Nah. If you want to be outraged at Google, at least be correct.
This has to do with Google “collections”, not synced bookmarks. Afaik, collections are a thing you only access on mobile through the google app, this doesn’t even have anything to do with Chrome.
If you run chrome on mobile, for example, you don’t have access to the collections. It’s only through the google app.
Almost certain they monitor collections because they can be shared with public.
They shouldn’t be monitored either way in my opinion as it’s just a bunch of links, but especially not while still private.
Ultimately I don’t think it quite matters if it technically is bookmarks or “collections”, they seem clearly used in the same manner in this case.
I don’t care if you’re mad about it like I said. I just care about accuracy. The person in the screenshot and this thread’s title are both inaccurate.
I didn’t ever indicate I was mad, I simply stated my opinion. We already know it is inaccurate as you shared this in your original comment.
They aren’t. They are made from links that appear in Google search results. Google is notifying the person that the link you’ve saved is being removed. Therefore it will be removed from your collection as well.
Keep licking that Google boot.
Some torrent sites have been ordered to be entirely blocked in some countries so they probably have to check for them to comply with local laws.
These blocks are usually the job of the ISP’s in the country, mostly via DNS.
I don’t think a simple “collection” of URLs would ever fall under any of that.
Normally, I would fully agree with you, but well, don’t underestimate the stupidity of law makers: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/sign-our-petition-to-stop-france-from-forcing-browsers-like-mozillas-firefox-to-censor-websites/
France is always special! It’s honestly sad that they constantly try to pull so many stupid things off.
Eh… the ultimate question, what if it’s a collection of CSAM links?
Some moderation is fine, especially when it can be shared pretty easily. This isn’t private bookmarks, it’s “private” bookmark collections.
Edit: For those downvoting, this is the same concept as a private Reddit/facebook community. Just because it’s “invite only” doesn’t mean it’s free from following the rules of the whole site.
CSAM is never an excuse to violate everyone’s privacy.
I hate seeing people implying that it is. It’s no better then Patriot Act B.s that took away privacy in the name of catching terrorists.
This once more reminds me of the guy in Sweden who got assaulted by police, in his bed, because an American institution searched through his Yahoo mail and found pictures and videos of him and his 30 year old boyfriend and incorrectly flagged it as CSAM, and then forwarded it to Swedish authorities.
There was no justice after that. No repercussions for either the Swedish police or the American government, and no damages paid to the guy.
Could this sort of surveillance stop abuse of minors? Yeah absolutely, but at what cost?
You’re equating a companies refusal to host links to piracy (or CSAM) and… literal assault?
Yeah, absolutely. That’s literally what I said. In fact CSAM should come bundled on every single electronic device. Then it won’t be a problem anymore.
Of course not. My comment was in response to the discussion about companies going through private emails and the like (which I recognise the original post isn’t about, but that’s what this conversation turned into) and how I take issue with that. You might argue that we have no right to privacy when we use products like gmail and whatnot, which would be a fair argument if they didn’t already dominate the market.
When those links are hosted on Google servers, publicly available to anyone handed the link to them?… how is that a private space?
This isn’t reaching into your phone and checking the information you store on it, this is checking links you added and shared with others using their service. They absolutely have the right to check them.
It is a private space when they are not shared publicly
Except that’s not how it works.
If I go into a public park, put up a tent, then start breaking the parks rules, I’m not “in the clear” just because I’m in a tent and didn’t invite anyone else in.
The fact that you think “privacy” existed even then is telling. The only thing that changed in that regard with the so-called Patriot BS is whether the gov’t could do it without the guile that otherwise had been SoP for decades. 🤦🏼♂️
I call them human parrots, they like to repeat words or phrases that they do not understand or lack full understanding to get the approval of their caretakers and receive treats.
😂😂😂
Words used to have meaning, you know. Like, for example, the word “private”.
Private has various meanings in various contexts. If I take you to the private booth at a club, does it mean I’m allowed to slap around the waiter? No, of course not because rules still apply in private places hosted by a third party.
