https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol...
Mozilla have had so many chances to position themselves as the privacy-preserving alternative in current years but just can't get out of its own way in any sense (e.g. corporate greed or being hostile towards users). There's still dim hope for FF and some of its forks, like Librewolf, but hopefully forward thinking projects like Servo and Ladybird can fill the void.
Letting an advertising company own it is not.
There’s a few different cases, one recent one Google has lost and is now in the “remedy” phase. Meaning the court has officially decided Google did bad, and is now considering what to make Google do about it. And splitting up Google into separate Chrome, search, etc companies is completely on the table.
Some reading:
https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitru...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/google-found-guilty-of-mo...
I'm also completely at a loss to imagine how chrome becomes someone else's play thing and is somehow less prone to serving advertisers.
For all the hate it got, IE was nowhere near as privacy-invasive as any of the "modern" browsers now, even Firefox. If you configured it to open with a blank page, it would quietly do so and make zero unsolicited network requests.
Thx. Even the source in the slashdot article links to msn...
All very confusing.
No idea what kind of deal these places have with Microsoft.
How Microsoft is making a mess of the news after replacing staff with AI https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/02/tech/microsoft-ai-news
I remember it revolved around giving you the news and maybe even loading hotmail with a special ui button. I have a foggy memory of it, but this MSN forum thread confirms the MSN Explorer existed[0].
You could even build a personal home page of sorts with the weather.
[0] https://answers.msn.com/thread.aspx?threadid=2fa8c100-ed43-4...
Any ways it had a following of people who got their news and it still exists in some form today. I know the website msn.com always catered to news stories, but I don’t know if they were always reposted if they once had writers. I think it’s always been some sort of data harvesting/media credibility facade news-focused branch of Microsoft.
Here is a screenshot:
https://img.informer.com/screenshots/53/53675_1.jpg
From the screenshot it appears the news has always been reposted and FUD based. It probably worked well (for Microsoft) in the golden age of RSS.
Originally, like Bill Gates wrote about it in a book completely ignoring web browsers, MSN was a proprietary Windows client like AOL. Later on it became a 'web portal' like Yahoo. Then a 'content' site. At one point, it was even a social media site. Somehow, when my parents got cable internet, they were funneled into a @MSN.com account. It had this fake "dialer" which pretended it was "connecting", even though the internet was always on.
For many years since, MSN has just been the tabloid news to remind you that Microsoft shit is low class.
Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea, independent on any decision to use ad blockers or not.
The Meta/Yandex incident in particular is straight-up malware and everyone should remove their apps.
They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.
Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.
> Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea
While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.
Lol, why are you commenting as if somehow allowing it to run negates the other good ideas in some way? Obviously some is better than none, and all is better than some, but each step takes more effort.
what I _don't_ want is to be _tracked_. show me ads all day if you want.
I’m not asking what you think makes for a successful ad campaign, I’m asking why you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good
Self-hosting ads is not really a winning game unless your ads are non-animated, non-modal static text and images.
It might be correct-and-incomplete but they just have no credibility on the topic.
They're also owned by one of the richest men in the world...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/washington-post-lost...
Advertising revenue is less than a 1/3rd of their revenue, and dropping fast. Ad revenue from more than 50 million visitors is less than subscription revenue from 2.5 million subscribers.
If WaPo was dependent on ads, they would have taken steps to increase accessibility to articles, but they didn't and haven't. Instead, they're restricting more and more content to subscribers, because ultimately subscribers are the ones that keep the lights on.
> and dropping fast,
Just like the number of subscribers and subscription revenue?
WaPo is by no means worst here. But their omission of Adblock in this article means they can’t be credible.
But adblockers do not fully solve the problem that the article is focused on. Namely, the use, e.g., by Meta and Yandex, of websockets in closed source mobile apps to listen on a loopback address for requests by mobile browsers, e.g., for tracking pixels.
There are approaches to prevent such tracking that do not necessarily require adblockers running in browsers. If the article mentioned Adblock but omitted other approaches, then does that mean the publisher is not credible.
But the point of the comment was that there are other methods besides ad blockers running in browsers. There are often alternative methods that "tech journalists" rarely if ever mention.
Sometimes, these methods are arguably better. For example, some methods can limit _all_ connections, whether the connections are initiated from (a) browsers, (b) other applications or (c) pre-installed corporate operating systems.
I miss those days.
You can't firewall a journalist's understanding that their job depends on certain things.
