DNS over TLS Lets Google Serve You More Ads

Like a lot of people, I hate advertisements. In my quest to remove ads as much as possible, I've installed an ad blocker in my browser. To go further, I've installed Pi-Hole to block ads for all devices on my home network. I've even setup firewall rules to re-route all DNS traffic through Pi-Hole. This setup seemed to work pretty well until I noticed I was still seeing ads in an app on my Android phone.

Sometime in the last couple of years Google added a Private DNS feature to Android and enabled it by default. Private DNS is really DNS over TLS (DoT), which is supposed to be a privacy feature that encrypts your DNS so your network operators can't snoop on what sites you're browsing. It sounds nice in theory, but when I'm at home, I am the network operator, and DoT has a side-effect of making my apps and devices ignore my carefully planned DNS settings, and bypass my (actually privacy enhancing) Pi-Hole ad blocker. The (surely coincidental) outcome is that Google can freely serve ads to my Android device.

You can disable the Private DNS feature in Android (for now). The bad news is that Firefox is enabling DNS over HTTPS (DoH), which is a similar system, with similar drawbacks. Now, you have to change settings not only on each device's operating system, but you might have to individually configure every app to disable DoT/DoH. The next thing I'm going to try is blocking all traffic to public DoT/DoH servers at my firewall.

💡 Update 2021-03-22:
I learned that Firefox supports a temporary workaround for disabling DoH. You can setup Pi-Hole to point the "canary domain" use-application-dns.net to any IP address to cause Firefox to use normal DNS.

https://ericlathrop.com/2021/03/dns-over-tls-lets-google-serve-you-more-ads/

#private #dns #tls #google #DeleteGoogle #advertising #smartphones #workaround
📡 @nogoolag @blackbox_archiv

Use the DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome

Google has created a new tracking method called FLoC, put it in Chrome, and automatically turned it on for millions of users.

💡 FLoC is bad for privacy: It puts you in a group based on your browsing history, and any website can get that group FLoC ID to target and fingerprint you.

You can use the DuckDuckGo Chrome extension (pending Chrome Web Store's approval of our update) to block FLoC's tracking, which is an enhancement to its tracker blocking and directly in line with the extension's single purpose of protecting your privacy holistically as you use Chrome.

DuckDuckGo Search (via our website duckduckgo.com) is now also configured to opt-out of FLoC, regardless if you use our extension or app.

https://spreadprivacy.com/block-floc-with-duckduckgo/

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/9/22376110/duckduckgo-privacy-floc-block-chrome-extension-advertising-tech

#ddg #DuckDuckGo #google #FLoC #chrome #browser #ad #targeting #tracking #cookies #DeleteGoogle
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Alphabet, Stop Protecting Harassers

Alphabet workers deserve the right to work in an environment free from their abusers.

Alphabet does not provide a safe environment for those who face harassment in the workplace. Even when HR confirms harassment, no action is taken to make the reporter safe. For example, Emi Nietfeld shared in the New York Times, “My harasser still sat next to me. My manager told me H.R. wouldn’t even make him change his desk, let alone work from home or go on leave.”
This is a long pattern where Alphabet protects the harasser instead of protecting the person harmed by the harassment. The person who reports harassment is forced to bear the burden, usually leaving Alphabet while their harasser stays or is rewarded for their behavior.

This is not news to many people at Alphabet:

https://stopprotectingharassers.medium.com/alphabet-stop-protecting-harassers-d32a17aa5762

#google #DeleteGoogle #alphabet #harassers #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Brave disables Chromium FLoC features

https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/8468

#brave #browser #floc #chromium #chrome #google #DeleteGoogle
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Google's short-lived data-advantage

There's a lot of ways to think about the movement to tame Big Tech, but one of the more useful divisions to explore is the "Night of the Comet" people versus the "Don't Believe the Criti-Hype" people.

This is a division over the value of the data that Google, Facebook and other large tech firms have amassed over the years – data on their users, sure, but also data on the advertisers and publishers they serve with their ad-tech platforms.

Big Tech companies and their investors are really bullish on the value of this commercial data-advantage: they say that spying on us – the users – lets them manipulate our opinions and activities so that we buy or believe the things their advertisers pay them to push.

More quietly, their investors believe that the data-advantage extends to publishers and advertisers, a deep storehouse of data that makes it effectively impossible for anyone else to do the precision targeted that Big Tech manages, which is why they have such fat margins.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#google #DeleteGoogle #facebook #DeleteFacebook #BigData #BigTech #AdTech #thinkabout #comment
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Google gamed its ad auction system to favor its own ads, generated $213 million

Google used a secret program called "Bernanke" that used historical bidding data to give its ad-buying system a major advantage over its rivals, an antitrust lawsuit filing claims, a program that earned the company hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Google is in the process of dealing with an antitrust lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general, about its advertising technology and ad industry dominance. In a response to the lawsuit filed by Google in early April, the search company accidentally let slip of some of its behind-the-scenes work.

In the initial version of the filing, seen by the Wall Street Journal, Google failed to properly redact some sections, revealing the secretive business elements. A federal judge allowed Google to refile the properly-redacted version under seal.

The unredacted elements refers to a program called "Project Bernanke," a system that Google allegedly kept secret from publishers and other rivals. Bernanke was also viewed as an antitrust issue by the states in the lawsuit, due to how it operated.

