from Hacker News

Chrome won't clear your Google and YouTube data – even if you tell it to

by yvoschaap on 10/22/20, 10:01 AM with 26 comments

  • by matsemann on 10/22/20, 10:25 AM

    A rehashed and worse article than their linked source, which was discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24817304

  • by skinkestek on 10/22/20, 10:55 AM

    Remember a few years ago, Microsoft was running its failing Scroogle campaign and I (under a different nick) and others were defending Google.

    Fast forward to today and Google has managed to do to itself all that the Scroogle campaign could realistically have hoped to achieve and then some:

    - techies like me go out of our way to avoid them. I just spoke to a friend of mine during lunch and told him to think twice before using Gmail as a single misplaced comment on the Internet can get you locked out with no recourse except hoping for friends on social media if you are so lucky.

    - People are still making Chrome-applications just like they made IE6 applications but we are turning the tide now it seems and I see a growing trend that loathes the Chrome-only trend.

    - Regulators are circling in the air above.

    - etc.

  • by pyrale on 10/22/20, 10:40 AM

    It feels like there's not a day in recent hn history without a story that makes a compelling case for harsh antitrust on Google. Even the services that you could think are peripheral to their model partake in this.

  • by varbhat on 10/22/20, 10:56 AM

    People loved Chrome when it was released.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292980

    Slowly after they gained monopoly and became sure that they are going to exist in browser-space , they now don't care about these tracking bits present in the browser.

  • by adrian_mrd on 10/22/20, 11:05 AM

    The best way to think of Chrome these days is that it is a Google web browser, as in, it preferences products and services made by Google.

    Edge is similar in some ways, but modern Chrome is not a web browser per se but a web browser clearly built by Google with Google’s corporate interests at heart.

    The disconnect for many - including myself - is that we remember the first few years of Chrome. How revolutionary it was and how it provided a beautiful path off ‘the terror’ that was Internet Explorer. Modern Chrome is not the same browser, philosophically. Modern Chrome is a Google web browser and integrates the best - and increasingly by default - with Google’s many products and services.

  • by pydry on 10/22/20, 10:33 AM

    This doesn't really surprise me, but the number of people trying to justify it really surprises me.

  • by Razengan on 10/22/20, 10:39 AM

    I’ve hated Google ever since they started automatically signing me into Search when I signed into YouTube.

    I fix this by deleting all cookies matching “google” after signing into YouTube, but sometimes I forget to and it infuriates me to see my name in the corner when I search for anything.

    Even on iOS they use a browser window to make you sign-in so it cookies up your entire device.

    Thankfully the quality of Google Search results has been going downhill for years so it's honestly not that much of a difference to switch to DuckDuckGo as the default engine now.

  • by mrjin on 10/22/20, 10:43 AM

    Google has gone rouge for a very long time... Avoid Google if you can.

  • by OCISLY on 10/22/20, 10:42 AM

    chrome is a perfect example of abusive software that everyone seems to love

  • by Santosh83 on 10/22/20, 11:04 AM

    MS Edge doesn't have this feature. Just tested it on my machine. It clears all forms of storage even from MS's own domains tied to the browser like msedge.microsoft.com, msn etc.

  • by imtringued on 10/22/20, 11:10 AM

    For some reason Google's Captchas work much better on Chrome than on Firefox. I thought there was some sort of dedicated tracking built into Chrome. It turned out to be far simpler. They just give google sites special treatment.

  • by Razengan on 10/22/20, 11:56 AM

    Why was this flagged as a dupe instead of the dupe that didn't get any attention, and why haven't they just been merged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849558

    Is criticism of Google being silenced with flagging?