borderline OT fireox question

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 07/14/16 23:51, Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016 21:10:15 -0453.75, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>> On 07/14/16 19:46, Brandon J. Wandersee wrote:
>>> Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions writes:
>>>   
>>>> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:41:45 -0500, Brandon J. Wandersee wrote:
>>>>> Google and Mozilla are competitors (and therefore Google won't be
>>>>> getting anything from Firefox)
>>>> Type   about:config   into Firefox's address bar, then after
>>>> ignoring the warning, in the search bar type   google  . How do you
>>>> think works safe browsing and what do you think are the URLs good
>>>> for? What is the geo location URL good for? Firefox shares high
>>>> amounts of data with Google.
>>> This doesn't record personal information. The geolocation feature
>>> certainly uses the IP address at which you're currently accessing the
>>> Internet to tell where in the world you are at this particular
>>> moment, but not *who* you are or what you're searching for. (Unless
>>> you're browsing from home, and your ISP is openly sharing your
>>> account information with others, then the IP address can't reliably
>>> say anything about the who is doing the browsing, just where it's
>>> being done.) The Firefox "safe browsing" setting refers to the
>>> Google database of malicious/suspicious websites for its
>>> anti-phishing protection. It's not recording your every keystroke
>>> and feeding it to Google.
>>>
>>> This is all beside the point. The first sentence in this thread was:
>>>   
>>>> I notice that whenever I start typing text into the serch-bar of
>>>> Firefox ... it suggests completions for me, implying that Google has
>>>> my identity pegged.
>>> That's just downright fallacious. The mere existence of the
>>> "suggestion" option doesn't mean every Firefox user's browsing is
>>> being tracked, and even if we assume that it did mean as much it
>>> does not follow that the entity doing the tracking must be Google.
>>> The "suggestions" option has nothing to do with Google *unless* you
>>> use Google as your search engine via the Firefox interface.[1]
>>>
>>> Of course I retrieved that information using Firefox, and for all
>>> anyone knows I may have landed on the linked-to page through a
>>> Google search, and Google may have deliberately led me to a site
>>> chockful of misinformation in order to sustain the large-scale
>>> cover-up of its nefarious solar system domination scheme. So maybe
>>> that information can't be trusted.
>>>
>>> [1]:
>>> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-popular-search-suggestions-firefox-search-bar?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Search+suggestions
>> As the OP, let me clarify the above. Whenever I start typing text into
>> the search bar, it suggests completions *that I have typed in recently
>> (last few weeks)*. My 2nd reply clarified that detail, not my 1st
>> post, sorry.
> That was already clear. It's based on your search history.
>
> However, Firefox's safe browsing de facto is Google's safe browsing
> and the collected data does say much about people living in some areas.
>
> And therefore the claim "Google won't be getting anything from Firefox"
> is a wrong claim.
>
> Other browsers have other pros and cons, I'm just referring to the
> claim "Google won't be getting anything from Firefox".
>
> People with a special IP/geo location might visit more heterosexuell or
> more homosexuell porn sites, might visit more Christian or more Muslim
> websites, might visit more racists websites, might visit more tobacco
> and liqueur websites, sport websites, etc. than people with other
> IPs/geo locations.
>
> The information about an IP + the information of Firefox's version
> and its window size and a few other hints even could be enough to know
> exactly what person visited which website. However, even if they don't
> know your name, the company knows exactly what groups of people live
> in which areas, in a more correct way, than by an averaged old school
> statistics.
>
> Regards,
> Ralf
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>

Wouldn't TOR defeat the geo+IP mapping ? Indeed, since I started using 
TOR, whenever I visit Google, I have to do a captcha-style click through 
to get my search results back ....

-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

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