That's a problem for the media outlet to solve. Ad-supported tech "news" can never be trustworthy.
I know it blocks a use of your information against you (targeted ads). And any external source is a potential leak (e.g. the kinds of things that CORS is supposed to reduce).
But does an ad blocker specifically leak more, or just reduce the incentive to collect that information?
This blocks most existing tracking methods. The only thing you're not protected from is first-party tracking by the site you're actually visiting, which is impossible to fully protect against.
Incidentally, just blocking JavaScript with NoScript kills quite a lot of ads (obviously, not first-party ones if you've white-listed their JavaScript for site functionality; but I try to avoid that when there isn't real demonstrated value) without any need for an explicit ad blocker.
If that is an acceptable compromise, you could also try ditching the Internet altogether, as that not only blocks all online tracking, it also blocks a lot of fraud, misinformation and all kinds of harmful content.
You literally (actually literally) can.
Sure, images may no be present without JS lazy-loading them. Accidentaly, NoScript also fixes a lot of websites. Publishers are often paywalling posts via JS and initial HTML is served with full articles.
You're trying to imply that ublock lite doesn't do that. It does, including javascript files. The full uBlock does more things to prevent tracking that lite cannot do. But "intercept requests at the network level" isn't one of those things.
It looks very stretched, but the real magic happens when this data is sold in bulk. It allows recouping who is where. Your target person may or may not be in each dataset, their location isn’t known like clockwork, but that allows determining where they work, where they sleep and who they’re with. One ad is useless as a datapoint, but recouping shows reliable patterns. And remember most people on iPhone still don’t have an adblocker.
But I am glad they are pushing people toward other browsers because that is the biggest step. Once you have taken that step, installing the most popular extensions is trivial.
Guess what the highest rated extensions are?
It is better than nothing and definitely for the more "normies" advice. Let's start there and then we can get them onto adblock and other stuff.
Btw, the ArsTechnica article they link offers more advice[0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...
"This includes bringing new users to Binance & other exchanges via opt-in trading widgets/other UX that preserves privacy prior to opt-in. It includes search revenue deals, as all major browsers do."
Seems pretty relevant to the current topic and not part of the VPN controversy.
I love Safari on macOS. I love the pinch/zoom with the tabs. I love that private browsing mode, at least seems to, keep things contained to the tab they started with. e.g. if I open facebook in a private tab then open new tab and go to facebook, it’s going to make me login.
Lots of anti-google people dislike Safari. Safari isn't the only non-google option you know.
Can you give an example of this?
And on the plus side, it’s vastly better at power efficiency, meaning I can use my laptop longer without being plugged in.
When a browser like Safari fails to adhere to those standards, sites will break ... but you can't expect developers (of most sites; I'm not talking about the top 100 or anything) to test in every possible browser ... and then change their code to accommodate them. Certainly not in ones with single-digit percentages of market share, that require their own OS to test (like Safari).
Web devs ignore Safari at their own risk, lest 100% of iPhone users be unable to use their site.
When “Safari is the new IE” was first published, they absolutely were. They’ve gotten a bit better since then, but all the same it was hilarious to see people who used to rail against IE for flaunting web standards (cough John Gruber cough) suddenly start saying that web standards were a bogus racket once Apple decided to stop keeping up with them.
- It has all sorts of random quirks in their supposedly supported features;
- Mobile Safari has even more quirks;
- No other major browser introduces random serious bugs like Safari does (remember the IndexedDB one?);
- Version updates are tied to OS updates meaning it’s the only major browsers that’s not evergreen, and coupled with the previous points you have to carry workarounds for bugs forever, and of course can’t use new features;
- Extensions are 10x harder to develop and more than 10x more expensive to publish since they’re tied to Xcode, Apple Developer Program and MAS, because fuck you;
- Like another commenter said, it’s the only browser that crashes on me (random “this page has experienced a problem and reloaded” or something like that);
- PWA is another kind of hell in Safari but opinions are divided so whatever. At the very least it’s not conducive to an open web.
It’s a piece of hot garbage, like a lot of other Apple software these days. Sure, maybe it’s battery efficient or something. I don’t give a shit because I work plugged in.
Oh and developer tools in Safari are crap but who cares.
Not slower? Safari or Orion.
And if you're not a fan of FireFox, Ladybird is becoming a thing in 2026
It also has a really annoying 'feature' that its update process will sometimes force you to restart the browser.
