this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Google enables advertisers a look into your browsing history...

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Vivaldi is based on Chromium. So it basically gets placed in the same field as Chrome and Edge.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Glad I switched to firefox when it became apparent google wants to take away control to shove more ads in our faces.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I thought they already did that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Fun fact, 86% of the revenue for these big tech (Twitter/Meta/Google/YT) are from ads. 😀

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Funner fact, social media apps collect more data than anybody else.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Uhhh.....

"Since your history shows frequent use of ~~pornhub~~, we highly recommend websites like ~~xvideos~~ and ~~redtube~~"

Because that's totally what every 15 year old fellow really needs hey Google?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I now understand late stage capitalism

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

(uses a different browser)

Have fun with that

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I thought they did already.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

It's well done, but there's a big flaw. It doesn't make clear that Google isn't selling your data. In fact, Google's entire business model would be obliterated if it actually sold your data.

What they're selling is use of their ad network, which they can tout as having these huge profiles on everyone to advertise to. So if you're an advertiser and want to sell bee-keeping equipment, Google can say, "We'll show your ads to people who've expressed interest in keeping bees or related topics."

If they sold the data itself, no one would need the ad network, and their ads revenue would dry up after the initial data sales.

So it's in their best interests to keep your data secure. The problem is that it's also in their best interests to give you minimal control over that data, and - as the comic eloquently makes clear - harvest as much of it as they possibly can.

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