If you want privacy in the context you explicitly mean, you shouldn’t be using anyone else’s hardware to begin with. If you expect any third party company to be fine with posting anything on them, you’re gonna have a bad time.
For example, how many lemmy instances are fine with you direct linking to piracy torrents?
I’d not expect the private booth to have the club’s employee sitting there and waiting for me to do something that is against the rules preemptively.
We mostly argue about semantics, but in this instance you are trying to excuse some very questionable behaviour by companies by saying something along the lines of “well you better go and live in a forest then”. And I don’t think that’s a good take.
For example, how many Lemmy instances are fine with you direct linking to piracy torrents?
Irrelevant, as all content on Lemmy is public in a proper sense of this word.
Yup. As an analogy, we rent apartments but that doesn’t revoke our right to privacy. We’ve decided people deserve privacy even if they’re only renting and not owning. Same should be true when one is renting space online to store things.
Irrelevant, as all content on Lemmy is public in a proper sense of this word.
/sigh
How many file hosting services let you share pirated data, publicly?
Before you start in on “it’s not the same” it absolutely is. It’s private data, which is being shared through a link publicly. Just like bookmark collections.
And once that file has been identified as piracy, it is very often fingerprinted and blacklisted from not only that instance, but all instances past, present and future.
That’s essentially what is going on here.
I guess we test and see whether I get banned.
Also, it’s not the same. A link to a website is not “pirated content”. A link to a website in a “collection” not shared with anybody is not publicly available pirated content.
Why would Google preemptively ban a set of characters that does not constitute a slur and is perfectly legal to exist?
I’m getting really sick at the amount of misinformation that gets spread here. There’s plenty of stuff to hate Google without making shit up, and resorting to misleading titles.
Wtf is a collections?
Basically the Google equivalent of Pocket Reader; saves a whole bunch of links from Google News/Articles for you, Google search, and general web links. It’s not the same as your Chrome bookmarks (though at one point they were considering merging them until everyone hated it).
Ok, I just checked. My collections consist almost entirely of saved maps locations of which restaurants and tourist places I want to visit. Interesting.
Beats me, I only use chrome if firefox cannot display the site correctly. And it’s a case to case basis at that, it has to be that I really really need to access that site.
Also i rarely use the Google apps that came with my phone. The most probably used one is Maps.
Edit : so yeah, I forgot. I’m on Android. There’s that, no escaping from them on my part. I can’t be bothered with using and installing my own phone OS.
Crazy that I had to scroll past 9 other comments to reach this one. Maybe I oughta start sorting comments by top.
Upvote this post to stop spreading misinformation please
I think you need to boost, not upvote. But I could be wrong.
As far as I’m aware boosting is only a kbin thing. I haven’t seen it in any Lemmy client.
My bookmarks can also be shared with the public though
I’m not aware of a way of making your bookmarks public through chrome.
Aww man, I was hoping google was gonna clean my bookmark up for me.
Anything on my computer can be shared with the public as well.
Get. Away. From. Google.
It’s really that simple for much of their products. I really don’t understand why people still insist on using chrome, in particular. Google is a horrible company that would literally sell you into slavery if it was legal and they thought it’d boost their ad business somehow.
Part of the problem is that Google has an entire ecosystem that is ridiculously useful and is designed to hook people and keep them around. And once they’re hooked it’s really hard to move away from, even if it’s in their best interest.
Unfortunately, parts of that ecosystem start deteriorating as they slowly abandon the product, until it reaches a point of being borderline useless. Then, they just deactivate it with little to no warning. Sometimes they just shut things down even if they’re popular (such as Google Poly).
For example, their line of home security cameras are getting worse in quality and usefulness. I feel like it’s only a matter of time until the Nest service shuts down.
I don’t think Google will shut down nest anytime soon. They gather very useful telemetry about their “customers” and use that data to train models, and ah-hoc send your front door video to law enforcement whenever they want it.
Perhaps, but there is absolutely no development or bug fixing happening on their software. There hasn’t been a software update in years, and the hardware has been a crapshoot for just as long.
Everyone says Apple’s walled garden is a problem.
Google built something far more insidious. higher walls but glass, no garden just a swamp of ads.