The antitrust lawsuit centers around how Google's ownership of a platform for selling online advertising, as well as its position as an ad buyer for its own properties, was a problem. By being both an owner and a client, Google was thought to be able to game the system due to having access to data that ad buyers wouldn't necessarily receive.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/11/google-bernanke-revealed-in-ad-business-antitrust-lawsuit-error

#google #DeleteGoogle #AdTech #AdBusiness #lawsuit #antitrust #bernanke
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Google to Start Censoring Telegram

Fake news or justifiable warning? You be the judge.

I saw a message today stating the “Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them.” The message suggested a simple workaround to download the app directly from telegram.org/android.

👉🏼 Here’s the message in its entirety:

"Google Play Store is now censoring certain pages on Telegram if you downloaded the app through them.

To get around this simply download the Android app directly from Telegram themselves. Less censorship and more updates.

Before you delete the Google play store Telegram app, install the new one directly from Telegram which will send you a security code to your Telegram messages. Once you have the code from the old app and you enter it into the new one, you can then delete the Google play store version."

Having seen videos I consider important disappearing from YouTube recently I wouldn’t put it past Google to dupe the chattle into downloading a doctored version of Telegram in order to protect people stamp out free speech in order to suppress the fast-rising global freedom movement organizing on Telegram.

Whether or not the message I shared above was true or false is less important to me than maintaining free speech. And so I’d like to share a few resources I’ve learned about from being on Telegram which can help you do just that:

https://habd.as/post/google-start-censor-telegram/

#BigTech #censorship #dystopia #freedom #google #DeleteGoogle #youtube #telegram #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side - Clean up the web!

Will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?

🚮 Remove third-party scripts from Google, Facebook, etc.
This includes Google Analytics (one of the most prevalent trackers in the world), YouTube videos, Facebook login widgets, etc.

These scripts enable people farmers like Google and Facebook to track people across the web as they go from site to site. If you embed them in your site, you’re complicit in enabling this tracking.

And yes, that absolutely includes fucking Google AMP.

https://cleanuptheweb.org/

👉🏼 Read as well: Nobody is flying to join Google’s FLoC - #Brave, #Vivaldi, #Edge, and #Mozilla are all out

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387492/google-floc-ad-tech-privacy-browsers-brave-vivaldi-edge-mozilla-chrome-safari

#cleanuptheweb #floc #google #DeleteGoogle #facebook #DeleteFacebook #tracking #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Forced unemployment and second-class status: The life of Google's data center contractors

Contractors love the good pay and engaging work in Google's data centers. They resent that Google and its staffing firm, Modis Engineering, make them quit every two years.

Shannon Wait felt a muscle pull in her shoulder as she knelt to lug a 50-pound battery into its rack, but she ignored the pain and kept going. She had 20 batteries to replace in the cavernous, 85-degree warehouse that day.

Hauling batteries is a major part of the job for Wait and hundreds of other workers like her at Google's data centers. They'd tried switching to automated machines during her two years working in the Berkeley County, South Carolina facility, but that stopped after only a few weeks when one of the machines pinned a co-worker to a wall.

Despite the heavy lifting, many of the workers in Google's 14 U.S. data centers at least start out enjoying the work. It's a tech job for people with no tech experience. It pays relatively well ($15 per hour for most contract workers). And while it's physically demanding, it's nothing like working at an Amazon fulfillment center or the local Walmart.

But Wait and other workers like her who keep the data centers running are not actually Google employees. While as many as half the workers in some data centers actually work for Google, make Google salaries and get all those famous Google perks, the other half don't. For data center contractors specifically, that difference can extend beyond second-tier social status to job insecurity and forced unemployment.

Protocol spoke with four contract and full-time Google employees in three of the 14 U.S. locations for this story, all of whom were granted anonymity for fear of losing their jobs (except for Wait, whose data center contract recently ended).

https://www.protocol.com/google-contractors-forced-unemployment

#google #DeleteGoogle #data #center #contractors #unemployment #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private—But It Wasn’t

Researchers say hundreds of preinstalled apps can access a log found on Android devices where sensitive contact tracing information is stored.

When Google and Apple introduced their COVID-19 contact tracing framework in April 2020, the companies aimed to reassure people worried about sharing private health information with major corporations.

Google and Apple provided assurances that the data generated through the apps—people’s movements, who they might have come in contact with, and whether they reported testing positive for COVID-19—would be anonymized and would never be shared with anyone other than public health agencies.

“Our goal is to empower [public health agencies] with another tool to help combat the virus while protecting user privacy,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a tweet last May, when the framework became publicly available.

Apple CEO Tim Cook provided similar assurances.

Since then, millions of people have downloaded contact tracing apps developed through Apple’s and Google’s framework: The U.K.’s National Health Services’ app has at least 16 million users, while Canada’s Digital Service COVID Alert app boasted more than six million downloads in January, and Virginia’s Department of Health noted more than two million residents were using its COVIDWISE app.

California governor Gavin Newsom endorsed his state’s version of the app, calling it “100% private & secure” in a tweet last December.

But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it. AppCensus was testing the system as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The company found no similar issues with the iPhone version of the framework.

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/04/27/google-promised-its-contact-tracing-app-was-completely-private-but-it-wasnt

#google #DeleteGoogle #contact #tracing #app #privacy
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

This morning, I was locked out of my Google account

I chatted with Google support to see if they could help me. This is a genuine live chat with Google support:

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/RaveofRavendale/status/1389507928269393921/

#google #DeleteGoogle
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv