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Chrome Google Privacy Your Rights Online

Google Chrome Introduces Do Not Track 110

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-look-at-my-history-bro dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has started rolling out the latest update to its Chrome browser which brings the 'do not track' option to users. With this move Google has joined major browsers who support this standard. Just like other browsers Google allows users to enable it."
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Google Chrome Introduces Do Not Track More

Google Chrome Introduces Do Not Track

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  • Don't give up your proxy! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Cuz "Do Not Track" is a farce.

    Just ask Mark Zuckerburg. He's worth billions because FaceBook's technology is designed to slice and dice your online existence.

    And what about the gub'ment? You think they're gonna stop monitoring electronic communications just because Chrome gives you a feel-good button to click?

    No one cares that you want privacy. Just as Scott "Get Over IT" McNeally.

    At least he was honest about it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Cuz "Do Not Track" is a farce.

      Oh I don't know about that, I have a feeling that DNT works fine, the problem is advertisers not respecting it more than anything as we all know. I have a feeling that the Chromium [chromium.org] will implement something that makes DNT work...properly.

      Funny enough, that whole privacy thing? People do. Enough so that various privacy commissioners do get involved like they do here in Canada and Germany, a few other places too. And in most cases they're not toothless either. Maybe that's just an American thing.

      • Oh I don't know about that, I have a feeling that DNT works fine, the problem is advertisers not respecting it more than anything as we all know. I have a feeling that the Chromium [chromium.org] will implement something that makes DNT work...properly.

        You mean like this? [adblockplus.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )

        You are making VAST ASSUMPTION about what 'Do Not Track' is. Have you read anything about it. Here:

        Enabling ‘Do Not Track’ means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic. Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted. For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that aren't based on other websites you've visited. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data - for example to improve

    • Some sites will honor it. I don't see the harm. Especially the sites I use chrome for: All my non pseudonymous stuff like my Gmail account and my credit union. Actually I can't use chrome for some features at my bank because I can't find a way to enable popups for even a whitelisted site. I don't really hope Chrome will change. I would rather my bank change to not require popups. I notice chrome asks me for my gnome keyring password. I am not sure what that is but I believe it's some data stored in m

  • I trust this feature works as advertised as much as I trust them with my data.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by p0p0 ( 1841106 )
      [citation needed]
      Seriously, I have trouble thinking of any real problems that Google has had with personal data aside from the Google cars collecting WiFi info.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by GodfatherofSoul ( 174979 )

        Problems I've had with Google:

        1.) I use PicasaWeb a lot. The URLs have always been obfuscated so that your user name and real name don't show up (it's not my Slashdot user name btw). I did a google search for my real name and found out that Google had indexed my REAL name with my photo albums which showed up under any google search for me. My real name probably comes from using the Google payment service or my email display name. No attempts to alter my Google account name will change my real name as di

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          For #4, go to www.google.com/ads/preferences in all of the browsers you use. Remove categories related to finding jobs. If that doesn't work, it probably means you are getting random ads that happen to be about job searches (which would interest a lot of people in this economy).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by geekoid ( 135745 )

          I never get spammed from Google, and I have been using there services since their inception. Not a single piece of spam form them, SO I don't really believe your post.

          "address book showing up under my YouTube profile pages and I'm sure that eventually they'll start seeing mine."
          And? Change the damn setting. Another case of someone who doesn't know how to use something bitching about the systems.
          It says this:
          " Let people find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address"

    • but I am sure they have a "work-around" in place, now that they have added this feature.

    • The feature works just fine. It adds the extra header information exactly up to spec.

      If no one listens to the DNT flag well then that is a whole other issue altogether.

  • So they can claim Chrome is the only browser that truly protects your privacy by pointing out that Safari & IE's privacy settings are ignored by the top search engine?

  • Many reasons for tracking. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by EmperorOfCanada ( 1332175 ) on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @07:31PM (#41914021)
    Most people don't want tracking because of scumbag marketers and data gathers; groups who are the least likely to follow the spirit of DNT. Yet for a website like mine GeoAmigo.com [geoamigo.com]. I track one thing and that is your login. I am fairly certain that people who use my site are 100% happy with my tracking as then they don't log in over and over. I cookie this so that the next time you come back to check to see if new people are in your area you don't have to log in again. If you log out the cookie is killed.

    So it shouldn't be do not track but do not sell my data to data whoring scumbags.

    This where the law needs to get with the 21st century. I have a simple suggestion. That any organization or logical part of an organization cannot share your data without your written permission with anyone else on the planet. Thus the billing department for a company can't even share your contact info with the marketing department let alone any third party. Also they need to make obtaining this permission a separate document. They can't have a small section of a larger form forcing you to agree to this. Also agreement to sharing the data cannot be a condition to any other agreement. This way the phone company can't say you don't get an account without sharing data.