Google has lots of problems but “a walled garden” it absolutely is not.
There’s an open source version of Android with hundreds of forks.
There’s an open source version of Chrome with dozens of forks.
You can install literally any APK you want on Android without any workaround shitfuckery, rooting or jailbreaking.
All Google apps are available on iOS and MacOS.
People use Google products because, from a pure user standpoint, they’re a compelling option.
You can sign up for a Google Workspace account and have virtually everything you need to run a business at a compelling price. And it all works quite well.
None of that means they aren’t using their domination nefariously but it sure as shit is not a walled garden.
This reads like a Google ad. I know you’re not a Google marketing shill. They don’t need it. Their users will justify their own choice to the point their literally lose the scope of the thread.
Not so much a Google ad as it is shitting on Apple
They are all part of the same walled shit hole disguised in a veneer of shiny new products and empty promises.
Sure. It’s just funny to watch people pick Google because Apple is bad.
At least Apple isn’t selling every price of your data to advertisers.
Apple hatred is mostly people who have never used it.
Everyone has used Google.
Google is inarguably worse but people get religious about it. As long as they can think of one thing Google does better, they will justify the abuse.
Sort of like republican voters.
Apple is almost certainly selling your data, perhaps not to same extent as Google, but personal data is literally these companies biggest commodity.
Yep. That’s the justification I was talking about.
People have a blindness to Apple so they let Google take their data.
deleted by creator
Microsoft is not really an alternative lol
Depends on your goals I think. Microsoft isn’t very likely to ever abandon their office suite, since it’s an integral part of their business. Google could do that tomorrow.
If you want to get away from big evil corporations, then no they’re obviously not an alternative.
I think there are Google Docs clones you could self-host.
OnlyOffice, which is included in NextCloud and allows for co-editing, works fine in my experience. Microsoft Office Online is slightly more sophisticated, but it also feels more bloated in my experience.
There’s also a markdown editor allowing for co-authoring in Nextcloud. It lacks proper track changes, but for drafting up a document together it’s great. Then you can just convert to word or latex when it’s time to revise.
For most of my co-authoring needs I use Overleaf, which is a fantastic online Latex editor.
There are certainly options! Good old LibreOffice is still around too.
I would argue that anything from Microsoft or Apple are not good, safe alternatives to Google.
deleted by creator
Eh, I think it’s pretty simple to move away from as there are plenty of ready made alternatives. There are a million different email services, many web browsers, many note taking/saving apps, many other map services, and so on. The only ones there aren’t really replacements for are YouTube and parts of google photos.
Apple and Microsoft for example both have alternatives for everything google has.
There are certainly a great number of alternative, but the average person doesn’t seem to want to put in the effort to switch. Nor do they appear to particularly care about privacy or the prevalence of ads. Google puts a lot of effort into making sure people don’t care enough to leave.
Meth is useful for keeping me awake but I still don’t use it
Google keeps taking L’s and firefox keeps taking W’s. If they keep going maybe firefox will be most used browser again
I hate that I have to keep chrome on my machine because some sites I visit don’t work well, or at all, on Firefox.
I’ve heard a lot of people mention this recently and I must live a charmed life because I’ve never had this happen. There was I think maybe, once where I was having a problem with a site and it said that I needed to use a browser like chrome so I begrudgingly did and it still didn’t work so I don’t count that as an example and other than that, I’ve just never seen it. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s not since about 2001 that I’ve seen any website give me shit with only working on certain browsers and that was sites designed to work on IE6 or something.
Just had it happen yesterday with the the students loan simulator. It wouldn’t work on Firefox and kept getting hung and freezing. Opened it in chrome and it worked perfectly first time.
It’s not common, but enough that I keep chrome installed for now.
When someone sends me links to instagram on my phone, firefox mobile can’t play the thing, I’m forced to open the link in chrome to watch the video. There are lots and lots of websites and webapps that don’t work or barely open on firefox. I’m forced to regularly open every week a few links on chrome/chromium on my computer as well. Although the amount as reduced a lot, some years ago it was worse.
