"Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities
This was overwhelming rejected by everyone, including Microsoft, Mozilla, Safari, and others. It's universally disliked, and Google knows this, but they intentionally know they're abusing their monopoly to push anti-consumer bullshit.
I think I'll just invite Google to come get my dna, set up cameras everywhere, and install a microchip in my brain. Then I can be done with this slow-walk of privacy invasion.
Chrome is like Facebook, zero respect for privacy. Anything you do with Chrome can and will be used. From day one Chrome has fed all your browsing activity to their index bot. After your browsed a URL, shortly after googlebot crawled that site.
This will expose your user data. This will allow you to get targeted, and it will allow you to get targeted for long term interests versus short term ones. God forbid someone with a political agenda ever decides to act on this data ...
A few years ago, I switched from Firefox to Chrome. A few months ago, I switched back to Firefox. Chrome is rolling out changes which are completely unacceptable, such as making adblockers impossible, and using my private browsing history for their own ads.
Got this today, I have to use chrome for a couple things every month, and they conveniently turned on all their tracking and ads and bullshit. Had to turn all that crap off again. Not that they'd glean any useful information from my paltry chrome usage, but it still pisses me off.
In Chrome, start at the three dots in the upper-right corner and go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Ad privacy. (Or just type
chrome://settings/adPrivacy into your address field.) The ad privacy page lets you turn off Chrome's targeted ads.
Damn advertisers are finally gonna realize how fucking lonely I am is keeping me from being a better consumer and has me resenting capitalism and they'll work to change my sad life, right?
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, isolate the losers. Got it.
Interesting tidbit: I've been watching "the big bang theory" a lot these past few weeks on my own hosted jellyfin install.
I don't use google search anywhere, I don't type tbbt anywhere. Yet, on my Android phone I have this obligatory Google news thing when I swipe left (HATE that) and all of the sudden that thing got chock full of chatgpt written TBBT articles... I don't really go there (usually end up there by accident swiping left once too many) and I don't read those articles but it really obviously switched to TBBT articles when I switched to watching TBBT.
This really kinda freaks me out and makes me wonder WTF more google is monitoring. I use a Google Chromecast, I guess google monitors that?
Everyone talks about Firefox. And that's cause Firefox is good and hands down the best. But I've been using Vivaldi which is chromium based for years. Anyone have any opinion on Vivaldi?
Firefox is a great browser to switch to, it has a vast variety of customizability in configuration. It is a very flexible browser and it has helped me a lot in the past few years.
As a further suggestion on top of it, do use a custom user.js to harden your browser even more, set up your DNS Resolver to use Quad9 or any other private DNS Server like Scaleway, NextDNS, etc.
I also recommend using Oblivious DNS over HTTPS for added security.
I am on a Freedesktop Linux system hence I refered to the Archlinux Wiki in setting the beforementioned configurations up.
Someone needs to make an extension that googles random stuff all the time and floods ones history with so much background noise that the history becomes useless.
My ad " you like thick women, Stoicism and band tees? well do we have a goth girl for you, limited item sold, not responsible for broken car windows or torched house, all purchases are final.
FYI, while this is a terrible move, it does not allow advertisers to see your browsing history like you said. Google looks into your history, the advertiser gives them ads and Google serves the ads to the users they think will like it. The advertiser never sees any of your data. Ironically, Google's advertising system is the safest compared to systems like Meta's.
I see a lot of people mentioning that you should just switch to Firefox, but if you're doing that because of privacy, you will not be off that much better by doing just that - unless you fiddle with the settings and get a custom user.js, such as this one, that properly hardens it and a few extenstions, such as Decentraleyes, Cookie Auto Delete or ClearURLs.
But it can get annoying, so instead I'd recommend giving LibreWolf a try. From my experience it works pretty much out of the box, and for the few settings that may be annoying to you they have a quick guide about how to disable them.
But even better than that, I'd recommend giving Mullvad Browser a try. It's basically a clear-net version of Tor Browser, and so far I haven't heard anything negative about them. I also really like their idea about pairing a VPN service (that's optional) with a browser, so now you have exactly the same browser fingerprint as any other user using the same VPN (as long as you don't add any extensions), which will make you more resistant even to the more advanced fingerprinting techniques, since there's basically no way how to tell all of the users of the VPN apart. Some more info and reasoning, along with more recommendations, can be found at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#mullvad-browser
I've recently started using Mullvad, and was using LibreWolf as my daily browser, so now I'm switching between them randomly. I do run into issued from time to time, mostly because of 3rd party requests or auto-deleted cookies when leaving a domain, which can break some kind of cross-site flows. But whenever there's an issue, I just quickly fire up Brave to do that one task. But all things considered it's an amazing experience, so I do recommend giving some of them a try.
This is replacing tracking cookies and browser fingerprinting, which let advertisers see your history with a system that objectively doesn't. The goal is to discourage advertisers from using trackers. Google does some shit. I don't understand the anger about this.
Google and others experimented with pay-per-view models, but it turns out people hate having to pay for what turns out to be clickbait or ideologically disagreeable content and most will not pay in any case, so the Internet runs on ads. Click through rates for untargeted ads are abysmal. This technology isn't great, but the alternatives, tracking or web sites shutting down, are worse. Anyone who doesn't want targeted ads can opt-out forever in a few clicks.
I've mostly been using the chromium-based Brave Browser which is Chrome without the advertising engine plus a built-in adblocker. Requires going through the settings once to enable that. There's a very decent android-only browser that does much the same, called Bromite. (Brave has a mobile version but Bromite is developed from scratch for Android, and is stable & supported).