I am mad at google

If certain that is the place that sent you the email, note the following from their own site:

"Don't remember signing up through our website directly? Then you must have joined SafeOpt through one of our many publisher or brand partners' sites. We have a partner network with 2,000+ large brands and publishers. When people sign up for emails on a site in our partner network, they can join our network at the same time. Typically, this is presented as a check box on whatever form the user is filling out, but it varies from site to site."

In other words, you signed up for it (if indeed that is where your email came from).

None of that is a Google issue...
No. Don't read the junk they put on their website. Lots of reports of them sending unsolicited emails. There is even a class action about it.
 
Phones are not computers. All I use a phone for is placing / receiving calls - texts and Voicemails. I also use it to read latest News / Sports stories. No scan codes - no banking....... nothing like that. Desktops and laptops are what keeps me safer from the advertisers and creepy crawlers that follow us everywhere online. Retailers get my 2% back on everything credit cards and no debit cards are owned by me. I would never go into a place like 7-11 to withdrawal money from one of their machines and do banking from a 7" screen phone.
 
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Vivaldi is a browser with built-in ad-blocking and tons of customization options to fine-tune your browsing experience. I don’t use it myself, but I’ve heard great things from friends who recommend it for its strong focus on privacy and flexibility, even though it’s not as widely known.
 
I've stopped using the Google search engine, Google Chrome browser, and Microsoft operating systems.
In so doing, I've restored my privacy to it's 1990's level.
I use the u-block origin browser extension, so never see any ads. Problem solved.
 
And I refuse to let my chrome book capitalize google..............yes I know....


Aside from all the other reasons to not like google and its invasion of everything in you life I found another. After looking at an ammo website recomended in a thread on this site I closed the page and went on to something else. I cleared all the notifications on my android phone and as usual it found some other notification to push into my face as soon as I cleared it. Oddly enough it usually is a gmail notification. The email I got a notification from was the ammo site I was on. I had not entered any info into that website yet I get an email from them for 10% off. So it seems that no matter how you opt out of their data mining and sharing there is always so other way that you get advertised directly to. I wouldn't mind except most of the email I get is daily repeated notifications wanting me to buy stuff that no matter how many times I unsubscribe it keeps coming.

Is there a better browser for chrome book that might help curb some of this junk? I use the duck duck go browser on my phone and iPad but it is crummy on chrome book and doesn't do that much good at blocking ads. At this point I am so fed up with everything constantly blasting me with ads I am considering becoming Amish.

This was more of a rant than anything.
Dolphin browser or opera browser
 
And I refuse to let my chrome book capitalize google..............yes I know....


Aside from all the other reasons to not like google and its invasion of everything in you life I found another. After looking at an ammo website recomended in a thread on this site I closed the page and went on to something else. I cleared all the notifications on my android phone and as usual it found some other notification to push into my face as soon as I cleared it. Oddly enough it usually is a gmail notification. The email I got a notification from was the ammo site I was on. I had not entered any info into that website yet I get an email from them for 10% off. So it seems that no matter how you opt out of their data mining and sharing there is always so other way that you get advertised directly to. I wouldn't mind except most of the email I get is daily repeated notifications wanting me to buy stuff that no matter how many times I unsubscribe it keeps coming.

Is there a better browser for chrome book that might help curb some of this junk? I use the duck duck go browser on my phone and iPad but it is crummy on chrome book and doesn't do that much good at blocking ads. At this point I am so fed up with everything constantly blasting me with ads I am considering becoming Amish.

This was more of a rant than anything.
First thing I would do is go into your gmail and any google accounts. 1. Privacy settings 2. Turn off everything, deny all permissions.
3. If your favorite certain app needs a permission that you turned off the app will ask you if you would like to turn it on as general rule.

I hate everything google to be clear and I dont use it or its applications in my now Apple world, however I am familiar with its privacy settings and they are improved from years past due to external pressure.
I have one junk gmail account that I never use, except for something really junky that I might need it for a couple times a year like a news site or anything like that to sign in.

What I am saying, you might find it acceptable if you go into privacy settings and turn everything off which most people do not bother with and google knows it.
 
And I refuse to let my chrome book capitalize google..............yes I know....


