“Shortly before I left my boss told me, direct quote, my job is to protect the company. There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.”

😳

"Yeah, no shit"

-anyone on the internet and paying even the slightest bit of attention for the past 5 years

I really should take all of them to small claims for the time and energy needed to block them.

Shocked pikachu face?

And when will those companies punished according to their crimes?

In a lawless place there is no enforcement of one's word, is blind trust or nothing...

I’d gasp but I don’t want to get the hiccups.

I am a solo developer on some of these platforms and have to do an annual privacy evaluation which I find painful as the company taking up my valuable time to answer all their BS questions, are the ones breaking privacy. Insane. Further, I had to pay $100 annually to the UK privacy commission as it is required for all UK companies which is also deeply ironic as the same government is requiring you to submit ID for some websites which has made the privacy leaks even more damaging.

As a solo developer I am feeling the brunt of the privacy charades while the big companies just continue to violate privacy unchecked. I have zero desire or intentions to break anyone’s privacy an ask for no information from anyone outside of pulling down their profile to sign in as is required to determine app permission. That is it. No phone numbers, no real names, no biometrics, no photos of ID or anything outside of those username on that platform but I am burdened as if I was collecting all of this and as if I was the one breaking privacy. This world is mental.

Yup online privacy done been gone!

Article behind paywall.

An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user’s browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how its product works.

The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There’s a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.

According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. “Googleʼs failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Googleʼs servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code ‘sec-gpc: 1.’ This means Google should not return cookies,” the audit said. “However, when Googleʼs server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the ‘set-cookie’ command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”

The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta’s failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. “Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals—it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumerʼs privacy preferences,” the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta’s tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

webXray is an independent technology company that runs a search engine that lets people look for privacy violations on the internet. Its founder Timothy Libert is the former lead of cookie policy and compliance at Google. Libert told 404 Media he felt his job at Google was to protect its users but that his bosses didn’t agree. He left the company in 2023 and started webXray.

“Shortly before I left my boss told me, direct quote, my job is to protect the company. There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.

so you're telling me that all those times I said google was listening to me through my phone, and like a thousand people said I was full of shit, I was right?

I'm trying out Google's Gemma4 LLM, which is run locally, and is touted as a 100% private model.

Asking it some questions about itself, at one point it acknowledged that chats were sent to "developers".

So the corporations that make their money on mass surveillance are still spying on people?

I'm shocked, shocked!

Super Ultra Mega Surprised

I'm pretty sure apple paid to be omitted here. They absolutely track you despite lying and saying they don't.

I run all my stuff in a private tab nowadays. And nuke all cookies etc each session.

Also, make sure I have anti-fingerprinting enabled.

With a VPN.

The only annoying thing is I get a few texts/emails saying "A new device just accessed your account. Was it you?". Yes, yes it was. And I'm not relying on a cookie or fingerprinting for security.

in, out. same/same

This is a bit vindicating lol. Every single social media post on the internet even here on Lemmy when something comes out about scalping people for more of their data there is a top comment saying: "do this and this to opt out" as a solution and it gets high visibility.

I usually say "yeah, there is a high chance that does nothing" and there are always people who say that is not true, without exception... Well, here is more proof.

My reaction is a certain Riviera reference.

The accursed!

Duh

Are they at least tracking less? (Not that I think that makes it okay.)

That's because they have a rapist mentality.

These companies will find it very difficult to track you if you use uBlock to ban their scripts worldwide on all sites. If you must use one of their sites, you can enable their scripts only on their own domains.