google’s latest fuckery: if you write online, read this
The Google app for iOS now adds THEIR links to YOUR posts from YOUR website unless you opt-out.
Their links lead people away from your site and back to Google. Because that’s definitely what you want, right? That’s why you have a blog or portal or web site or whatever. You want people to leave your site and go back to Google.
Oh, it’s not?
If you don’t like it, you can “Opt out.” Opting out is a pain in the ass. Here’s where you go to do it. You have to enter every variation of each of your domains or it won’t work. It will take up to 30 days, during which time Google will continue to pollute your work and your writing and your website with their modifications and their added links to take people away from your site and back to themselves.
For example, here’s the list of what I need to opt-out just for this one blog:
Making it difficult like this is 100% intentional and entirely designed to make it as annoying as possible, and also, to make sure you slip up if at all possible and forget one or more combinations.
(Tho’ I am just going to depreciate web. as a prefix right now, to bring down the load a little. Still gonna list ’em, though, because spite is why.)
Right now it’s only in the Google app for iOS and it’s probably a test to see whether they can get away with it without complaint, and how much revenue it generates. Let’s make that a combination of no and as close to zero as possible. Because otherwise they’ll roll it out everywhere, and probably derank you if you don’t go along.
Fucking hell, Google. Fuck you. Just… fuck you.
[#]art #t0000000000bs_ #writing
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@solarbird @hazelnoot TIL google has an app? That is not Chrome? But anyway, so people who use this app/browser thingy get an altered version of the internet and probably don’t even know it? Wth. I’ll have a look into it. Thank you for alerting us.
How long until this hits Chrome…? Ugh.
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@h5e @solarbird @hazelnoot on Pixel devices, using the unremovable Google search bar on the homescreen does your search in this app.
In order to do this in Chrome, Google would have to relax standard web security to accomplish it, but they already did this to make YouTube videos autoplay without user interaction, so it's definitely a plausible concern.
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@nyquildotorg @solarbird @hazelnoot if they can do it in this app it stands to reason they can do it in chrome too.
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@h5e @solarbird @hazelnoot that's definitely a concern, but I'm hoping this makes people more aware in general of the problem of native apps that embed browsers in them. The Facebook app has been doing this sort of thing for a long time in ways that the user can't actually notice.
Any app where a link to a remote site opens inside of it, instead of handing it over to your default browser should be eyed extremely warily; they can and probably do track you in ways they couldn't if you were looking at it outside the app.
But yeah, if Google also controls your default browser, there's definitely room for concern.
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@nyquildotorg @solarbird @hazelnoot Yeah I get that Apple may not want to give up that api (yet), but they could warn users if they cannot guarantee the integrity of a webview.
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@h5e @nyquildotorg @solarbird @hazelnoot they could limit it to domains that the publisher can prove they control :neocat_think:
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