    The reason for this would be that with the push of a button a company can share millions of records with any dirtbag they feel like. So make it hard work to share data.

    I use different addresses (same location but mistakes that don't matter) for nearly every company I deal with so I can see who is selling my data. Nearly all of them are. They might argue that it is for my own benefit but if I don't want it then it isn't for my benefit but to my detriment.
    • A login process is opt-in and should therefore be exempt from the do not track setting. But if your web site added a cookie and tracked my page views without my explicit consent? That's something else entirely.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by geekoid ( 135745 )

        DNT doesn't mean they won't track you.

        Enabling ‘Do Not Track’ means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic. Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted. For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that aren't based on other websites you've visited. Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data - for example to improve security, to provide content, services, ads and recommendati

    • If you don't allow people like Google to do their business with your data, then they will most probably stop making all those services free for the user, since the money comes from the user tracking data.

      I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. It's sorely needed to regulate the personal information sharing/trading. But people need to be aware that many of the free services we have like so much are free because we are not the clients, our data is the product instead.

      • There's nothing wrong with that. All those free services can go. They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want. Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.

        So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them

        • There's nothing wrong with that. All those free services can go. They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want. Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.

          So let the data collecting leeches die a well deserved death. We don't need them.

          Woww...I really can't believe the mod carnage I'm seeing on this forum. Seems like a lot of 'vested interests' are spamming with their mod points today...

          For example, what's 'over-rated' about the quoted comment? Seems to me it's well written, not factually incorrect or profane, and quite reasonable. Oh, riiight, it expresses sentiments that the advertising industry really doesn't want people to think about. In other words, 'over-rated' is mod-code for 'STFU, you're threatening our bloated and obscene p

        • They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want.

          Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported. I suppose the companies you're theorizing could use untargeted ads, but that's going to lead us back to what we had in the late 90s -- massive blinking banners everywhere, and lots of them, because that's what had to be done to make them sufficiently effective. I would much rather have discreet, carefully-tar

          • Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported.

            I disagree. The analogy of web services with radio and television is inapplicable imho, yet it's also a quite informative juxtaposition.

            In the case of TV and radio, scalability is a necessity which ultimately occurs due to the limitations on frequency allocations in the broadcasting spectrum. Auctions fo

            • Breaking Google or Amazon up wouldn't eliminate the costs, it would increase them. You can't do the same job with less equipment, in fact you'd need more equipment without the extremely efficient automatic allocation of processing that Google does (it's pretty amazing stuff, actually). I suppose you could envision a world of many small service providers all operating on something like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute or AppEngine, to get the efficiencies of scale without the centralization of control -- but s

  • DNT: Now only the bad guys will track you. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thisisauniqueid ( 825395 ) on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @08:38PM (#41914631)
    So now the *good* guys will no longer track you. I don't get the logic.

    • There are no good guys when it comes to tracking me.

    • Re:DNT: Now only the bad guys will track you. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Thursday November 08, 2012 @01:58AM (#41916105) Homepage

      It's called "putting them on notice". Sure, they'll still track me. But they can't claim that they didn't know I didn't want to be tracked, or that there was some implicit consent because I didn't tell them I didn't want to be tracked. It's like the fence with the "No Trespassing" sign on it: it won't stop someone from trespassing, but they can't claim they didn't know and thought it was OK. That doesn't matter unless I want to take official or legal action against them, but if I do it's a very useful thing to have available.

      • It's called the evil bit.

        And it doesn't work, either. Ignoring the Do Not Track standard won't give you a case against them because:

        1. You can't prove the tracking caused actual harm - unless you were caught doing something illegal.
        2. If you were doing something illegal, the tracker has no obligation to conceal illegal activity.

        3. The Do Not Track standard is why I don't use Chrome: Google believes (and probably rightly so) that its users are idiots. This is designed to give the user a false sense of sec

        • I don't have to be doing anything illegal to suffer harm. For instance, if I work for a GOP-supporting business my job may be at risk if they find out I support the Democrats. Note recent news stories of CEOs making fairly explicit threats to employees about what'd happen if they failed to support the GOP in the election (eg. http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/175797801.html [jsonline.com]). Just because something's legal doesn't mean I want the public at large, or even any specific third party, to know about it. Take you

  • If they didn't then people might realise they shouldn't use a browser from an advertising company. Plus they will just disregard the setting anyway. They had no problem by-passing safari's settings so I'm sure they are happy to do it to their own browser.

  • Now, when selected, no more Facebook or tons of other websites tracking you. Now only Google...

  • This is just like Microsoft to muscle companies into what they want. I am for DNT but I don't like how Microsoft makes companies do what they want them to do by using there desktop leverage.
  • So how does this impact Google Analytics? I don't agree with the advertising industry stating "we won't support this", maybe an unscrupulous business or two. I know many good advertising businesses which have a strict permission-based flow and would support the end-users' preference.

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