Blocking Google trackers

[Catweazle]

@paul1149 , this has nothing to do with Google Tracking (well, this tries anyway). There are many pages that offer to create an account through the credentials of Google, Facebook and others, this is an option that the page itself offers, but it is also offered apart from doing it in a traditional way with an email account.
Either way it is recommended for this, to use extensions (apart from uBlockOrigin or the Vivaldi blockers with its filter) such as

Trace
Anti fingerprint, header spoofer y more

LocalCDN
Protects you against CDN (Content Delivery Networks) crawling by redirecting to local resources.

Site Bleacher
Remove automatically cookies, local storages, IndexedDBs, service workers, cache storages, filesystems and webSQLs

WhatCampaign
swap out Google Analytics parameters with invalid data
Automatically changes tracking analytics values to a fixed string to protect privacy.

All extensions are FOSS

[paul1149]

@catweazle said in Blocking Google trackers:

this has nothing to do with Google Tracking (well, this tries anyway). There are many pages that offer to create an account through the credentials of Google, Facebook and others,

I don't see how it's possible that they would know my email address ahead of time, before I click anything. And the popup is always exactly the same, strongly suggesting that it is a google service.

[paul1149]

@Otmanraad, @Catweazle - are you saying other anti-trackers will stop this, but V's won't? That's exactly the point of this thread. I'd like to see V stop this activity without installing another extension.

Thanks.

[Catweazle]

@paul1149 , Vivaldi blocks a lot of trackers, depending of the filterlist you put on it. The problem is that Google and others use a lot of diferent systems to track and identify the user.
If you goes on Browserleaks, you can see al the parts which a webpage knows from you.

You can log out in Google, when you don't need it, instead of staying logged in. Delete the serviceworkers and cache (for this is good Site Bleacher, when you don't whitlisted this pages, all other pages "you have never visited before"))

This way, without the cache cookies and serviceworker of Google, they can´t see your account, only showing the Menu with Google, Facebook,etc por default, to log in.

Tracker blockig works, but no avoid that the page use their cookies in the browser and the datas in the Cache and serviceworkers, only avoid that a page can track your action out of the page,, but the data remains in the browser.

Because of this, at least for the moment, some extensions are recommended to keep the browser clean of unnecessary data, apart from disguising and falsifying the data you leave behind, for the benefit of your privacy.

You only keep the necessary data from the sites you visit regularly, such as this forum or others.

Anyway, I avoid Google as much as possible, far away from the times where they used their motto of not be evil.

[paul1149]

@pathduck said in Blocking Google trackers:

||accounts.google.com^$third-party

@Pathduck , sorry, somehow I missed your post. I will look into how to implement that rule.

@Catweazle , thank you for that explanation.

[Pathduck]

@paul1149 It's not too hard - I have a file:
Documents\Settings\Vivaldi\Adblock\Myfilters.txt

It's mostly for testing the V adblocker, so it doesn't really contain much.
It can be used for making specific override exceptions, for instance if I want to allow requests to a domain from another domain, without disabling the full ad-block on the domain.

It's a good idea to start the file with a proper title so it can easily be found in the list after adding:

! Title: Adblock Filters (personal)

Then you can add rules as specificed in the Adblock Plus documentation:
https://help.eyeo.com/en/adblockplus/how-to-write-filters

Note that the Vivaldi adblocker only supports Adblock style rules, it won't work with all rules from uBlock for instance. Standards, standards, standards...

After creating the file, you can add the file as a list in Settings > Privacy > Ad+tracker blocking > Manage Sources. Note that the UI is kind of buggy, might get a hang or errors when adding, but usually it will work anyway. When making changes to the file, just disable it, find it again and enable, it will load the updated rules.

Honestly, I know it's a bit complicated and wonky. IMO the Vivaldi ad-blocker is mostly geared toward users with basic ad/tracking-blocking needs. If you want more control of blocking I highly recommend you go with uBlock Origin - much more powerful rules and flexibility to add your own.

[Catweazle]

At the moment I prefer to use uBO and not the one from Vivaldi, because, uBO permits to eliminate certain ads with the context menu, this is currently not possible in the ad/tracker blocker of Vivaldi.
But I think that, apart of this, the Vivaldi blocker do it's work.
Although it would be desirable that it can be included in future versions also blocker / spoofer for the different other spyware tracking techniques (fingerprinting,etc), which for the moment still has to be done with the corresponding extensions that I mentioned before, while Google&cia continue to use them.

Much can also be done by the user himself, to avoid as much as possible services and applications that use these techniques, in my opinion, criminal, but unfortunately there are 2 big lies on the web
'I have read and accept the TOS and PP' when creating an account and the second lie 'Your privacy is very important to us' with which all the texts of the different PP begin.

[guigirl]

@paul1149 said in Blocking Google trackers:

this one was yelp.com, and was greeted with a popup inviting me to sign in using my google account

Apart from the valid filtering / blocking suggestions you've already received [& btw i add a big +1 for the uBO mention, coz when i visit that site gargle doesn't get a look-in given i block it], why don't you either globally or otherwise locally block pop-ups?

[Pathduck]

@guigirl It's not really a "popup" in the traditional (HTML) meaning, just a CSS div "popup":

It only appears if you're actually logged in to the Google account, so in your case I'm guessing it's a moot point

It can be easily blocked from showing in uBlock by:
||reddit.com/account/sso/one_tap/$subdocument

It can also be stoppet outright by blocking:
https://accounts.google.com/gsi/client

[paul1149]

@guigirl I do have popups blocked, but this one gets by

@pathduck said in Blocking Google trackers:

It's not too hard - I have a file:
Documents\Settings\Vivaldi\Adblock\Myfilters.txt

Thank you, again, Pathduck! This seems to be working very nicely at yelp, and I'm still logged into gmail. Yes, it did error on loading the file, but it actually did load anyway. It seems the problem is resolved.

I used uBO from early-on, but after V-block proved itself I uninstalled in the interests of simplicity. V generally does a very adequate job for my needs, but this one problem had been getting worse.

I only use my gmail account for spammy stuff, but my main hook to evil google at this point, Voice, is tied to it so I stay logged in.

Thanks again to all who contributed. Be blessed.

[Catweazle]

@paul1149 , other possibility is to use Lemmy or Raddle instead of Reddit.
With or without Google account, Reddit isn't better than Google in respecting privacy.

Blacklight report of Reddit

[paul1149]

@Catweazle , I'm not the one who mentioned reddit here. I have not experienced this problem at reddit. I have other problems with reddit, but nothing an ad blocker can solve.

[Catweazle]

@paul1149 , I only say it, that Reddit shares al your data to third parties, not only to Google, also to Tower Data, company which use incluse keyloggers

Be careful with Reddit