this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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privacy

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Big tech and governments are monitoring and recording your eating activities. c/Privacy provides tips and tricks to protect your privacy against global surveillance.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google doesn't want to keep your information private, they want to keep it private from everyone else.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

unless they pay for it*

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

And then sell it to them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

by making it so that it is hidden to anyone, except for google. It is not possible to hide your ip completely online. Your ip address is the only way for anyone to reach you. The only way to hide your ip from someone is to have someone else (who does know your ip address) make the request on your behalf, and forward data forward and back between the two endpoints. Everything has to go through the middleman.

Google will be that middleman

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Google is ready for that "sacrifice" on your behalf.

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

Yup, they will get access to literally everything you do online.

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

The joke's on them: I do nothing online in a literal fashion. #litchally

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

Yeah but Google will know it either way, so it really doesn't matter. Not that IPs really matter anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Google wouldn't know it either way. What even is this sentiment? Google doesn't own the internet. Don't use their services and use a VPN.

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

they know your ip anyway. everyone does. It's your only identifier online. I'd rather not send all my data through them anyway.

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

Ironically you're probably writing on the most tracked OS ever, odds are.

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

It's a Google VPN, which means they own it, which means they see literally everything you do if you use it, rather than just seeing what you do if you visit a page with their tracking and you don't block their cookies and scripts.

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

as opposed to someone else seeing all your traffic, if it were owned by anyone else.

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

The difference is that those companies presumably don't run the biggest advertising agency in the world, don't cooperate with governments, and don't log your history or original IP address. Using Google as a VPN provider in oppressive countries that punish free speech online could present a serious hazard. Plus there's just the overall privacy issue too.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

my comment on the same topic:

Since most of Google’s revenue comes from tracking users across the internet and offering them personalized ads, it will be interesting to see how the company strikes a balance between user privacy and revenue generation.

Isn't it obvious? Google own's the proxies. And judging by the look of this, they are going to act as a a Man In The Middle for HTTPS, so they will be actually able to see everyone's plain text connections. This is not a privacy feature, but a privacy nightmare. Like everything else on Chrome, tbh

Edit: I don't know if they will be breaking HTTPS or no, since I didn't see the details of how this works. But even if they don't see your plain text traffic, they are logging your every request, which is scary.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

So companies can still get your IP the same as before, they just have to pay Google now to get it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

We have every reason to be skeptical of Google where privacy is concerned, but the design described here looks interesting. In particular, proxying only the off-site resources, and running them through two proxy layers from different providers.

I still won't use Chrome, but if the design holds up to scrutiny, something like it on Firefox (with configurable independent proxy providers) could be appealing.

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

So, instead of companies tracking your IP address, they will have to pay Google to buy your IP address, along with your Google account info and demographics.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They stopped caring about your ip address and have moved to profiling, so they’ll gladly help you change your ip address to get more from you.

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

At least it's only the off site resources. As someone who works with credit card processing online and has to deal with BIN attacks those proxy IPs would get banned pretty quickly both by us and the credit card processor. We already have issues with people using free proxies.

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

Google is the reason we need IP protection.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Reading the GitHub, it's actually not a bad idea if you're allowed to change the cdn