Financially, probably. Apple customers represent a disproportionate share of global consumer disposable income.
Technically, I guess Unix-like, BrowserEngineKit and WebKit (Orion uses this) help. Good question, hope someone knowledgeable chimes in!
But the main hook for me is how websites look. I do a lot of reading on the browser, and fonts on Chrome always look better than on Firefox. I would switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if only things started looking the same on it.
Last week's discussion on a profile management tool offered several insights into how others a bit further down this path use their browsers of choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132752
There is now a bar of 5 icons at the top. The middle icon, "download", saves the PDF.
Edit: Long-pressing each icon will show you small pop-up text for the icon/action.
I am a developer but have to deal with questions on this regularly from people's at my company due to the IT department being small.
I'm afraid I can't guess your reasoning.
One of the few that seem to have their shit together
If I’m a contractor forced to use Chrome and mobile devices, can I deduct a separate work phone?
I really hate having it my iPhone, at least maybe I can claw something back this way?
I use FF for 99% of dev, open Chrome maybe once a quarter. It’s a better browser.
Basically, you can press "ctrl S" for save, straight from the dev console. In FF, you have to manually designate the save location each time. It may seem like a small thing, but it's an entirely different workflow.
For frameworks that don't use plain stylesheets, it may not be useful.
it does not do the e2e hat-trick thou
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
The WP article says:
"" Millions of websites contain a string of computer code from Meta that compiles your web activity. It might capture the income you report to the government, your application for a student loan and your online shopping. ""
If I read that correctly then they are capturing all https web content you access in clear text and uploads it all to Meta? Then Meta
I thought the exploit was used to track where you visited, not the full data of each webpage.
I can only assume they're suggesting that companies like Intuit and H&R Block are sharing this data with Meta, but that seems like a huge violation of privacy and with tax data it might even be illegal.
Basically, they created a channel between the browser and a localhost webserver running in their native apps, by abusing the ability to set arbitrary metadata on WebRTC connections. That way, they were able to exfiltrate tracking cookies out of the browser's sandbox to the native app, where they could be associated with your logged-in user identity.
Google still hasn’t fixed the issue of app being able to list all other installed app on your phone without requiring permission despite having been reported months ago. They didn’t even provide an answer.
I believe Google isn’t interested in Android user privacy in any way, even when it’s to their own benefit.
At this point either use iPhone, grapheneos or no phone at all.
Since the first release of Android it has been possible to query for installed applications on the device, and since Android 11 those results have started to be filtered[0] (with some exceptions[1]).
So which issue exactly are you talking about?
[0]: https://medium.com/androiddevelopers/package-visibility-in-a...
[1]: https://developer.android.com/training/package-visibility/au...
Basically no answer but an a.i generated one and someone promising to get back in touch since 24 of march.
Who are they kidding ?
What makes employees there feel good (or at least okay) about doing stuff like this? You're spying on people, no? Surveilling ordinary people, not enemy combatants or foreign militaries? Perhaps a friend of a friend or even a family member? This kind of thing is so creepy and disturbing to me, not that it’s anything new…
On the flip side, how much are morals worth if you have the opportunity to be financially free?
There's also the opportunity to work on interesting problems.
Anecdotally, of course, I know a Meta engineer at the L7 level (generally staff engineer in these large tech companies). He makes over seven figures a year, 75% of that being from stocks. The money is there.
I'm sure there's overlap like people working on AR scraping images of people's homes to build better models but they also do a ton of research where they use open datasets.
I'm curious what this distribution is.
I'm also curious what the answer is for just average programmers. Meta has like 70k employees. Surely a lot of them aren't doing interesting stuff
It's not like one day all of Germany turned evil then a few years later turned good again. Framing things like that is unhelpful. It makes evil seem cut and dry. Trivial to identify. That's what authoritarians thrive on: oversimplification. Everything is easy, it's not your fault, "it's so simple, you just..."
All that accomplishes is letting evil flourish. Gives it time to grow and set root. You're just being dehumanizing yourself.
Don't help your enemies.
Don't emulate your enemies.
I got this exact thought IMMEDIATLY (yet again) and posted on it here as well, putting my two cents in.
This is totally unacceptable for a software engineer to implement features like this simply because their company told them to, doing what the company tells them to makes them money, so they do it.
No apparent thought into whether they are creating is harmful, or caring about it.
