Got this notification when I opened Chrome when coming back to my desk after lunch.
“We changed our privacy settings to allow us to snoop on what you’re looking at and shove you ads accordingly. Feel free to opt out, but we’ll probably opt you back in when you aren’t paying attention.”
Saw that, immediately reinstalled Firefox, saw the tab bar was still a mess and reuninstalled Firefox. Is there a non-chromium browser with a decent UI. Firefox is a disaster after 3 tabs.
I am genuinely curious what is your issue with the tab bar? I got a long list of issues I have with FF (still my main browser anyways) but the tab bar is not one of them and I always have 20+ tabs open. Not saying your opinion is wrong, just trying to understand why you think so.
Not OP but I really dislike the way Firefox handles multiple tabs. When there are too many tabs, Chrome would shrink the tabs to icon size, but Firefox insists on keep a weird minimum tab size and make you scroll the tabs awkwardly.
I stopped using Firefox for a long time because of that, until I discovered Sidebery (vertical tabs).
Besides just jumping ship to veritcal tabs, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a user .css customization, settings option, or other small extension to get that in Firefox.
Oh yea, that makes sense. The Chrome ones get super super small I think right? Has been a very long time since I last used it. I personally like it the was FF does it because I can more easily tell what tab is what, but I can totally see how it you would dislike that.
Also good to know something like Sidebery exist.
Thanks for your answer :)
Why tho? Just block ads at all. They just want to be “friendly” when the web drm changes hit
It is the illusion of choice granted in order to minimize the Damage Done by experts pointing out why Google is trying to kill the internet
💯
more choices over ads you see
Who in their right mind want to see ads
People who are used to ads somehow just glaze over them and seem to not actually see them. It’s quite Impressive really
I want for very little. Therefore I clearly want ads personalized to me that try to make me feel inadequate so that I do want more.
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They are good on paper
But not in execution
If you’re going to show me ads thag I give a shit about they may be less annoying.
We wouldn’t have gotten this far if they weren’t good in execution. Ads may not work on you or many people in this thread, but it works on enough people to make this worth it.
Google is a large company, they need to pay their employees and server. It’s pretty entitled of you to expect them to work for free. /s
I read this everywhere these days. Shilling has become culture.
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Sadly it hasn’t become culture, that was a thing even back in the days when the internet was just gamefaqs, new grounds, and whatever Message Board your mates went to.
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Frightening, isn’t it?
I dunno how other people operate but I never once bought something off an ad.
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Does it? Can you even remember a product that you bought after looking at its ad?
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Let me take a look at what I buy. No, everything has been reviewed, thought upon (cos I ain’t rich) and then maybe bought.
They frame it that way to reenforce the notion that ads are an inevitable thing.
As Netflix and producers of toilet paper know well, people in the end are happy to pay for things they like or need. But Google and its like have discovered that instead of selling stuff to me, it’s much more profitable to sell me to others.
No thanks.
God I wish the days would catch on in america, you just don’t get the same level of clean with toilet paper, seriously I used to have problems with an itchy anus, doctor always said it was normal. Even when it was red from wiping too much just to try to get rid of the itch.
Switching to a bidet cured everything.
If I start to itch back there I just use the bidet, clears it right up
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Fuck Google
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Just opted in.
Am I supposed to disable uBlock Origin and Pihole now? 😈
Question: if personalized ads are so great, why can’t I just go into my google account’s settings and put there all the info about me? My income, my interests, ages of my children, my favorite food… Since personalized ads are so good every google users will just fill it in to get the best ads possible, right? Why not give people this option instead of implementing all this trackers?
Because everyone in the game is making money off those trackers. Just because you give them your address and general interests doesn’t mean they know you’re shopping for a new fence for your house or different daycares for your kids at a specific given time.
They are also scarily accurate too. To the point where some people were finding out their teenage daughters were secretly pregnant when Target would send them an infant coupon package in the mail that was intercepted by them. That was guessed solely on data Google and other entities sold them, that’s crazy.
I would fill it up with false information.
Then you will not get all those super useful, personalized ads! How will you know what do you need?
On my work devices I try to Google and use as many websites in Spanish as possible. So now when I get Ads I at least get the benefit of learning some new Español
They do give you that option for a lot of it: https://myadcenter.google.com/
You can set whether information like income, profession, education, etc is used, + or - different topics/brands, as well as see the ads you’ve been shown in the past.
This feature that the OP posted about however is about doing all this in the browser instead of doing the tracking on their servers and across various websites with embedded analytics/tracking code. The end goal is also to get rid of third-party cookies entirely, hopefully shutting down that method of tracking, while still being able to provide targeted advertising.
I’m joking of course but if people really wanted relevant adds they would just set it up like they create playlists in spotify. Spotify doesn’t have to track your browser history to guess what music will you enjoy because people just tell them that. Obviously no one wants personalized ads. Google knows this but they keep pretending that all this tracking is to improve your experience.
I love how targeting yourself with ads relevant to your interests is presented as something advantageous for us. Sorry, I don’t desire to be constantly prodded to take interest in new gadgets and cat foods.
You actually can in Google ad settings, not that you should give them more info though.
Fuck google
I’m already seeing all the ads I want to see.
Fucking. None.
Does anyone know if this is coming to (Chrome based) Edge?
For the last year and for all of the crap Google has been changing in Google Chrome, I’ve actually been pretty happy with Edge (never thought I’d be saying that).
Side chat… am I the only one who has started finding Bing more useful than Google? I never thought I would type that statement out in my life…
It’s truly shocking but yes, I don’t immediately change search engine preferences when Edge defaults to Bing now.
