Google sued for 'clandestine tracking' of UK iPhone users' browsing data

This is one of those things that make me very pessimistic about the future of our civilisation.<p>Instead of empowering common folk and accelerating our potential as a species what is happening is our thoughts, interests, fears, relationships and most intimate secrets gradually become a commodity in the hands of a few powerful companies.<p>The trend is clear and I am really fearful for my children&#x27;s future.<p>It&#x27;s really depressing to watch the world change into something many of mankind&#x27;s greatest thinkers feared the most.

What does &quot;bypassed privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser&quot; mean? Ignoring the DNT header? Setting third party cookies? Something about ITP?<p>This article has practically no details about the actual accusation.

And no engineer at Google said “hey, should we be hacking our way around the user’s privacy settings?”, or blew the whistle?

&gt; Google was fined $22.5m for the practice by the US Federal Trade Commission in 2012 and forced to pay $17m to 37 US states.<p>So it&#x27;s the consumers who were violated. But were they compensated?

I&#x27;m pretty sure this is the same incident from<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-pays-17m-to-settle-safari-cookie-privacy-bypass-charge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;google-pays-17m-to-settle-safa...</a><p>(which is from 2013) just a lawsuit in a different country over the same set of facts.

Everyone gets so outraged about this, and yet one glance on Stackoverflow shows it was a common concern at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;search?q=Set+3rd+party+cookies+safari" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;search?q=Set+3rd+party+cookies+saf...</a><p>Not arguing that Google was right to do this, but some of the “pessimistic about our civilisation” arguments on this page seem slightly overblown IMHO.

And here I was, on HN last week, getting downvoted to oblivion for mentioning that each Google embedded service is a cog in a much more nefarious machine.<p>It&#x27;s getting like reddit around here, where the most controversial comments about SV misdoings are usually the most objective.

Google doesn&#x27;t need a cookie to track you. The real culprit is the multitude of sites relying on javascript hosted by Google to do mundane things.

I feel like the UK parliament is creating ane enforcing archaic privacy rules because they realized they can not compete on the technology front with US companies. Their plan is literally to sue US companies in order to gain a small footing&#x2F;edge. I think what they are going to get is increasingly blocked. China is looking way more open an profitable to do business in comparitively.

Another reason to scrap class-action lawsuits - other than they clog up the courts with mostly frivolous claims seeking payoff and that lawyers get the bulk of the winfall while dividing the scraps among their clients - it would also do away with plaintiffs&#x27; lawyers overselling their cases and supplying newspapers with a steady stream of clickbait.