I've given up on any anger directed towards the company itself. They will make money any way they can. Now, the engineers who actually implement it bothers me, because it is clearly not something that should be built.
To me, I don't care how much I'm being paid or how bad it would be to lose my job at that time.
I would resign before working on features like this and deal with the consequences.
I think some people also tell themselves that they'll be agents of change and fix things from within but that almost always winds up being another self delusion at worst and impossibility at best. There was a certain amount of this on display in Careless People.
In the past, people aspired to work at cool tech companies. Devs aren't lining up to work at insurance companies. I never worked in the industry I went to school for because the only jobs when I got out of school were for weapons. At this point I feel the same way about social media, I would never work at such a 'make the world as bad as you can get away with' industry.
For employees it gets normalized at the first signal that your livelihood might be affected if you don't comply.
As someone who's privacy conscious, it's an uphill battle to convince co-workers to actually follow laws instead of trying to find loopholes.
I've worked at places who collect every possible data point and distributes it willy nilly in Excel spreadsheets posted in Slack. I raised it to a CISO and the response was "all that information is available for everyone anyway via the interface". I know a German company requires you to "accept" data collection and processing in order to settle a debt. I reported this to their legal department which I personally knew a person and they said they'd "look into it ASAP" two years ago.
In the end people just roll along with it. I know this is unpopular, but the only forward I see way to prevent this from happening seems to be using courts and tightened legislation.
If Pavlov's dog gets a big fat steak everytime it bites someone ...
(I know this wasn't your main point.)
If understanding that it’s wrong to invade people’s privacy is incompatible with keeping your job, you probably won’t understand it.
Pretty sure this is illegal, and probably a liability e.g. if it came up in court.
I'm pretty sure if the debt itself ever goes to court, the debtor can argue that they can't even enter the website. On the other hand this company is a bit of a shitshow so good luck having the website work haha.
What they see is dollars now but not dollars later. Often these data issues can rise to the level that it could destroy the entire business. You might be called a party pooper, but truth is people like this want to keep the party going. It's hard to understand that sometimes keeping the party going means saying no. But it's just the same dealing with drunk people, say no by saying yes to something else. Like presenting another solution. Though that's way easier said than done...
Just remember, everyone is on the same team. People don't say "no" because they don't want to make more money. A good engineer says "no" a lot because your job is to find solutions. It usually sounds like "I don't think that'll work but we might be about to...". If you stop listening without hearing the "but" you can't solve problems, you can only ignore them. Which *that* is not being a team player.
We're always rushing and the truth is that doing good is much harder than doing bad or "evil". I put it in quotes because it's very easy to do things that are obviously evil post hoc but was done by someone trying hard to do good. So I find this language to be a problem because it is easy to dismiss with "I'm not a bad person" and "I'm trying to do good". Truth is that's not enough. Truth is mistakes happen. We work with asymmetric information. It only becomes your fault when you recognize and don't take steps to fix it (or active ignorance).
Sometimes things take nuance. Sometimes it takes more than a few sentences to convey. But who reads longer anyways?
But the baseline is really bad.
There's an expression: normalization of deviance.
This is where we are now. People idolize others because of their wealth, and that wealth is always gained by means which are ultimately harmful to the greater population. Even the wealthy philanthropistMS which will remain unnamed acquired their greatness by cheating and stealing. But as long as you make a great show and give it all away eventually (while living lavishly the entire time), you look good.
To me that sounded absolutely absurd and a freaking caricature, something out of "American Psycho".
Today I was just discussing with a friend how we're perhaps even more materialistic and cut-throat...
Hope is about finding and using that moral compass. To change worse outcomes to better outcomes for everyone. The “I’ll take mine” or “My group needs to win” attitude is poison to yourself and to the world, and if you don’t see that your conscience is blind or broken.
This is nothing new, in numerous books on moral philosophy and people who have been in these situations have spoken out on it.
I don't see a way out, though. I just hope we can leave a planet for the animals.
EDIT: On the other hand: the internet is already a dystopia if you look closely. Maybe it will prove to be a fad and people will go back to their lives. One can hope!
Corporations disagree, as long as your death will be profitable.
An entire generation of critics tried to appeal to a new market and money suddenly became synonymous with quality.
Naturally artists stopped caring about authenticity, sharing their beliefs. And also about the critics.
Just as music was replaced by reality shows in MTV, music journalism was entirely replaced by gossip and tabloids.
