Wow, this comment section is a giant echo chamber. Really, guys?
Yes, Google and Chrome are dumpster fires for privacy. But this is at least inching in the right direction, however small. Now the next time you shop for a present for your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, you can prevent yourself from getting underwear ads for the next month.
Also, if this is your last straw... you've had your head in the sand for over a decade. Google has been watching every single thing you do, categorizing it, and selling ad placement for that topic to the highest bidder ever since ads became their primary business model. Chrome just made it easier to do that.
I ditched Chrome a short while ago due to its poor memory management and its inexplicable inability to handle certain sites that Edge can somehow handle fine for a third of the RAM hit. This wouldn't have been my deal breaker.
What? Before, for many, many years, they didn't even ask how you would like your toppings on your shit sandwich and you happily gobbled it up. They're giving you the option to opt out of some topics, and NOW you're pissed? It may not be a privacy slam-dunk (why are you using Chrome, anyway?), but it's better than the nothing that existed before.
Of course Google doesn't care. They're not going to give you an opt-out option. They're an ad company, and their whole business is knowing your interests to get you to buy from advertisers. The search engine is just to get you in the door. The moment you press enter, they're selling you something.
They started off as a search engine with the motto “don’t be evil”. Let’s get our facts straight before you try to talk me down like I don’t know anything.
Fuck their ads and fuck whatever this monster is. I opt out by making sure my security settings are so high most pages won’t load until I manually configure what I allow. Everyone has the option to do this but it’s a massive pain in the ass so I get it. It doesn’t mean we all need to passively accept getting fucked.
They started off as a search engine with the motto “don’t be evil”. Let’s get our facts straight before you try to talk me down like I don’t know anything.
Google was selling ads about 4 years before their IPO when the "Don't Be Evil" motto was first revealed to the public. There is a "History of Google" page on Wikipedia if you want to brush up on the facts and timeline.
The fact remains that they're now an advertising company. This was their monetization model and how they've amassed 90%+ of their wealth.
You can fiddle with your security however you want. I settle for "good enough" with things that aren't Chrome, because my time isn't worth analyzing each individual cookie on a page to get the info I am looking for. Firefox and uBlock Origin are a good enough layer of protection.
That doesn't make them an advertising company. It was a search engine that sold ads to gain monetization. However at this point we are just splitting hairs over perspective so I'll bury the hatchet there.
I can and I do encourage EVERYONE to fiddle with their security, not just because of Google but because eventually you're going to stumble into some shitty website by accident and that fucker is going to pop you with a some random JavaScript that you already told your browser is totally fine to run automatically.
There is way more at stake here than a couple of tracking cookies, but it starts there. They need the permission to read, track and modify files on your machine in order to "sell" you the best advertisements. This means always having JavaScript turned on as well as allowing permissions which often are automatically accepted. This opens people up to a massive security risk with no reward. Google gets to walk away smiling while you're scraping viruses and malware off your machines left and right.They aren't here to educate or give you a choice, they just send you along after you pass GO and they get to collect the $200.
I'm sorry but no, it's not okay to try to convince the public this is a good thing. I'd wager Google spent a pretty penny trying to figure out a way to get people like you to agree that isn't so terrible when it's so obvious what they are doing is absolutely unacceptable.
I have 4 different browsers installed, I use Chrome for work activities, as it supports the Outlook and Teams PWA's and I'm not browsing ad-ridden sites. I use qutebrowser for personal stuff/bookmarks, and Firefox for uh, video browsing.
This is one of those situations where people are mad at the right person for the wrong reasons and I never know how to respond. I hate misinformation, so I lean towards wanting to try and point out what's wrong, but long-form nuanced explanations don't fit well with the situation and will change zero minds so why bother? At least there's some people switching to Firefox as a result, I guess.