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A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header wit
by hyperman1 2y ago
A few weeks ago, I was using my mothers PC. Google was erroneously in French, and no language chooser available. So I checked. Firefox sent a HTTP header with a Dutch preference. She was logged in with her Google account, which had a Dutch language preference. Some geolocation providers put her in Dutch speaking cities of Belgium. Still, the Google Algorithm had decided she would speak French. Plenty of other sites make similar errors, especially the biggest ones
So I wonder: Why are we sending out all this info. Fingerprinting is the only actual use. The number of sites using it as it should is minimal. Lets just stop giving it. They don't need a list of audio or video devices. They don't need my installed fonts. They don't believe my language settings when I whack them over the head with it. Let's just fill in defaults everywhere. Maybe provide a whitelist for legitimate sites.
- Zak 2y agoSites preferring geolocation over Accept-Language as a means of picking the language is one of my pet peeves. Preferring geolocation over a logged in user's stored setting is beyond absurd.
- f1shy 2y agoWhen you think that 90% of browsing devices are phones or laptops… beyond any possible comprehension
- buildbot 2y agoWith weirdly sticky behavior too once you’ve left that area. My google sign in prompt was in Italian for over a decade after logging in there once on a family vacation. Only with the latest login revamp did that setting finally get purged. Everything else was always english, profile set to english etc.
- anal_reactor 2y ago[flagged]
- ElCapitanMarkla 2y agoI’ve just had an issue where my google searches were stuck defaulting to Sydney, Australia after being there for one week.
- worthless-trash 2y agoI think that is a pretty safe assumption from Google. People die trying to leave Sydney.
- cbarrick 2y agoThis was so annoying when visiting Poland recently. I don't speak Polish. Even after setting my preferred language on my Google account, Google Search was still speaking Polish to me.
- cyberpunk 2y agoPrime video is amazing for this; in Germany but only dubs available? Admit defeat that the orig audio is somehow not available but not even English subtitles?!
- senkora 2y agoWith video I think that it’s sometimes a licensing thing. As in, the streaming service licenses subtitles from a third party and the rights are limited to specific countries.
- Zak 2y agoThat's a weird one. It's common for people to prefer the original audio, and most Germans understand English.
- bmoxb 2y agoGermany has a very strong culture of dubbing essentially everything. Just finding any showing of a film in its original language at a cinema is very difficult outside of major cities for example.
- wkat4242 2y agoSame in Spain. Often only the Spanish dubbed audio is available making the content useless to me. With the increase in ads on streaming platforms I've just reverted back to piracy. The enshittification has gone too far.
- slowmovintarget 2y agoSame in the Netherlands. It gave me everything in Dutch, even after I logged in.
- sunshowers 2y agoThere's a trend in commercial software where folks keep adding epicycles on epicycles, often based on barely stat-sig wins in A/B tests, to the point of systems becoming completely impenetrable. I bet this was a result of that.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoAnd geolocation is often wrong. Half of IP locators locate my VPS in one country, a quarter in another country, 1000 miles away, and another quarter in a third country, 1000 miles away from the first two.
- stevekemp 2y agoAgreed. I live in Finland, but my preferred language is English. Many many sites send me Finnish by default, although Google directions will always be in Swedish. I seem to have to "change results to English" on google searches at least once a week when it forgets which language I've setup and used for the past ten years!
- asyx 2y agoNow that google is offering translated Reddit posts my flow on my iPhone when I google something is Google -> Reddit -> open translated post in app -> share in app with browser again -> click on show original. I’ve never ever let any involved websites actually use my native language. Neither Google nor Reddit.
- Symbiote 2y agoIf you set the language to something that isn't the default anywhere, and isn't standard for your country (so for you, English followed by Danish would do) Google seems to respect the preference. But you add a lot of entropy to the privacy violators.
- wkat4242 2y agoYeah I live in Spain but don't speak the language so well. It's super frustrating when I get redirected to Spanish versions of sites. Sometimes they even redirect me back to Spanish after I deliberately choose English.
- anbotero 2y agoNetflix used to offer Audio and Subtitles in several languages. Now even subtitles the only option I get is Spanish (Latin America)... Like come on, sometimes I want to learn another language, understand the real word behind the sounds. I may understand Audio, because of Edge location storage costs, but Subtitles... that’s blasphemy.
- unsignedint 2y agoSelecting a locale based solely on geolocation is absurd, and the reverse is equally true. Just because you prefer a specific locale doesn't mean you're physically in that country. Unfortunately, I encounter this anti-pattern far too often.
- lexlambda 2y ago> Why are we sending out all this info. You are generalizing. Google and big providers do that, usually (US)services that need to cater to the whole world. But a huge part of the normal web still uses and _needs_ preferred language. No one wants to be forced to use geolocation. Just one very common example are info pages for sightseeing, they are usually available in all languages that people commonly visit from and just work if you browse to them. Not to mention that geolocation would be useless anyway in that case.
