly dominating.
Google has roughly 90% of the search market share. This is partly because they are the default browser on Chrome (and they are also the main financer of every other browser to be default there)
Chrome has roughly 2/3 of the browser market share. Furthermore, apart from Firefox, every other browser also is built on the Chromium technology. Firefox stays alive at the grace of Google, who basically pay for the lion’s share of the bills.
The impact from an advertising company on a browser enables the browser to not support W3C features that heighten the privacy of the user. It can also implement tracking algorithms straight into the browser.
I think your assumption “let’s just accept that our privacy is dead” is there with a lot of people. And I feel sorry about that. Because with solutions like NextCloud or LibreOffice, you don’t need to sacrifice your privacy. Obviously, it will cost you a few dollars per month, but i hope you value your privacy more than that.
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Does that give you privacy?
I doubt it.
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At least you’re not locked into one company (open source solution - you can take all your stuff elsewhere if you want to) and you know what is being stored.
And no, you won’t be protected against government agencies, but in that case your data won’t be sold for marketing and influencing. Keep in mind that privacy is not an ON/OFF switch, but a spectrum… there’s different levels (and facets) if privacy.
But if you don’t care about that… I guess a few dollars less is the better choice. Just let’s hope our next government won’t condemn some of your behavior (e.g. gay people in some Arab countries, minority groups in China, etc…)
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Not sure that is true in all cases … I think some such as viagra was much longer, and the covid vacine phiser still hold on to, but its an area i know little about having never worked in or around that industry
But often they are also controlled by the government of the day
Right or wrongly
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May be true but if you take apple, you get safari by default, if you take windows 11 entry level you get edge and its quite difficult to install another unless it in the windows store.
Same on linux in the repositories for some time in linux mint you could not get chrome it was chromium after firefox
If you buy a new computer you are locked into windows, if you buy apple you are locked into mac osx. Should the courts be looking at that…
It quite difficult to install mac osx on a pc, 30 years ago we had power pc and power mac so you did stand a chance but not now
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Actually you’re not locked into the system with a Windows OS. Nothing preventing you from wiping the OS and installing Linux.
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Or dual booting. Or running a VM. Or using WSL.
To me Microsoft is not evil. They’ve been demonized, but I don’t have any huge grudge against them. I have more of a grudge against Google, because I was always a Yahoo guy for search and used IE for a browser. Along comes this new search engine with a goofy name that didn’t really give any better results, but somehow is the new thing that everyone is switching to. They produced Google Chrome, and everyone said how much faster it was, but I didn’t see it. It was just Google and so everyone had to use it.
And so it goes.
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But its getting harder and harder to do
I had a lenovo in my workshop last week and after 2 hours had to give up. No matter what I did or tried it just kept rejecting my media or system. Linux mint, mate, cinnamon, debian, … bare in mind I have done over 400 of them over the last 15 years, but this one stumped me. Imagine for a new user.
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That is because of Android using chrome by default.
I dont care which browser is most popular, as long as there remains a choice.
The only way to guarantee a choice is to support open source.
We need some measures to make open source mandatory… splitting companies will not help with that… all you get is 2 lockins instead of one.
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I don’t like the narrative of calling anyone “evil”. That’s cheap and unproductive. I have faith that most people (if not all) in most companies (if not all) honestly believe they are doing something that is somewhere between neutral and good.
I do believe that certain actions of big companies are not in the interest of society or the customer of the products. Especially if those products are being offered for (nearly) no cost.
A big eye-opener for me was the whole openAI story… So both Google and Microsoft had agreements explicitly stating that they would not violate copyright and steal data from their customers. Admittedly, they said it a bit nicer in Legaleze, but that’s what it boiled down to. Now, what they quietly neglected to mention, was that they were ingesting all that data to be used as training data for their large language models (that at that point, we didn’t even know existed).
So I rather not trust Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta, Apple or Microsoft with all our data (and there probably are a few other less visible players out there too who are more settled in the banking industry or other less visible areas).
I don’t think they are evil, they function within their own priorities. And they disalign with my values in such a strong way that I rather avoid using them.
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I agree. That’s why I choose to not use any Apple products when I can avoid it. The walled garden does not fit me.
My own view is that neither google, microsoft, or apple are wrong in the actions they take from a commercial front they create tools that end users want and need plus protect them. The developments in technology have come from the investment they make and although they make profits as a result that is not wrong, money makes the world go round
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I think I agree with @callpaul.eu .
If the profits become excessive, we can control that with taxation
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