Privacy

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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.

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Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser (github.com)

submitted 1 year ago by BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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And since you won't be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.

The community feedback is... interesting to say the least.

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[–] Cube6392 75 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think it's coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they've really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don't understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they've already made a decision, they decide it's because we don't understand the squeeze they're under to make money.

Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing's a disaster because that's really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there's some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they're doing. They're ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they're doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they're doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They've learned the following lesson: if you're big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it

[–] fearout@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now

[–] Cube6392 6 points 1 year ago

I'd be happy to hear that's true. They were originally an aggregator until Google changed their api

[–] halfempty@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it's own crawler.