Developers, it’s time for you to choose a side: will you help rid the web of privacy-invading tracking or be complicit in it?

https://cleanuptheweb.org/

#CleanUpTheWeb #FlocOffGoogle

  • nutomicA
    18·
    4 years ago

    I’m not sure that this initiative makes much sense. The vast majority of developers work in private companies, and dont have any say in the tracking and advertising thats embedded in their sites. Those decisions are taken by managers, and managers care about profits, not what some cute little website says.

    So most likely this initiative wont have any effect at all, other than being shared around in privacy circles. If we really want to challenge the tracking/advertising model for websites, I see two options. Either we do something so websites are discouraged from using advertising. As companies generally dont care about ethics, this would have to be an economic incentive. Basically, advertising would disappear very fast if websites earn more money without ads than with. But this seems impossible to achieve, except in isolated cases.

    The other option is that we build alternative websites, which do not rely on for-profit companies. This is what the fediverse does, and open source projects in general. I think this is clearly the moat promising approach, and we should focus our efforts in this direction.

  • Helix
    5·
    4 years ago

    Would be nice if the site was actually useful, like telling me what to put in my nginx server config to add the header:

    server {
  …
  add_header Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()";
  …
}
    • j0taOP
      1·
      4 years ago

      To opt your site out of FLoC, you need to send the Permissions Policy HTTP response header.

      Permissions Policy is a new header that allows a site to control which features and APIs can be used in the browser. To opt-out, use this header:

      Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

      If you have access to the .htaccess file on your Apache server, you can edit it with this code to set your Permissions Policy:

      <IfModule mod_headers.c> Header always set Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() </IfModule>>

    • j0taOP
      3·
      4 years ago

      We’ve been for years warning people but they are kinda addicted that chrome is the best, we know that’s full lie.

      Devs can make their part to help the #OpenWeb and not all-in with google shit policy of we want to track your site visitors everywere

      • Helix
        2·
        4 years ago

        we know that’s full lie.

        well then, make a list of arguments people actually care about. Because if you only want to browse the web as a noob, you could use any browser which can do JS and follows most of the standards. It doesn’t matter for Joane Normal if they use Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi, Edgeium, Konqueror or whatever.

  • j0taOP
    4·
    4 years ago

    Downvoters expose your side in comments instead downvote

    • Bilb!
      3·
      4 years ago

      I did not downvote and I do like the sentiment, but reading it makes me feel so tired. I don’t think sympathetic developers like me will ever turn the tide. I would love to be wrong.

      • j0taOP
        2·
        4 years ago

        It’s only add an header to implement it and google analytics facebook like button etc etc clearly don’t need to be on your website

        Tell Google to FLoC off!

        Due to mounting pressure, Google announced it will eventually block third-party tracking in its Chrome browser. Sounds good, right? And it is, until you hear that their proposed alternative is to have Chrome itself track people on every site they visit… unless the sites ask them not to by including the following header in their responses:

        Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()

    • canteen
      56·
      4 years ago

      I downvoted because this read like pointless nerdrage. The only way to completely avoid Google is to turn off the internet. There are many ways to limit Google influence, but those are much better explained on switching.software. Admittedly, there should also be a site urging developers to stop utilizing Google in their projects but such a site shouldn’t read like the blog of an angry 18 year old who just discovered the free software movement.

      • jazzfes
        61·
        4 years ago

        Being an angry 18 year old may mean that you are becoming an articulate, critical 36 year old, and subsequently even an influential, world enhancing 72 year old.

        A single post won’t change the world. Democracy means that you should/need to listen to people with “stupid” ideas. Some are dumb, less will prove influential.

        Let people express their ideas and let them grow them. Downvoting doesn’t seem productive in most cases… if you don’t like something, move on.

  • Bilb!
    3·
    4 years ago

    Wow, Google is a factory farm for human beings? I had no idea.

  • Dragon
    2·
    4 years ago

    Does anyone have a good analytics alternative recommendation?

  • DePingus
    55·
    4 years ago

    The web is Iost cause. You can choose to leave. There are projects out there like Gemini.

    • Bilb!
      122·
      4 years ago

      Gemini is irrelevant. Nobody will use that except an exclusive club of geeks. It’s a neat little project but stands no chance in solving our problems.

      I don’t think independent software develpers are going to solve this problem. I wonder who the intended audience of this website is. Yeah, my blog with at most hundreds of visitors won’t abuse the data of end users, but who cares? The big centralized services will pay no heed. You can’t solve this with software choices, you need to get control of your government and make this shit illegal.

      • Helix
        102·
        4 years ago

        Back in the 70s and 80s, the Internet was irrelevant. Nobody used it except an exclusive club of geeks. It was a neat little project.

    • federico3
      22·
      4 years ago

      Gemini has a poor design. It does not solve many of the problems of the web and it lacks a lot of required functions.

        • federico3
          1·
          4 years ago

          Gemini claims to “Takes user privacy very seriously” and yet it leaks the client and server IP addresses to each other and to network observers by not using any form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network.

          It claims to “Strives for maximum power to weight ratio” and yet does not support caching.

          It does not support content-addressed sites in any form: to host a single-page static site the user has to pay for a VPS or buy some SBC, pay for a domain and configure DNS. The “lightweight” aspect is the protocol itself, not the deployment effort.

          The protocol is “non-extensible by design” but obviously cannot prevent users from adding higher-level markups in some clients and start adding complexity, exactly what happened for the web.