Aside from all the other reasons to not like google and its invasion of everything in you life I found another. After looking at an ammo website recomended in a thread on this site I closed the page and went on to something else. I cleared all the notifications on my android phone and as usual it found some other notification to push into my face as soon as I cleared it. Oddly enough it usually is a gmail notification. The email I got a notification from was the ammo site I was on. I had not entered any info into that website yet I get an email from them for 10% off. So it seems that no matter how you opt out of their data mining and sharing there is always so other way that you get advertised directly to. I wouldn't mind except most of the email I get is daily repeated notifications wanting me to buy stuff that no matter how many times I unsubscribe it keeps coming.

Is there a better browser for chrome book that might help curb some of this junk? I use the duck duck go browser on my phone and iPad but it is crummy on chrome book and doesn't do that much good at blocking ads. At this point I am so fed up with everything constantly blasting me with ads I am considering becoming Amish.

This was more of a rant than anything.
Technically you can run any browser available to Debian. I have LibreWolf, GNOME Web (Epiphany) from Flatpak, and various others including everyone's favorites Lynx and Elinks.

There's also Android browsers.

Google turned off VirGL so you're going to have to re-enable hardware acceleration in Linux in the Chrome flags and reboot the Linux container. Otherwise swrast will be your "accelerated graphics" (on the CPU).

Brave Browser?
Runs from the Apt repository for Debian (recommended) with less problems than the (unofficial) Flatpak.

Trying to drag tabs to rearrange them will crash the main process and bring down the browser.

After some reading I will concede that google isn’t the main culprit but their fingerprints are on it because this data doesn’t just come out of thin air and all devices and programs involved were google devices. Also google is mining data from that site and did nothing to prevent this.

It appears that the culprit is safeopt”dot”com that is hosted on AWS. From a short amount of reading it is a dirtbag company that retailers use to specifically send you unsolicited emails after visiting their site without asking permission.
Google honestly does so many shady and intellectually dishonest things like "Privacy Sandbox" previously known as FLoC, which is just another way for advertisers to spy on you which is even worse than third party cookies (which are still on by default, turn them off and install uBlock Origin Lite and set it to maximum permissions and filtering, and let it run in Incognito mode)

It's hard to tell what's happening exactly, it's Google.

mrincognito.webp
 
This is partly why I went to Apple. Still see the occasional ads, but I’m not completely inundated by ads pertaining to my browsing… so if anyone needs a whole gasoline dispenser let me know 😂

Oh yeah, safari is pretty okay at blocking tracking. View attachment 242965

It's actually just the Content Blockers and "Intelligent Tracking Protection" which are also in GNOME Web (Epiphany) since it uses the GTK port of Webkit.

Back in 2020, I went on a bug hunt. I fuzzed Webkit and found 46 bugs of varying severity, including at least 7 that could potentially crash and cause arbitrary code execution. The People's Republic of China has been confirmed to use Webkit bugs to install malware targeting pro-democracy protesters and Uyghurs.

My findings sort of lead me to believe that Webkit is not the browser engine to use if you need security.

Along the way I also found one in GNOME Web itself, but it was a low severity leading to a Denial of Service attack (crash without code execution) involving the password manager, at worst.

And 2 bugs that were in the GTK code for Webkit that wouldn't apply to Webkit WPE or the Apple distributions.

About the only nice thing I have to say about Apple is that while their rendering engine isn't well debugged and is definitely a major security risk, which has become a problem with zero click malware like Pegasus targeting the iPhone (written by an Israeli firm.), at least Apple said thank you and applied the patches that Igalia wrote to address the problems I reported to the trunk all the same month I found them, although I don't think I'll ever own a Mac or iPhone, since they didn't land there in some cases for several months.

Including the crashes with potential arbitrary code execution on the GPU. Igalia is more pleasant to work through than Apple.

Google has a bug bounty program, but honestly they're so serious about fixing CVEs on Chromium that I honestly haven't found a single one.

Apple said they were interested in memory safe programming languages like Rust, but Webkit is still C, which at least makes it easier to compile I guess. But it would help if they implemented a bug bounty program and encouraged people to come forward and rolled out fixes quickly. Quite often, WebkitGTK rolls them out faster than Apple because there's a monthly patch update.
 
