Brave is bent too and will auto update itself when it feels like it. Have you ever suffered mountains of clickbait and junk articles and piss poor plagiarism thanks to this? Have you thought about before this? Before some some advertising and surveillance companies decide to commit fraud against the public and steal its labours.

Yep - Edge is now chromium based. Really, as you said, it's Fireforx, Tor, or go for something really niche.

Whilst I understand the greater implications to privacy and privacy concerns from market research, machine-learning algorithms clustering people based on their interests and even mere 1st party publisher based data through subscriptions, I think the content creators benefit directly from something as simple as people consenting to cookies or data management.

That part is a no-brainer. The website owner sells ad space to media companies that buy it to show adverts based to people with cookies that can be remotely targeted. Cookieless users are almost never targeted or shown adverts to because it's basically throwing away your digital media advertising budget - it's wholly ineffective to show teenagers Mercedes Benz ads. By not consenting, the publisher and content creator (with some cut) gets 0 revenue, and actually they are operating at a loss if everyone did it due to some running costs in hosting websites. It's the free rider problem all over again, like with piracy.

That's the whole point really - do you believe giving up your dummy email's interests and data for a dummy account is warranted enough to save some annoyance from 'targeted' ads on your fave websites, which other people are keeping running? I think everyone and their mother is jumping on this bandwagon about 3rd party cookies, without realising how creative content gets shown for free, so occassionally it's worth to slow down and think about whether the current trends are worth following.

Sure ads are annoying, but so is potentially losing the opportunity to enjoy creative content that you were interested in. Give them a break, throw them some money, it doesn't cost you anything materially speaking, not even your 'real' privacy.



About Google and digital advertising in general - let's clear a few things up, not for you necessarily as you seem well versed in this matter and have thought things through, but anyone else wondering about these things. Now, whilst Google is the biggest digital advertising platform out there, it's certainly not the only one and you don't have to go through them to buy ads, and give them their cut. They don't even touch many publishers basing their inventory on 1st party data - i.e. data they collected straight from users on their own website. Think about a website you frequently visit and log in to with some dummy email with fake personal info. Does Google get to sell ad space on that website? Nope. Let's say it's some news website - say... the Daily Telegraph to pick something popular. You consented to cookies or data management, and they tracked you clicking on an article about climate change. Congrats - you are now in the 'green politics' 'environment' and 'science' plus other interest segments. Do they have your name and address? Nope, of course not - they just think you're interested in these matters and think you might buy/subscribe to their client's goods or services, which is why they will pay to show you Eco-friendly renewable electricity bargains and deals from your local utility. But the Daily Telegraph as a publisher (or the company that owns them) sells that ad space through many buying platforms, Google owning just one of them, and they might not even use them at all. Plus, the news website retains most of the revenue - they just pay a fee to Google/other buying platforms, so allowing ads to be targeted at you still enables creative content and keeps the business floating.

Fast forward to Google specifically and how they operate - they have a ridiculous amount of user based data that they use algorithms on to categorise you in interest or data segments. This can be as benign as 'interested in cooking vids' to 'planning to spend 10k euros on renovating their kitchen Provence style in Finland, some specific city'. They do shit that will make heads spin. Ever noticed how something you talked to your girlfriend about purchasing is followed by seeing ads for that product around the Google-sphere, like Youtube and search engines? Hint - voice recognition in mobile phones whilst being logged into your Google account. It doesn't even have to know your Google search history, which is the simplest way to categorise you obviously. So I get the apprehension people have about Google, and I get your point that there is a difference between mere targeted advertising and giving up your personal habits to a mega corporation. But nevertheless, apart from mobile phones (which are very difficult to de-googlify and prevent tracking/targeting), using a dummy email or account to surf the web is rarely as harmful as people make it out to be.

You do not need to log on youtube to get recomendations, however you do need coockies enabled.
I have a ~4 year old firefox profile, wich has been on numerous computers and Windows versions and use it the most on google's products, like search engine and youtube,. The recommended videos are from the same type of content pretty much as if I was logged, although never was.

I can't stress this enough. It's part of their job to find new solutions and as we have seen in other medium, it's constantly getting more agressive.

As we learn to ignore banners and bars, and I certainly have developed a filter for those over time, stuff like auto-playing videos obnoxious behaviour is getting more popular (even on freacking steam pages, wich hilariouly, let you set the game vidjeos to not auto-play, but not the streams). I wonder what's the next step, now that browsers work more like a operating system "for user convinience" or "security reasons".

Two questions:

Am I the only one to constantly see the add for some "facebook-like" game with a cute gobblin called hero wars or something like that? I swear I see those everywhere, no matter what machine or browser I'm using.

Do websites have to allocate extra bandwith for the displayed adds or that's everything on google's end?
On user end, those adds do indeed cost bandwith and some, me included, use mettered connections.

Dunno about others, but the first is likely true & the second most certainly is for most people(barring maybe hermits living off the grid).

As for surveillance: I dislike actual surveillance being done on vast swaths of the populace , but personally don't mind things like some random corp knowing say what food/music I like.

Who knows....I might like that and get a kick out of it(some others do, as well, if the net cam craze is any indication).

Jokes aside: it's a different story to have a cam in one's bedroom/bathroom vs google/etc serving you tailored ads.

I see so many people still wants to live in the past.
Pls enlighten me!
What's wrong with targeted ads?

Google allows extra for the adds and no goblin games at my end

Yeah maybe at least the recommendations are mostly based on cookies, but then if you are logged in, I presume I get more videos from channels that I've subscribed to. If I am not logged in, I think sometimes it overemphasizes some videos in recommendations, like if I happened to watch some Raspberry Pi4 video, suddenly it spams me with other RPi4 videos where half of the recommended videos are just that.

And I presume the video history tab is also active only if you are logged in. Sometimes that is useful when I think "man there was that video I saw last week, what was it again...?" and there it is in your history list.
So if you once happened to look at a wikipedia article about impotence and Parkinson's disease, are you sure you want your browser start spamming you about penile clinics and "cure for your Parkinson's disease!" advertisements the next time you open your browser at work when presenting your project to your colleagues in MS Teams or a video projector?

Well of course you do, because that would be a damn good icebreaker for the meeting!

("MS" above refers to Microsoft, not "multiple sclerosis")

There are also other things for which such tracking may be used, besides mere targeted ads. There was a, I think Taiwanese, company who offered a service to online banks and insurance companies that they track all the time how people recharge their mobile phones' batteries.

They made reports on your trustworthiness based on that, e.g. that if you tend to let your phone get to low battery levels often and don't keep it recharged, you might not be that punctual and orderly person, in which case maybe your loan margins and insurance premiums should be higher than for someone who does keep their smartphone charged up.

And then there were the cases where e.g. online flight tickets might be offered for a higher price to you, based on your browsing history.

It is a crazy world we live in.

Sounds fine for me
If they can get reliable data from your habits that's a good thing, yeah if they can take more money from you that's entirely your fault.

Charge your phone regularly easy. I would want to know if someone is trustworthy or not.

It is your colleagues who make assumptions based on some ads, you searched it for online probably you are interested in related services/products, totally fine.
Btw what other ads would you get? Some news about Kardasians? A new anti-feetmold or how it is called ointment.
What would they think about you seeing those?

It always ends showing how much im smarter than the dvoters :P

Ha! You can't even spell right!

It's "imma", not "im". Like "imma be smarter".

nah , im is perfectly fine and justified as I used it

I wasn't saying this is the only way but simply informing users that this is happening and that GOG can block this in the client and the website if they wanted to. Obviously they already use services from Google so they might not think this is a big deal.