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Comment by zwaps | Hacker News Reader

To some degree this is probably wishful thinking, but I feel the growing contempt for Google's dismal stance on privacy (eg recent changes to Chrome) may eventually harm their market share. This is especially true if it turns out that personalized ads have less value than thought. For me, the change in perception was certainly the reasom to switch from full on Google disciple to deleting my accounts.

I argue this has certainly affected facebook already.

Then again, lots of wishful thinking, i admit.

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Removing an API that let's any extension peep at every single request you make is many things, but I don't see how it's "a dismal stance on privacy". FWIW it's how Safari does it, and everyone always cheers Apple for their stance on privacy, but then Google does it it's suddenly a dismal stance...

Apple has equally gotten a lot of pushback for the adblocker. Safari's approach is clearly inferior and has a lot of the same problems - compared to uBlock Origin. When Apple blocked alternative approaches, everyone here on hackernews was suspecting its because Apple's move into the ad business. I think no one applauded Apple for trying to control what ads can be blocked. I strongly suspect that Safari is much more vulnerable to tracking and anti-ad-blocker scripts. Certainly if they come from Apple. I don't use it for that reason. So no, this is not a distinction.

but Google also logs everything on phones and basically sells access to that data. And every week they find new ways to pull a fast one on users who thought they had disabled these "features". That's why Google is hated more.

> Removing an API that let's any extension peep at every single request you make is many things, but I don't see how it's "a dismal stance on privacy".

I've seen this argument come up multiple times on HN. The V3 Manifest doesn't have anything to do with whether or not extensions can monitor network requests.

Google isn't removing the observation abilities of the webRequest API, just the blocking abilities[0]. All of your extensions will still be able to spy on you after these changes in exactly the same ways they did before. The point of this change is (ostensibly, at least) to increase performance, not privacy.

Safari on the other hand completely removed the entire webRequest API. This was not actually widely regarded as an uncontroversial, positive move, and today ad blocking extensions on Safari are almost universally less effective than their equivalents on Chrome and Firefox. But at least Safari's change did actually improve privacy by some metrics because it deprecated everything, not just the blocking bits.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz...

One thing I have learned about business is that this is not true at all. Hurting social norms or political ideas does not harm most businesses. People care about the benefits to themselves individually. They don't care about anything more than maybe a passing thought or an online venting if they really care.

It's not dismal, it's calculated. Monopolies can afford that.

That doesn't mean it can't be dismal too.

Fairly enough. Although I want to live in the illusion that Google at least likes money more than anything else, and they weight their options. The alternative is scary.

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