I’ve used several sites that just won’t scroll in Firefox. Coursera is awful for this and a lot of job sites seem to use the same library because they have the exact same issue
The most annoying thing is the website that insist on displaying a banner everytime you visit to tell you that it won’t work on Firefox. And then it works perfectly fine
Brave or ungoogled chromium are other options
both are still just chromium and as such still subject to google’s bullshittery like amp, manifest v3 and web integrity
Use brave
That’s just chrome with a hat on and does nothing to help reduce the encroachment of Google as the internet’s sole provider
But it is more private than chrome and makes heavy modifications for privacy/freedom’s sake it is definitely better than actual chrome if you have to use something chromium based
it’s literally made by an adtech company. you’re falling for marketing hype
seeing as no one has delivered proof so far i would argue that thats not the case.
i mean one can literally check for themself (even i, if i could be bothered)
It’s still chromium based, which I’m trying to get away from as much as possible.
and here i am stuck using chrome, firefox doesn’t install properly. i’ve tried a bunch of times. i have a chromebook.
Do you need ChromeOS? If not i suggest installing linux.
Ngl seems sus that firefox won’t install in ChromeOS
This was suspicious back when IE became incorporated to File Explorer circa Windows 98.
Now it’s just business.
i tried installing linux but i don’t have enough memory for it. my storage is small (32 gigs).
How much memory do you have?
Less than 10 gigs free. Ram is 4gigs.
4 gigs should be enough for a distro. depending on how far you are willing to go you can even end up with 1 GB or less ram usage at idle. and storage shloudnt be a problem either. i had some distros that take up like 4 gig (storage, not memory)
the linux that i downloaded was over 10 gigs storage. how were you able to find something for 4 gigs?
Sounds like an anti trust lawsuit waiting to happen tbh
It’s in the name lol
firefox doesn’t do this
Neither does NextCloud. Self hosted bookmarks have been great.
I see NextCloud being talked about everywhere. I checked their website but still can’t figure out a use case for personnal use.
What do you use it for?
It’s basically Google drive or Dropbox but hosted yourself on your own server. It’s an effort to set up and maintain but means it’s entirely in your control.
It’s a file sync platform. Say you have files you want to access from your desktop, you install next cloud and place the files there. They sync up with the next cloud server, presumably your NAS.
Now let’s say you want to access those files from another machine. It could be a laptop, an Android phone, your friends, whatever. You just need to install the client and login, and there your files are, ready to sync to the new device.
Great use case would be syncing your computers user folders, such as my documents, desktop, etc. If you have to wipe your computer and start over, at least those items are preserved and easy to restore.
Otherwise sharing files with other machines in general is the main use.
how is it different from using something like syncthing?
It is much, much easier to setup than syncthing, uses a decent GUI interface that works well with Linux, Mac, Win, iOS & Android. Lots of additional features beyond file sync/sharing.
Much more in depth UI similar to Google drive kind of UI. Has a bunch of plugins to do other things too. Bookmarks being one of them. I personally use both they have similar syncing functions but work differently. Syncthing is nice for data just being on multiple devices where nextcloud is nice to have a UI and web site to go to anywhere. Nextcloud get the spousal approval much easier too.
I’ve been looking for a FOSS replacement for One drive, it seems like this is it. It seems great, I will definitely install it on my homelab then.
Thanks for the detailed description.
I use it as a backup location for pictures and videos I make with my phone and for bookmark storage. But you can use it to fully replace cloud services like OneDrive, GCloud or iCloud.
Is nextcloud the same as syncthing?
Syncthing just… syncs things. Say you have a folder that you want to automatically get synced between devices, syncthing is exactly for this.
If you want something like Google Drive, you can run Nextcloud, which is like a self hosted Google Drive, but more powerful. You upload files, which get saved to the server, not just synced between devices. Then you can also sync them, sync calendars, news (RSS feeds), edit documents in it (assuming you install the correct extension), and a lot more things.
That sounds pretty much just like SyncThing. Is the only difference that Nextcloud requires a server, rather than being decentralized?
