After the last few weeks, you would have thought Google hat learnt their lesson.

First, they were tracking you, even if you had disabled tracking on your phone, because, of course, not tracking the phone has nothing to do with tracking you, which was done over the web options on their online dashboard and wasn't influenced by the phone settings.

Then they upset people by saying that they were blending out "the unimportant bits" of the URL in Chrome, like "www." or "m.", which got people up in arms.

Then, at the end of last week, they upset people again as it became apparent, that if you signed onto a Google website, it would now automatically log you into Chrome as well. A lot of people didn't want that, had never asked for it and found it obnoxious and, in some cases "dangerous" - E.g. if you "borrow" a PC and log onto Gmail to check your mail, you log back out of GMail, but you are still logged into the Browser, after you have left the machine.

And now, it transpires that Chrome 69 also doesn't clear Google cookies. If you go into the browser settings and chose to clear all cookies, it clears all non-Google cookies, but any cookies relating to Google properties remain there and you remain, therefore, logged into the Google properties (if you didn't manually log out of them).

But, hey, it is all okay, because its Google and their motto was "don't be evil." But they dropped that a while back, and we are beginning to see why.

They all want you and as many of you details as possible. Google, FaceBook, Apple, Microsoft, and a whole load more. This is the way things are going, and I don‘t think they’ll stop any time soon. They’ll all just keep pushing the boundaries to see what they can get away with.

That is one of the reasons I still use Firefox. It isn't perfect, but it doesn't have the world's biggest tracking and ad-agency writing the code.

I've always used Firefox as my browser on my own PC's*'.
We have had Chrome on the works laptop for a while, but I've just installed Firefox on there too. It has one login for everyone from our company on the rig. Guess I can't risk logging into my own Google accounts on that any more.

* (Okay. Netscape and Mozilla back in the day)

I still use FF and don't use chrome. I have uBlock Origins this year given that Adaware allows adverts. I've been using Bing more and more for searches.

Yes, I use Friefox, NoScript and Ghostery most of the time and use DuckDuckGo or Bing for search.

I also have over 55,000 entries in my hosts file, blocking advertising, tracking and known malware sites, and the whole of Facebook (1,500 domains on its own!).

I've tried Duckduckgo but it's pretty pants for my needs, hence avoided it.

That is the problem, either it is tailored to your needs or you can use a search engine that doesn't track you...

Safari warns that Ghostery can slow it down, but I’m running it anyway.

I’d not considered using a hosts file for this kind of thing before.

+1

The VPN I use also has features for blocking tracking /adverts.

I use the following lists:

https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/b ... cebook/all

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Some of the someonewhocares list is commented out, because it can cause problems with certain websites, you can decide whether to leave them commented out or not.

The Github dev has lists for Facebook, Pinterest, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare. You can apply the ones you don't want to see.