6 private links
From the author of uBlock on this:
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
In a response to negative feedback, Google shared that Chrome's current ad blocking capabilities for extensions will soon be restricted to enterprise users.
Sometimes it’s worth pausing to ask the simplest questions.
Google collects the purchases you've made, including from other stores and sites such as Amazon, and saves them on a page called Purchases.
<p>In the last week of April, nearly 23 percent of all traffic to news sites tracked by web analytics firm Parse.ly came from search engines. Google alone accounts for nearly half of external referral traffic—traffic, that is, that comes from platforms, apps, and other outside sources— to news sites. Together with the fact that Facebook […]</p>
Gmail servers have been randomly rejecting my personal mail with vague SMTP errors about spam detection.
The privacy crisis Apple and Google need to fix—now
The tech giant records people’s locations worldwide. Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent.
A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms.
Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google spy device, so I decided to liberate the Chromebook from Google’s surveillance-based operating system (ChromeOS) and gift it to her.
Spoiler : c'est plus compliqué que ça en a l'air
Facebook, Google, and other masters of the surveillance economy have bred a virulent mutation of capitalism, which explains why they aren’t interested in addressing their many scandals
The harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine. So I braced myself and had a look
Personal Site of Reda Lemeden
Après avoir fait plier Twitter, UFC-Que Choisir continue son combat pour la protection des données personnelles.
Police are increasingly using judge-approved "reverse location" search warrants to find cellphones near crime scenes. Civil liberties experts worry it's a digital dragnet ripe for abuse. Authorities say it's an important new crime fighting tool.