Yep, it’s centralized. However, it offers more functionality than just syncing stuff. If you only want to sync files, syncthing is the simpler, more lightweight solution :)
Nextcloud includes OpenOffice integration, like Google Docs, and loads of plugins, such as kanban project management, notes like Keep, galleries, etc. Very much unlike Syncthing, both are useful for slightly different things.
Ah gotcha; so with NextCloud I could have multiple people editing an OpenOffice file simultaneously, like Google docs? That’s interesting, though not a use case that generally applies to me.
Correct. I think it’s unnecessarily complex to setup and maintain if you only need to store files.
Neither does Chrome
For now. All it takes is a single change in leadership.
Nah, the CEO reports to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so just swapping the CEO will not impact their overall goals.
Besides, Firefox end-to-end-encrypts synced data. They’d have to rip out a ton of solid engineering to know what you bookmark.
Are you fucking shitting me rn? I am sick of how lame this dystopian future is. Where are my neon lights and grungy underground bars? All we get in this timeline are takedown notices, corporate overreach, disappearing content and DMCA strikes.
TBF in your grungy cyberverse the corporatocracy would simply try to kill you or turn you into a vegetable instead of sending you a DMCA violation notice by email.
deleted by creator
Well they do exist you just have to look for them
Until you find out that everything is so expensive there too you’d need a corpo job’s salary just to pay for cover.
And Xs. Xs everywhere.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Firefox
deleted by creator
I went from chrome to Firefox and while there is a slight learning curve (like private browsing is ctrl + shift + P instead of Chrome’s ctrl + shift + n?) But I’ve been having a great time with it.
The biggest learning curve for me was the placement of the find bar.
deleted by creator
It’s the only way.
People who still use Google Chrome in 2023 should not be surprised. Firefox gang stays winning
Op you’re so easily fooled
Fake, as that site is brand new and has nothing on it.
Google has plenty of skeletons in their closet. OP didn’t have to make up new ones.
Internet will internet though I guess
Fake, as that site is brand new and has nothing on it.
what site is brand new?
I think they meant the Kickass Torrents (KAT) link. It was taken down in 2016, but it looks like it’s back by the original people that were running it.
Check Internet Archive. It was a torrent site.
Now we know we’ve reached parity with Twitter, we have people sharing misinformation!
I am so incredibly sick of this intrusive digital dystopia.
A natural result of unchecked capitalism
getfirefox.com and disable google search in your preferences. F*ck google.
deleted by creator
Brave is built on chromium…
deleted by creator
Still gives google a lot of power to decide how the web will function in the future. That some websites don’t work in Firefox is a symptom of exactly that problem
deleted by creator
It’s something about how the Gecko engine is built IIRC. I don’t get all the details but TLDR Chromium is a lot easier to abstract into other programs as a plugin and engine and Gecko is harder.
the trouble isn’t with Firefox, it’s with those sites and the developers of that site that can’t be botheted to do it properly and cross-browser - it’s still a thing and a sane requirement.
deleted by creator
how did you register them genuinely asking.
i would also recommend keepass
deleted by creator
It’s as simple as buying them (mind you that it’s a yearly payment) on a domain platform such as Namecheap or Porkbun.
Then using them requires some setup depending on what you use. I use mine with Protonmail + SimpleLogin and they have a good guide on how to set it up.
deleted by creator
Is this just chrome? Or does this affect all chromium browsers? And yes, I already use FF, but I also use Brave for when FF doesn’t work.
It’s about synced bookmarks. Do any browsers besides Chrome sync through Google?
It’s not about normal synced bookmarks in your browser, see other comment.
Which technically speaking makes sense as those are Google-stored data referencing illegal data. You can’t store actual ripped movies in Google drive either. Just no browser has decided to pull the trigger on this policy before since it’s so much work to collect this data unless you’re an actual web browser company as well. (So I guess this might be coming to Edge in the future)
Google literally crawls the web and serves piracy pages as search results, complete with keywords and all. How hard is it to just… Leave personal bookmark data alone? Encrypt it for the user and let it be? What the hell does Google have to be moderating personal saved links for?
You literally can store ripped movies on Google Drive, (but you cant share them on it)
I’m sorry, WHAT?
Some of those people really said 💀
