Google has secret webpages that feed your personal data to advertisers

Primary source is at the top of HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876248

https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/

Good to see wider coverage though!

> In response, Google said Wednesday it doesn't serve "personalized ads or send bid requests to bidders without user consent."

Two things:

- The thing that seems to be most companies idea of "user consent" is laughable.

- Also it seems they are dodging the real question: nobody is asking if Google has something written about consent somewhere in a document that we were forced or tricked to accept. The question here IIRC is if they are going beyond even that and are sending personally identifiable information directly to shady companies.

So within a few hours, a primary source describing "Push Pages" - a concept easily grokkable with light skimming - has been processed into understanding-destroying moron-appealing not-even-wrong clickbait of "Google has secret webpages".

Some "journalist" was directly responsible for this vile transmutation. What the fuck is wrong with them?

The larger analysis is that much modern news is being reported directly on blogs, making repetition by traditional "news organizations" like CNET simply unnecessary. But like so much of our post-scarcity society, rather than pivoting to focus on accomplishing something useful, they insist on sticking around to make things worse for everyone.

Someone should do a zero-day privacy bug (feature?) blog. End result is the same, breach of data and trust but some are mistakes and the others are coded on purpose.

This cnet article is really light on technical details. The feature described appears to be the Push Pages flow, documented in this Brave research article:

https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/

Given that the CNET article is so light on details, I'm tempted to consider it as a duplicate of this more direct post, which has a lively discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20876248