Google Removes ‘Pirate’ URLs from Users’ Privately Saved Links::undefined
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I’m pretty sure the other browsers have to comply too
What if your bookmarks are end to end encrypted?
I’m hosting my own sync servers with bookmarks for firefox, if I don’t delete it nobody will.
And stop using chromium browsers too!
No point in ditching chrome just to use chrome with a different coat of paint.
Yep! A few months ago I moved from Brave to Firefox since Brave can’t be trusted
isn’t it alright if you use ungoogled-chromium? It sends 0 requests outward so it’s completely safe.
Don’t rely on online service to save your stuff.
Edit: how can i exclude < and > from being interpreted?
Usually a backslash (the one under the backspace key, not the one that shares a key with ”?") before a character that would usually be treated as a formatting instruction will stop it from being interpreted as such. Could be different for other machine-interpreted languages but when used this way, the backslash is called an “escape character”.
The \ key. And you might ask how I wrote that symbol without it gettting interpreted. Well, by writing \\.
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It’s a forward slash, to be clear. There’s not two backslashes on the keyboard.
Imagine being downvoted because someone else can’t figure out the difference between a forward and back slash.
Lemmings, weird breed. Lots of chuds, it seems.
I specified the location of the backslash as a way to tell the difference between that and the forward slash. Probably could have made my intent more clear if I’d stated that the slash sharing a key with the question mark was the forward one as you mention but didn’t see a need.
But that didn’t work for ‘angle braket open’ text ‘angle braket close’? Not even in code tag right now.
How about using “<” and “>” (“<” and “>”, respectively)?Edit: Okay, I see what you mean. That is strange. Not sure what to do about that but will look around.
Man, they really want you to use Firefox
It’s wierd. 4 Days ago I got an email saying they removed a link from my saved websites. Only the link, in the email, was of a reddit post from 8 years ago on how to plug in speakers into a Motherboard I used to have??? How is that piracy? Its on the buildapc subreddit.
You should be asking how the fuck do these cunts still have a reputation that you are supporting?
Googles new, but not announced motto is, “We are the evil”.
That motto ain’t even new. It’s been a thing for at least a close to a decade now if you ask me.
it also removed all of my saved places from google maps. thanks i like it
I don’t think that’s related
it isn’t but nobody is going to post a news article about it so I’m just fucked
“trust me bro”
They had the pirate chests locations.
Honestly, the only useful Google service these days is gmail. And that’s only because I don’t want to deal with changing providers after 15 years.
I wish other providers had the tab system that Gmail has, I’d switch in a heartbeat if it did. Folders just aren’t as convenient.
Many do. I use labels on Fastmail and it’s great!
To be fair, I use labels like folders, so I probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
There’s gotta be an app for that, though that could ve dangerous since you’re letting it access your Gmail.
Yeah, the issue is with going through every service you’ve used that you might use again and changing the email. That can take many hours, depending on how many sites you have an infrequent need to use.
It took me about 6 months to de-gmail. Well worth it in the end. Im with paid protonmail now.
You can ‘future proof’ your mail by using your own domain and use it with your proton account.
So if you want or need to change your mail provider or self host in the future, you just need to redirect your domain to your new provider.
I don’t use this (Google Saved?) and I’m unfamiliar with it, is it similar to Pocket?
Is it this: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9217379
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it’s not synced bookmarks, collections are a confusingly similar service
I’m gonna give Mullvad a shot, sick of Google’s shit.
Mullvad browser is just a copy of Firefox that’s designed to work with their VPN.
Not entirely true. The mullvad browser adds a lot of anti-tracking stuff, which was originally implemented in the TOR Browser. So you’re definitely safer using the mullvad browser instead of plain Firefox
hardened Firefox my beloved.
It’s literally a fork of firefox. No need for obfuscation.
What’s wrong with Firefox?
Firefox is usable with some tweaks and not that evil, even though sponsored by Google. But many people feel that they can’t believe Firefox like 10 years ago.
Some users feel it’s so wrong that they have forked the project: LibreWolf, which seems a good option too.
you gotta make some tweaks to LibreWolf as well to make sure it doesn’t break some websites
Maybe it will make people see Google for what they are. So many are stuck in some kind of illusion.
They’re an advertising company that tries to collect information about targets through products those targets use. That’s it
I signed up for a Google Ads account for a non-profit I volunteer with. I had to verify the organization with governing documents, okay, fair enough. They also “require” my drivers license or passport. Excuse me? We will no longer have a Google Ads account after Sept 15 (the cut off to verify my identity).
They did a lot of good for the FOSS community for many years. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
“You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” — Harvey Dent
I think because the moment you admit to yourself that Google is not so good a company, you are forced to recognize most are not and that is too much for many to swallow.
What excuse are they using if it turns out that the takedown request was false?
Would they undelete the private user’s lists?
Would they reimburse anybody for the damage?
I can’t imagine depending on Google to store anything. They shouldn’t be able to even see what links you save.
Yeah, this is incredibly intrusive
As someone who just converted from Chrome to Firefox 1-2 months ago: what alternative can you recommend to Google Drive? I wouldn’t miss everything from it, but being able to easily share data (so that they can play videos, audio files or documents without having to manually download them) is one of them.
