I use ProtonMail , standard notes, etesync, duckduckgo, Firefox, tresorit, wire/signal, lineageos on mobile and Linux on the desktop.
I still can't entirely opt out of Google.
And certainly can't opt out of their tracking.
They are inescapable.
I still can't entirely opt out of Google.
And certainly can't opt out of their tracking.
They are inescapable.
This seems like a great simplistic unit of measurement for classifying what antitrust action is supposed to target.
When it's extremely difficult, if not practically impossible to escape a private company from extracting/exploiting profit from unwilling persons at scale. When you basically can't opt out.
I'm not sure that would fit the current anti-trust legal definition (as in: not a lawyer so don't know answer - not that I think it doesn't fit). Equally, I'm not sure it fits under the more general principles of anti-competitive practices. They - I believe - presume willingness on the part of the consumer to access products or services, but where supply is unfairly limited.
Notwithstanding all that, your statement is an excellent principle and very neatly articulates the problem. I don't know what rule of law it would come under, but it's a succinct illustration.
Special mention to reCaptcha, you just doomed to train there AI and it seems to intensify once you start moving away from google. And I bet it's even worst from the 3rd world...
I guess the "don't be evil" way would be to make all those data public. Or just to provide an alternative way to prove your humanity online, without enslaving the whole world.
And I don't mean that they're hard to make sense of or something. But if I encounter a recaptcha on one of my specific devices that's not logged into any Google accounts, recaptcha will simply reject all of my clearly correct answers. It'll ask me to pick all of the fire hydrants, show another screen, show me another, show me another, stop for a second, then tell me I failed and repeat. I pick everything correctly, but it fails because somewhere along the line, the absolute clowns at Google decided an auto-rejecting AI would be a good idea for a user validation system.
We need Google out of the internet. As their evil influence continues to expand, they'll use their powers to lock people who don't willingly buy into their ecosystem out of everything. And worse, since Google is the biggest lapdog around for government-led oppression of speech, they'll just filter out anything that doesn't agree with the status quo. And they'll be able to brush it away as an "oops, sorry, your behavior just makes you seem like a bot. Nothing we can do."
You can be tracked by every android app, plus DNS and connectivity checks - it's only visible part. Sure any advanced security audit will show much more.
How would breaking up Google prevent tracking?
So yea, tracking will continue until people regulate it.
Brin and Page always stated that search is not the end goal. A real AI is. If these actions happen, it‘s pretty much guaranteed that China will get there first. We don‘t have the global regulations in place yet to discourage that arms race.
2030 to 2040 will be the earliest AGI could happen realistically.
How are you going to stop tracking?
Whenever you interact with a business, online or offline, you're supplying information that can be tracked.
I've asked this question twice now. We can't just break up companies because they collect data. That's not anti-trust.
While tracking and anti-trust are only loosely coupled, both are symptoms of an anti-social company.
Then there's the direct cell phone tracking-
> Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)
Through browser fingerprinting that is shared via channels which are undetectable and unlockable via browser scripts.
Through hundreds of many tiny mistakes you make every day and unknowingly let down your guard.
_Oops, damn, I forgot I disabled uBlock when accessing that important page for work._
You cannot opt out.
As long as there's a very popular communications service / social networking service / etc., or even a few of them (none of which dominates the entire market), you can't stop other people from turning in your data (unless you have no connections whatsoever in this world, or you and all your connections live in a cave). And if you use any popular service or visit any popular website yourself, your data will be collected, it's only a matter of the level of details.
Sure any 3rd party app I install can track me to some degree, but it can't compare my usage against my entire email history, my travel history, recordings of my voice...
GGP was talking about data collected involuntarily, and I was responding to that. Google (or any other company) can't have your entire email history, your travel history, and recordings of your voice without your voluntary participation in one of their services or services of a "partner". Those are way beyond drive-by collection.
There is no way to only use a Google service and also disable drive by collection. And because they're so huge and cover so many categories, that drive by info is more meaningful in their hands than just a dozen random unconnected companies. Because of that, drive by collection by other 3rd party doesn't really concern me as much. They can't do nearly as much with it.