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Google is an advertising company. It's not interested in any real privacy because that would negatively affect its revenue. I'm a very anti-advertising kind of

Google is an advertising company. It's not interested in any real privacy because that would negatively affect its revenue. I'm a very anti-advertising kind of guy. I block ads on all my devices. I wish all forms of cross-app tracking identifiers were simply abolished, and any API that could be used to pass data between apps like this would require explicit user consent. Anything lesser is a pathetic half-measure.

smoldesu 5y ago
> I wish all forms of cross-app tracking identifiers were simply abolished, and any API that could be used to pass data between apps like this would require explicit user consent. Real question: how would you try to abolish fingerprinting? Processing identifying info on your device can mostly be done server-side and requires no device permissions, accounts or APIs, just some basic identifiers like screen resolution, storage capacity, software/library versioning, battery health... anything is fair game.
- grishka 5y ago
  Fingerprinting is "analog" by its nature and thus never 100% reliable. Besides, here's another idea: not only make internet access a runtime permission like I suggest in another comment here, but also make it per-domain. If you don't trust an app, run it in a "paranoid mode" where you have to explicitly allow it to access every domain it tries to access. Advertisers always use their own infrastructure to prevent fraud among other reasons. And another one: a docker-style fully isolated container for you to run apps you don't trust. The container simply lies to apps with hardcoded or random values for anything that could possibly be used for fingerprinting.
- fsflover 5y ago
  One possibility is to use Tor (or Whonix on Qubes, which I use).
bentcorner 5y ago
I'm very anti-advertising as well. I use ublock and youtube vanced, and have a pihole on my home network. While privacy is certainly a bonus, the main reason is that ads interrupt what I want to look at, consume power, are ugly, intrusive and a vector for malware. I know many content creators consider me to be stealing their content, I wouldn't exactly disagree. But so be it. Some sites block me from visiting them, I think that's completely fair, and I don't put up much effort in circumventing such blocks. This Privacy Sandbox initiative appears to not at all address the problems I have with advertisements.
- jcranberry 5y ago
  I think it could help with being vectors for malware. The proposal wants advertising sdks to be uploaded to the play store as separate apks, and run in a separate process with limited permissions with no remote code execution allowed. Perhaps that might help you install apps without the SDKs as well. But the sandbox does appear to be computationally costly since the spec says it may not be enabled on starter android 13 phones. Also I doubt it will help regarding aesthetics. Of course the documents have all this as optional features rather than compulsory ones. But it sounds nice.
ac29 5y ago
> I wish all forms of cross-app tracking identifiers were simply abolished Interestingly, I noticed today my Android/Pixel phone lets me delete the advertising ID instead of just resetting it to a new one.

smoldesu 5y ago

> I wish all forms of cross-app tracking identifiers were simply abolished, and any API that could be used to pass data between apps like this would require explicit user consent. Real question: how would you try to abolish fingerprinting? Processing identifying info on your device can mostly be done server-side and requires no device permissions, accounts or APIs, just some basic identifiers like screen resolution, storage capacity, software/library versioning, battery health... anything is fair game.

grishka 5y ago
Fingerprinting is "analog" by its nature and thus never 100% reliable. Besides, here's another idea: not only make internet access a runtime permission like I suggest in another comment here, but also make it per-domain. If you don't trust an app, run it in a "paranoid mode" where you have to explicitly allow it to access every domain it tries to access. Advertisers always use their own infrastructure to prevent fraud among other reasons. And another one: a docker-style fully isolated container for you to run apps you don't trust. The container simply lies to apps with hardcoded or random values for anything that could possibly be used for fingerprinting.
fsflover 5y ago
One possibility is to use Tor (or Whonix on Qubes, which I use).

bentcorner 5y ago

I'm very anti-advertising as well. I use ublock and youtube vanced, and have a pihole on my home network. While privacy is certainly a bonus, the main reason is that ads interrupt what I want to look at, consume power, are ugly, intrusive and a vector for malware. I know many content creators consider me to be stealing their content, I wouldn't exactly disagree. But so be it. Some sites block me from visiting them, I think that's completely fair, and I don't put up much effort in circumventing such blocks. This Privacy Sandbox initiative appears to not at all address the problems I have with advertisements.

jcranberry 5y ago
I think it could help with being vectors for malware. The proposal wants advertising sdks to be uploaded to the play store as separate apks, and run in a separate process with limited permissions with no remote code execution allowed. Perhaps that might help you install apps without the SDKs as well. But the sandbox does appear to be computationally costly since the spec says it may not be enabled on starter android 13 phones. Also I doubt it will help regarding aesthetics. Of course the documents have all this as optional features rather than compulsory ones. But it sounds nice.

ac29 5y ago

> I wish all forms of cross-app tracking identifiers were simply abolished Interestingly, I noticed today my Android/Pixel phone lets me delete the advertising ID instead of just resetting it to a new one.