Google's business model has been ads from the beginning. Search, gmail, drive, office, chrome, everything they do is just to drive ad revenue further.
They don't care about the user. Never have, and never will.
And the outcome we are seeing is what happens when a defunct state isn't able to protect citizens from conglomerates. That's what the Kartellamt or the FTC is supposed to be for.
Not sure if I can't see this comment as anything else than hypocritical. It's always easier on the money receiving side, isn't it? How do you think the term malvertisement came to be?
AdMob is kind of the definition of inevitable Surveillance Capitalism and the prime example for necessary regulation through government.
The company as a whole also really stopped caring at some point and are now following the “do be evil” paradigm
How so? There seems a fairly inherent tension between having things just work by default and hiding surface area for fingerprinting behind permissions pop ups. For example say you go to a maps website, how do you decide whether to share the users location with the website? Or enable webGL functionality to render some fancy layout on the screen? As a user having to enable all that stuff per-website is annoying.
Maybe there's some other way Im missing?
On the web one is drive-by fingerprinted by sites they never once approved of or intended to visit thanks to the browser’s ability to redirect and embed without input from the user. The magnitude of the problem is far greater on the web.
To reframe it, in a given week the average person only uses a small handful of apps, but in the same span of time their browser has connected to thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of unique domains, most of which are tracking them in some capacity and the majority of which are tracking things most of us would consider invasive.
"You're protected from the methods I use here. You disabled JavaScript, so this fingerprinting trick can't run at all. You're still vulnerable to network-based methods. Read on to see what it does to everyone else.
From now on I’ll call you:…"
I've run sans JS as default almost since its inception in the Netscape days and I've very little difficulty without it. On rare occasions when I'm forced to use JS I'll cut-and-paste the URL into another browser.
I no longer use ad blockers as I just don't see ads with JS disabled. The other privacy precautions I take are the obvious ones such as no Google or social media accounts, flushing cookies at session's end, regularly randomize my IP and never let Chrome anywhere near my machines and make judicious use of multiple browsers (this is being written in Privacy Browser on Android).
Using NewPipe and sponsor block on PipePipe increases privacy and makes YouTube ad free.
Client-side scripting was a mistake which was obvious from the outset (or not severely limiting the reach of scripting engines).
What I find hard to understand is why alternative plugin JS engines haven't been developed that are under user control. Spoofing, randomizing and returning junk data to webservers would go a huge way towards stopping fingerprinting by websites.
Unfortunately this idealistic principle (no JS) attracts the worst people.
You're on Tor? You have JS disabled? I might as well warm up fbi.gov/investigate/cyber for the probable report I'll have to do...
"Unfortunately this idealistic principle (no JS) attracts the worst people."
Again, how did you come to that opinion? Where's your evidence/stats? Generally comments like that come from web/JS programmers who've realized that client-side users have them stymied when they disable JS.
An additional reason I avoid JS is speed, webpages become blinding fast when there's no JS. Once one gets addicted to the great rendering speed there's no return. I'm not against JS per se, trouble is you JS programmers have weaponised it against users, webpages of 7, 10 and even 20MB are now commonplace. Presenting such slow massive pages to users is nothing other than abuse.
I do not use Tor.
BTW, I should point out that my views about JS and privacy abuse were formed from my years working in govt. surveillance where the stakes are very high.
That does not change what I have dealt with. I am not a “JavaScript fanboy” remember I made a community that could work WITHOUT needing JavaScript and that lead to a bunch of grief for me which made me understand the extreme naivety of that original idealistic idea on the internet.
I guess you use the web in quite a limited manner? (Or use that other browser quite a lot...?).
I've tried no JS various times over the years and always end up constantly whitelisting sites. It's even worse in 2026 and gets worse each year.
Banking, insurance, webmail, groceries, eBay, CAPTCHAs... not to mention what feels like 50% of the web that is behind either Cloudflare or similar, which almost always require Javascript.
In fact, I'm a very heavy internet user, always have been. Much of my web usage is pretty well automated, I use multiple browsers selected from an 'open with' app. This android, de-googled smartphone currently has four different browsers 'tailored' for specific types of sites and all flush clean after use (cookies etc. are never stored). And toggling airplane mode is the quickest way to change one's IP address.
What's important for me is to separate jobs, functions, etc. that are best processed on the internet from those on other media—SMS, voice telephone, eyeballing people in person (physically going to a store), etc.
This greatly reduces my need for services that use JS. By separating and processing jobs by type I automatically avoid many having to be handled by the web—for those JavaScript can't enter the picture even if one wanted to use it.
For example, I used to do internet banking but I'd never do so again on two accounts—security and that it undermines the use of cash. (A cashless society is the quintessential way to lose one's autonomy, ultimately it's a very dangerous move towards totalitarianism. That most people don't realize this, or if they do then they're prepared to trade it for convenience simply horrify me.)
That Big Tech has enshittified the net out of all recognition in recent years means I've no longer use for social media, Gmail or any Google services—goodbye all Google JS. In short, whilst I do purchase stuff online, I purchase most from shops for cash.
Most of my time on the net is confined to specialist tech sites and they're the ones least likely to use JS in a restrictive way. Yes, I agree Cloudflare, etc. is an increasing problem but the web is so big there are usually alternatives. News is often syndicated, so when NYT and such make life difficult without JS, I just jump to the same story on another site where JS doesn't matter (such blocking nonsense is really a trivial non-issue for me). I've dozens more examples but by now you'll have gotten the gist.
> language
I dont think js is needed for either of those things.