Offering customers lower prices is a way to gain more customers. Software allows for automation and efficiencies of scale. The end result will be a few big organizations that win, without cheating or stealing. (Although, there most likely is cheating or stealing due to other factors).
But I would not classify the success of most larger modern businesses solely due to cheating or stealing. It was simply being at the right place at the right time and executing correctly to take advantage of developing technologies to take advantage of economies of scale.
In this specific case, I know my family and friends benefit greatly from the “free” instant communication and file transfer capabilities that Meta offers (WhatsApp). There obviously might be costs, but international communications have been made far, far cheaper and higher quality due to WhatsApp.
I can pull out usual godwin's law plug but I guess we all know what would be there. People like to feel great about themselves, its subconscious. And if slightly tilting reality in their favor can achieve that then what's the problem, right. Again, this is not a conscious decision so most don't even notice that, and who would complain about feeling better about themselves.
Old enough, when you want to see such things like these biases in people around you, its very easy once you start looking for them. I guess we really are all heroes of our own stories (but what I mention is far from uniformly distributed, some folks are really stellar human beings and some opposite)
Markets are a heuristic based around mediating between the interests of different parties precisely because the overall problem is computationally hard. If markets achieved the kind of optimality you're thinking, then top-down central planning would also be workable.
A big house, a fast car, more money.
Where else in SV are you going to go anyway? Every company does the same thing.
If you value money over other people, it's a great place to work though
"Everyone does it" is as much of a cope as "less bad". You are still covered in shit.
That's like saying mechanical engineers can only work at Raytheon or Lockheed Martin. Or biotech people can only work at Purdue Pharma.
There are companies in SV who are making products for actual users. Just look outside adtech.
Employees just want to make it to the weekend. Execs want to hit their targets. Sales dept. needs their bonuses. The board wants to pump valuations.
The PM tried shopping the task to other teams, but nobody took the bait after I raised it publicly, and both legal and the external law firm sided with me after about three months of delay.
In the meantime I raised the topic of yelling with HR but every step of the way the company made me feel like I was the one in the wrong for not complying.
I believe if I were meeker I would probably have complied right there.
Like someone mentioned below, it's unrealistic to expect people to think about second or third or nth order effects of their job. Heck, those effects are not even visible in 90% of cases.
To answer your question, the engineer at meta is just building a graph database. It takes a `void* node_data` as argument. Another is just building a kafka-clickhouse data pipeline that can transfer so many millions of `void* message`s a minute. The android engineer is just improving the percentage of requests without location data by using wifi ssids as fallback. The CEO just sees "advertising revenue WoW" in his dashboard. And so on. That it is actually being used for spying is many steps away from each of them -- OK, in the case of meta I'm sure the employees know to an extent. But it's still very different from the feeling they would get if they were doing the end-to-end task themselves.
It's the same thing with other questionable products. It's split up sufficiently across the supply chain that no one is actually aware enough of the task end-to-end.
In some cases, the same participant in the supply chain will be a supplier for something really good and necessary..but they will also be a supplier for something despicable. In this case, it is easy for everyone involved to sweep the latter under the rug.
As far as I have thought about it, there is no way to get rid of this larger problem without also losing the (unfathomably massive) benefits.
Anything these companies know, the FBI and CIA can know, without a warrant thanks to FAA702 (did we all forget about PRISM?).
The state now has leverage over almost every normal citizen, thanks to what these companies have built.
Turnkey tyranny. Built by silicon valley.
There are plenty of things you can do for money that are not (or are significantly less) unethical.
Would someone explain in plain language what is wrong with an app listening on a port for messages from the browser? It seems like a helpful asynchronous method to maintain state between browser and app.
Morality isn't a consideration.
That’s generally the case for everyone I know who works there.
Many of them are even quite liberal and will join protests for things that Meta has actively and negatively played a part in, so they’re in effect protesting their own workplace indirectly. But will continue to work there because they can compartmentalize this.
- "I didn't write it, I just had the idea"
- "I didn't implement it, I just made the prototype"
- "It wasn't my product, I just fixed some bugs with it"
- "I can't track everything in these implementation updates, I just work with what I am given"
- "I didn't collect the data, I just deal with what is in the dataset"
Likewise, when we blame IBM for supplying the Nazis during WWII, we're not decrying the enthusiastic early database workers. They aren't the problem; executives without morals are.