My guess is that it’s unlikely, Microsoft doesn’t want to empower Google even more, and running your OS is everything they need to plunder your data
“We changed our privacy settings to allow us to snoop on what you’re looking at and shove you ads accordingly. Feel free to opt out, but we’ll probably opt you back in when you aren’t paying attention.”
-Me wiping the coffee I spat after reading this. Hilarious 😂
It’s funny how small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up to a world where the largest advertising firm in the world basically is the internet for the vast majority of people. Everyone uses chrome and rarely types in a web address, they just type the name of the thing into Google and trust mommy to show them what’s appropriate. They’ve back doored the entire population into basically what AOL was trying to be 20 years ago.
“we are going to help protect your privacy” from WHO Google? Is it from you? Because it seems like we need protection from you most of all. Constantly being gaslit by mega-corporations is the new American dream. It’s okay because they love us, deep down, and we know that even though they don’t show it.
It’s funny how small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up to a world where the largest advertising firm in the world basically is the internet for the vast majority of people.
In a microcosm of the same kind of creeping normalcy, Bethesda charging a few bucks for horse armor in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was once a reach too far, until it wasn’t.
Now we have Star Citizen levels of grifting as well as ActiBlizz “buy a currency to get a currency that is leveraged as currency to get credit toward a currency in a battle pass” layer cake grifting.
EDIT: Typo’d on the sequel count.
Can you expand on the last paragraph? I am not a gamer, so although I understand most words in that sentence I really have no idea what you’re referring to.
Well, to put it simply there are these things called microtransactions, basically you want items in a game or extra lives or something like that, you can pay for them instead of earning them, sometimes they make it so that certain items can only be paid for, worse they make it so that certain items can only be paid for and will only be offered for a limited amount of time. If you miss the window to buy them now you will never be given another chance. Normally this is something cool like a tie in with a new movie that came out or something of that nature. Fortnite does this a lot, hope you got those Marvel characters when they were offering them cuz you’re not getting them now.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough there was another layer to it, one of the things you can buy with microtransactions, using real money, is a form of money that can only be used in the game.
So, what you give them a dollar, they give you 100 coins, and there isn’t even exchange rate? Of course not
There are various bundles where you can buy the premium currency as it is often called. Typically the more expensive bundles give more, and it’s not tiered properly, so let’s say $5 gives you 800 coins, but $10 gives you 2,000 coins, it’s to goad you and to always buying the higher amount, even if you only want that one item.
But it can get worse, they can set the prices so that you can just barely afford the item you want with that $10 tier, so the next year is 5000 coins for $20. And with that you can get enough coins to buy the item you want and have just a little left over, but not enough for you to do anything with unless you buy a lot of coins to supplement that amount, which can trick you into thinking that you’re getting a good deal when you are actually being fleeced pretty hard.
Fortnite is so bad because despite it being a good game, it does all of the above and targets to children who don’t know anything about money.
There are cases where you can buy one form of Premium currency with real money, so that you can buy a higher tier of Premium currency with the premium currency you bought with real money, forcing you to pay even more.
And this is one reason why modern games suck, the other reason is that everyone is using the same Engine.
That’s fascinating, it’s like microtransaction recursion. I actually want someone to say fuck it and pull the wool off and just create a legitimate gambling first person shooter… I would love that. I used to play counter strike a long time ago and love poker. Just have like an ammo buy in cost that forms the prize pool. Make it tournament style with a bounty a top 3 and just rake part of the pool for profits and all that money your going to have to pour into cheating detection.
I imagine one day these practices will be cracked down upon when the European Union comes out for blood, the European Union is actually pretty good at getting us new laws that help regulate the internet and Technology.
I don’t have a problem with a game that is based on gambling, I just don’t think one should be targeted to children, and I definitely believe that you need to be upfront about what you’re actually doing.
Sadly the European Union is a case of, the wheels of Justice move slowly, but they are moving. Only recently did they make loot boxes illegal, but loot boxes had already been abandoned by the industry in favor of something far worse, the battle pass.
Basically you pay a fee, and then you can unlock various features by doing certain missions, but if you don’t claim everything by the time the battle pass goes off of sale, then tough luck, and if you don’t get that battle pass, you are likely never getting a chance to get those features. So not only does it encourage you to buy a battle pass, but to play the game obsessively to make sure you unlock everything from the battle pass in time. And all that time there are bombarding you with ads for various other products that you can buy with micro transactions. It is Devious.
I play World of Tanks which has frequent battle passes. I used to try and grind earlier but then came a moment where I said fuck it, this feels like work and not fun. So now I just treat the base game as what I get. Any other reward is just a bonus. This change in mindset has worked quite well for me.
Elder Scrolls 4 but yes
Oops, genuine error there. I played since Arena so I should have caught that.
small incremental changes over the years felt like nothing big was happening and then at some point we all woke up
I (and many others I presume) has been saying Chrome is shit since the beginning. It didn’t feel like nothing was happening, it felt like we were slowly getting to the old days of IE and Netscape.
There are always a few that see this stuff coming, but they usually get looked at like a crazy person shouting about the sky falling.
It also feels like they really push a lot of the terrible on mobile first, get people used to concepts with the “that’s just how mobile is, it’s a different world” and then when most are accustomed to it they move to regular pc enshitification.
I do not like how websites prioritise the mobile view over desktop view even when it is on a desktop. You have a widescreen and want to waste all that horizontal space? Just ridiculous!
Yeah yeah, I understand it is less maintenance from a developer point of view, but still it is infuriating as a user.
They gotta their digital peasantry, I mean users, from other feudal lords, I mean corporations, to maximize their power over them and ability to exploit them, I mean … No wait that’s right.
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Use Firefox
This is the way.