- notpushkin 2y agoIt would be nice if Google actually used the preferred language. They don't give a shit. I'm still getting maps and other stuff in local language based on IP.
- OptionOfT 2y agoFunny, my friend in Wallonia complains about the opposite, he wants Google in French and gets it in Dutch.
- create-username 2y agoYes. The browser innocently gives away tons of information for surveillance capitalism corporations to leech. It is a if the web and browser developers lived in an innocent world
- chgs 2y agoThe largest browser is owned by a surveillance firm
- NemoNobody 2y agoWhy anyone would use Chrome blows my mind a bit. Brave is a superior browser in every single aspect of a browser and as of rn - you do not see ads on the Internet. It's such a no brainer, I can't comprehend it.
- maztaim 2y agoAre you OK with Brave using Chromium as their base?
- acheron 2y agoBrave is still Chrome, you’re just kidding yourself.
- Scottn1 2y agoBecause Brave is just trying to build their own ad-network under the guise of being "privacy" oriented. It is a conflict of interest trying to get profitable selling user data while also claiming to block it. When first installed the their own ad and crypto stuff is enabled-by-default. Then throw in a few nefarious incidents, such as the affiliate link-hijacks a few years ago, and it is hard to trust them. No browser is safe from capitalistic rot at this point.
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoAds in and of themselves don't mean a browser isn't privacy-focused. In fact the most privacy focused one I can think of, Duckduckgo, is monetized by ads. All of Duckduckgo is. They're just not personalized.
- newyankee 2y agoI still see stuff in Spanish on my phone and have not yet figured out how to reset it. Talking about Google updates like calendar, weather
- xattt 2y agoOne time, I set a self-checkout machine to French to immerse myself in French training in Canada. This happened to set the payment terminal to French as well, which must have set a bit in the on-card chip. Now, all my pay-at-the-pump interactions at gas stations are all in French. A website I was purchasing from flipped to French when I entered my card info. There were a few surprise interactions where my language preference was clearly derived from my bank card setting. I’m just hoping that being classed as bilingual is doing wonders for my “social” score at some clandestine data clearinghouse.
- benhurmarcel 2y agoThis is one of the main reasons why I use (and pay) for another search engine than Google. It just keeps translating everything it can to the country I’m connecting from. Even results from Reddit go to an automatically translated page. Google is really bad at handling multilingual users, or even just users that don’t want to use the language of the place they connect from. Now by default Youtube even translates the audio automatically, it’s unbearable. And I have declared the languages I speak in my Google profile. It doesn’t seem to matter.
- joedi 2y agoYou do realize that the fact of paying for any service makes your usage perfectly attributable to real identity, don't you. Something that Google needed to work hard to infer with some level of certainty you actually pay for. And I'd only have so much trust in promises of respecting your privacy given by any business. Everything that can be sold is for sale, event if this meant that it could not longer claim to "do no evil".
- dghlsakjg 2y agoI use kagi for a search engine. Paying for a search engine means that I am the customer, not the product. While you are correct that my data is an asset for Kagi, it is a one shot asset, vs my subscription, which is recurring revenue. I can look at the privacy policy for Kagi (https://kagi.com/privacy https://kagi.com/privacy), and see that I am not at risk of having my searches logged or data shared. I trust them because violating that privacy policy puts them at risk of being sued by me, and by any investors in the company. As you yourself stated: either company is capable of building a profile. One has promised not to do that contractually, and google, more or less, has promised to do exactly that regardless.
- itcrowd 2y agoA while ago a LinkedIn request from a Chinese person hit my inbox. I reluctantly pressed Accept Connection (in the email) only to find out that my LinkedIn language setting had changed to Chinese. Now, I don't speak or read Chinese and couldn't immediately find a way to change the setting back to English. Could probably find it on the internet but .. Oh well, I don't really use LinkedIn so it's just stayed that way now.
- netsharc 2y agoThat is some genius move by LinkedIn... I can understand it if someone's sending out something like a Google Doc collaboration invite, especially to a non-GMail address, the email will be in the Google Docs UI language of the sender. But LinkedIn has your profile with all your preferences! What next, a colleague shares the link to a location, you open it in your car, and your car UI turns into Chinese?
- ratmeadow 2y agoSo true. It's funny how the article mentioned "privacy enhancing technologies" - how about instead, we get rid of the disgustingly huge quantity of technology devoted to removing our privacy?!
- kdmtctl 2y agoI struggle with this often, but http://www.google.com/ncr http://www.google.com/ncr does the trick and allow to choose the language later if necessary.
- lithos 2y agoI logged in on deployment in the Middle East, and still have Google randomly swap over to Arabic in search and on YouTube. It has been over a decade and a half (since I was there), and I've never once tried to do any browsing in anything but English. To even drive this incompetence further, I was Navy so I have under two weeks time total of be logged in. Frankly for a company that's a Spyware company, they sure are incompetent.
- nurumaik 2y agoI want everything, everywhere be always in english by default unless I explicitly set another language or there is no english version at all. Even if it's my native language and I'm in my home country