Well, you're not. However:
Black reports that every Nazi concentration camp maintained its own Hollerith-Abteilung (Hollerith Department), assigned with keeping tabs on inmates through use of IBM's punchcard technology.
suggest that a good number of these "early database workers" were working directly with Hollerith codes on human flesh and tasked with the identification of Jews, Roma, and other ethnic groups deemed undesirable by the regime, along with military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.
You might argue they are no more responsible for concentration camps than concentration camp guards, but these are the people punching holes in cards and filtering them with knitting needles while looking out the window at piles of shoes and gold teeth to tabulate.
workers, especially professionals, have a duty to not do that bad work, and to make sure that that bad work doesnt happen
amongst other things...
What Meta does to society is more insidious: it gets people addicted to content so it can make them eat a poison for their minds, so-called ads. Surveillance is just method of making the ads more invasive, tailored to each user individually.
That's the onramp to normalization: "If the users didn't like this, they'd stop us."
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1GecPs
I would call this response "JSON" not "HTML".
The JSON is unformatted, i.e., no "prettyPrint".
The text-only browser I use to read HTML works with this JSON, it is easy to read, because the JSON values contain HTML tags.
That is so wrong, on so many levels ... I personally couldn't do it.
I hate this even more than NSO Group's Pegasys, which could easily get people killed. I'm ok with my reasoning, and I really hate that one as well.
Here, with Meta and Yandex, you see what you always see.
As soon as people catch on, they immediately remove it. But they will keep using it until that day comes.
For money, while trying to hide it from the users they are spying on.
It's greedy and evil and whoever in these companies think up these ideas should be let go. Immediately, in a perfect world.
Instead they'll just try another approach.
While everyone else has to clean up this latest one.
"Following public disclosure, Meta ceased using this method on June 3, 2025. Browser vendors like Chrome, Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo have implemented or are developing mitigations, but a full resolution may require OS-level changes and stricter enforcement of platform policies to prevent further abuse."
The silence says a lot.
I'm not even slightly considering removing any Meta app, and let's face it, Firefox is over as a project because their priorities are all out of wack.
So Chrome and meta apps all the way for me, but I'm sure to listen to the Amazon Washington Post as to how I should treat Amazon competitors in the future.
I've used Facebook products. Even just barring the privacy concerns, there's been one constant - the products are bad. They're not good. They actively make my life worse. They're not fun, they're not enjoyable, they're not performant, they're not... anything.
Even if I was a complete 100% sellout and I didn't give a single fuck about privacy, I wouldn't use Facebook products. Because they're just that bad.
Also Firefox is "over" as a project? Legitimately, what the fuck are you talking about? Firefox works fine and has been working fine for as long as I've used it. The browser works, and for all intents and purposes, I can't tell the difference from Chrome. Really, I can't. Are there differences? Probably. I've never encountered any, so for my money Firefox is fine.
Everything can be justified given enough money. There is no such thing as objective morality.
I'm disgusted by the number of people giving real personal information to these assholes. "Open"AI insisted that you give them a real, functioning phone number to use ChatGPT. No goddamned way.
The EU cookie fiasco is just that. All of a sudden, your every day experience was derailed extremely in a way that 'broke' HTML standards and sites at first in hundreds of ways. All of a sudden sites that never did track users were forced to start tracking them -- in order to set the flag to suppress the harassing cookie warning. Ironically, they will remember your cookie settings if you 'sign up'. Meanwhile nothing became more secure or private. It was just a way for the EU to virtue signal out loud and be annoying. It throws the user into sitespace to navigate the site's own cookie settings. It's theater.
Meanwhile, advanced fingerprinting is, well uhm, advanced. If the EU cared about cookie privacy a better course of action would have been to see whether browsers were locked down with best anti-fingerprinting possible and local cookie dialogues... and certify the ones that were. Educate users, harass them one time.
How is this true? You don't need a cookie warning if you're not tracking or doing other nastiness. A cookie banner is not required for functions like user sessions or keeping track of a shopping art.
If the site never tracked the user, they wouldn't need to show the cookie banner in the first place.
For this particular issue: Three dots > Extensions > uBlock Origin > Open dashboard > Filter list > Privacy, enable "Block Outsider Intrusion into LAN".
A bit wishy washy. They are still tracking you, just not as effectively as before.
My other favorite example is un-disabling telemetry, resetting default browser, etc. Some PM or VP is in a meeting saying we are going to do this shady user hostile thing and everyone just nods? What is the amount and type of euphemisation?
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in one of these..
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