<story><title>Google is facing a lawsuit for tracking people even when they opt out</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/google-lawsuit-app-tracking-without-permission-reuters-2020-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Interesting. Between this and the Incognito Mode lawsuit, it seems some lawyers are trying to make a case that companies have the burden of making their systems plain-language understandable to the consumer, not technically understandable. &amp;quot;Incognito mode&amp;quot; has never meant &amp;quot;Third party sites can&amp;#x27;t track you,&amp;quot; but one could argue its plain-language understanding should be that. Similarly, disabling &amp;quot;Web &amp;amp; App Activity&amp;quot; actually means Android&amp;#x27;s built-in tracking is disabled, but does nothing about third-party site tracking (which is what Firebase is; it&amp;#x27;s a framework for third parties building usage tracking into apps that &lt;i&gt;happens&lt;/i&gt; to be owned by Google but doesn&amp;#x27;t drop its data into the same hopper as the Android project&amp;#x27;s tracking). One can clearly see how turning off Web &amp;amp; App Activity tracking could cause a person to assume systems like Firebase are also disabled, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the right answer is yet. Manufacturer responsibility v. personal responsibility is an old question, and it&amp;#x27;s why we have court systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strictnein</author><text> &amp;gt; &amp;quot;third-party site tracking (which is what Firebase is; it&amp;#x27;s a framework for third parties building usage tracking into apps&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Firebase isn&amp;#x27;t that at all. It can be used to build such things, but so can PHP and CSV files.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google is facing a lawsuit for tracking people even when they opt out</title><url>https://www.businessinsider.com/google-lawsuit-app-tracking-without-permission-reuters-2020-7</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shadowgovt</author><text>Interesting. Between this and the Incognito Mode lawsuit, it seems some lawyers are trying to make a case that companies have the burden of making their systems plain-language understandable to the consumer, not technically understandable. &amp;quot;Incognito mode&amp;quot; has never meant &amp;quot;Third party sites can&amp;#x27;t track you,&amp;quot; but one could argue its plain-language understanding should be that. Similarly, disabling &amp;quot;Web &amp;amp; App Activity&amp;quot; actually means Android&amp;#x27;s built-in tracking is disabled, but does nothing about third-party site tracking (which is what Firebase is; it&amp;#x27;s a framework for third parties building usage tracking into apps that &lt;i&gt;happens&lt;/i&gt; to be owned by Google but doesn&amp;#x27;t drop its data into the same hopper as the Android project&amp;#x27;s tracking). One can clearly see how turning off Web &amp;amp; App Activity tracking could cause a person to assume systems like Firebase are also disabled, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know what the right answer is yet. Manufacturer responsibility v. personal responsibility is an old question, and it&amp;#x27;s why we have court systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhorie</author><text>Never mind where the blurry line might be. Can we just get a bare minimum working as expected? Going incognito in google maps shouldn&amp;#x27;t then bombard me with notifications to rate the places I&amp;#x27;ve been to, let alone send me smug emails listing my recent history!</text></comment>