In the browser, i didn't login in the google account, and I didn't accept the cookies on that site. Using privacybadger that supposedly should block the 3rd party spyware like that
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
334 points (99.1% liked)
Privacy
32159 readers
204 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Worth noting, this isn't really a Google thing. It's something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon -- Twitter used to be common. It's just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.
It Is a Google thing. It's a script that Google gives to third party to promote logging in with their account, and it can access Google cookies, so it can get populated with your name and email (which is absurd as some other malicious js on the same page could parse the HTML to extract the personal data of the user without consent)
If you're logged in, there's a setting buried in the Google account (really buried, very difficult to find) which hides this nag.
What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn't just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.
This is something that companies like Reddit see and think "Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site".
I think it's exactly the same as a Doubleclick ad as in it's a 3rd-party script that adds obnoxious content (be it ads or a signin popup) to the site. I think Doubleclick is owned by google which ironically makes it even more similar than if it was, say, a Facebook popup.
Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn't accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it's annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying "we don't want to force that on our users".
Yeah. Also, it's the difference between ads (a very obnoxious thing for 99% of users) and something potentially genuinely useful for a good portion of users like the sign in - I assume the popup isn't there to annoy us Lemmy users, a large percentage of whom I assume use uBlock Origin and find it annoying, but rather for the ~2-5% of users who wouldn't bother creating an account but don't mind signing in with Google due to the convenience (and wouldn't do so on the signin page). And eveb for us who find it annoying, it isn't like ads where you're not supposed to be able to get rid of the popup or the popup being a constant PITA