EDIT: and maybe Google Photos. Mainly for syncing.
I use Sync.com for years (since 2015 after my very privacy heavy swiss cloud service shut down). It’s Canadian, the end-to-end encryption (on device,upload and cloud) is the highest I encountered and it’s extensive zero-knowledge policy was my reason to sign up.
They added some nice sharing features with quite the extensive control and easy Setup. So might be worth checking out.
And obligatory referral link for a free account 🙃:
I’ve switched over to Proton for email, calendar and drive. I still haven’t found a replacement for Google Photos but I’m looking for one.
Have you tried iPhoto with Advanced Protection enabled?
Mega.io created by Kim Dotcom is (mostly) open source.
I wouldn’t trust anything involving fucking Kim Dotcom lmao
I’ve read some concerning stuff about him. The usual counterargument was that the source code was still open/public, but I can imagine he could still do nasty stuff to the plain data if he wanted to.
Proton drive gives a lot less storage for free but is known to be more secure and private
Thanks, I will take a look.
Protonmail has smaller cloud storage, but you have to pay for it. A thumb drive will work.
For storage, for free options I’d recommend filen.io, which gives you 10GB free. If you’re open to other paid options, proton drive and infomaniak drive seem alright.
Just skimming the alternativeto entries for google photos, the open source alternatives to Google photos look like they tend to be either paid or self hosted. Stingle Photos has a free 1GB tier you could try out. Otherwise, paid options include Stingle, ente, and seafile, and self hosted options include immich and Nextcloud (which is also a drive alternative).
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I wouldn’t mind a paid service as long as it’s not significantly more expensive than what Google can offer. However, I’m a bit more conscious regarding data security. I checked on mega.io and I’ve read mixed opinions.
Nextcloud has most, if not all, of the features of drive in my experience.
(Don’t everyone hit me) the snap version of nextcloud is dead simple to stand up. But if you are adamantly opposed to snap, the docker version is semi-easy to get going. Or you could just spin up a linode instance with it on there for like $5/mo.
This is all a self-hosted/self-responsible option though. So back it up etc.
Thanks for the idea. I’m mainly looking for storage that I could access even if I blow up my house.
This.
I invested in my personal infrastructure a bit. Bought an old retired Dell R710 server for $100, installed proxmox on it. Nextcloud is basically a one-click install using a Turnkey Linux container.
My setup clearly isn’t for everyone, but if you’ve got $100 to spare for some hardware and aren’t afraid of running your own server, proxmox is free and crazy powerful.
Depends on how much effort you want to put into it. Nextcloud is the closest in terms of features but you’ll need to set it up.
I have a ProtonDrive account and I like it but it doesn’t have auto upload of photos. You need to manually upload them. I’m personally fine with this since 90% of my photos are receipts and junk.
My work, which is supposed to keep things private for customers, stores so much on Gmail and Google Drive. It’s comical to me.
What type of company? I, too, find it comical. There was a lot of cloud resistance due to privacy and control issues in financial services years ago. Concerns were justified. Nothing changed except managements’ attitudes because “everybody else is doing it”.
Don’t want to say, sorry. Let’s just say it’s more industrial than financial services.
Oh in our company the CTO still has cloud resistance… But at the same time also feels comfortable sharing sensitive documents over Skype, Outlook and Teams…
ITT: nobody actually reading the article
Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google’s synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that’s not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google’s saved feature.
This Google service allows users to save and organize links, similar to what Pinterest does. These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.
Oh boy, I’m feeling ultra smug now. Been using a Keepass database synced via Syncthing for about 3 years now
I use it too…but I like to spell it KeepAss.
Thank you dear friend, I’ll be using that from now on as well. KeepAss!
kinda makes sense. it’s like if a youtube video or soundcloud track gets DCMA’d then they’re going to remove the link.
if it was you actual browser bookmark i would understand the outrage.
im still on FF tho
Just yesterday I saw a post that they did in fact remove bookmark and notified user about it with detail
A users bookmarks on the browser, and a collection saved on google, are different things. One is private, the other can be shared.
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I skimmed through the article and didn’t see it mentioned, but in another post I read that this was only done for a shared collection, as in it was at least semi public if not public
yeah but it’s nice to know what has actually been removed so you can get the song/video elsewhere
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Isn’t removing the bookmarks from people’s browser what they’re mad about? Now that Google is selling content through YouTube TV, I’ll bet they crack down hard on piracy. The old reddit /r/NFLstreams moved to a site a lot of people know. Now that Google owns Sunday ticket, I will not be surprised if it gets DDoS’d to shit this year and becomes borderline unusable. We’ll find out next week I guess.
It’s not from the browser. As stated in the article:
Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google’s synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that’s not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google’s saved feature.
It’s a feature specific to the google app that lets you share collections of bookmarks:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13128452?hl=en
They don’t want people sharing links to pirate sites.
It’s still bad, but saying they are going through bookmarks in chrome and deleting them is misinformation.
Would have been nice to have amended the headline to reflect the actual story.
And yet, I can still google torrent sites
Google search really has gone downhill. I’m using fence on my phone and it defaults to duckduckgo. Gotta say, it’s just as good, occasionally a little better.