Ungoogled Chromium? That's what I'm using, with uBlock origin and 3rd party cookies blocked.
Ungoogled Chromium is still problematic as it doesn't have blocking WebRequest after the phase-out of Manifest v2.

Brave has its own ad blocker written in Rust. WebRequest is still in Chromium/Chrome, but it's been made unavailable to Manifest v3 extensions (read-only). Google says this is for security, but that's simply not true since malicious extensions can still read from the API anything they darned well please. Manifest v3's DeclarativeNetRequest is built atop WebRequest and is read-write, but v3 extensions can't download "code" and "resources" (which would be the plain text ad blocking filter updates) from the Web, meaning that you have to bump the extension version every time you want to update the filters, and there is a limit to the number of rules.

As Brave Adblock is hooked into WebRequest it has read-write functionality and unlimited filters, and updates them from the server they're hosted on as they get updated.

The scope of Ungoogled Chromium, for now, isn't to improve on the ad blocking situation.
 
You can install linux on your chrome-book, by itself or dual boot.
Are you talking about Crostini, or Mr ChromeBox.

MrChromeBox involves having a compatible model, putting it in developer mode, and using a UEFI payload to load Linux, and it may be less than ideal depending on the distribution and the various components and kernel version it uses.

Part of the reason for Crostini is just to that people who want developer tools don't brick their Chromebook somehow. There are gaps in the functionality, including especially with input devices (like my XBOX 360 controller) and missing Vulkan acceleration.

Most of my retro gaming currently happens in RetroArch for Android because it can use the controller, so there's at least three levels of virtualization going on here. Very inception. Much wow.

One of the worst things about modern PCs that came with Windows is the broken and horribly buggy UEFI firmware that most of them have. Even if you format Windows off the thing, UEFI tends to bring Windows-ey problems to Linux because the bugs are unavoidable the moment you turn the computer on. I used to swear at my computer in the Legacy BIOS days, but had I known it would get much worse...

One of the great decisions Google made with Chrome OS is that they would not use UEFI, they port Coreboot.

Intel and Microsoft designed the UEFI "standard" and it's a firmware meant to run Windows, so that's why it's yucky I think. In many cases, they simply copied over warmed over 90s crap and then kept making new interfaces that were even worse. They had so much money tied up in ACPI that you still find references to Windows 98 in some of them.

Lenovo sold me a "business" laptop and the uEFI was so hideously broken that not even the function keys or backlit keyboard worked right, and then they kept "fixing" CVEs, and applying the fixes meant downtime and possibly bricking the computer. It was literally the most hellish computer I've ever owned, and I've owned dozens going back to Apple IIs and Commodore 64.

I admit that deploying TianoCore as an UEFI payload would sit better with me if it wasn't UEFI in any sense of the word.

I've stopped using the Google search engine, Google Chrome browser, and Microsoft operating systems.
In so doing, I've restored my privacy to it's 1990's level.
I use the u-block origin browser extension, so never see any ads. Problem solved.

I hate Google's search engine. It's gotten a lot crappier. DuckDuckGo is basically just Bing with a skin, but at least it's cleaner. I really discourage people from signing into search engines. Sometimes I use Yandex. Their Turkish domain doesn't tend to load CAPTCHAs while I'm in Incognito Mode on my Swedish VPN server.

Swedish VPN servers and me. This sort of thing is my bag, baby.

Anyway, since Yandex is Russian they don't take orders on what to censor and hide from the American government, so sometimes you can find things Google and Bing would never ever tell you about.

There's Searx metasearch instances. You can run it locally if you want to. If you run it locally to avoid rate limiting (which you can do in Crostini even!), I recommend having the search traffic going out over the Tor network plug-in to prevent the search engines from identifying you.

Dolphin browser or opera browser

Opera was great when it was a company in Norway and they had the Presto engine. Now it's a Chinese browser riding on Chromium with a crypto wallet. LOL
Phones are not computers. All I use a phone for is placing / receiving calls - texts and Voicemails. I also use it to read latest News / Sports stories. No scan codes - no banking....... nothing like that. Desktops and laptops are what keeps me safer from the advertisers and creepy crawlers that follow us everywhere online. Retailers get my 2% back on everything credit cards and no debit cards are owned by me. I would never go into a place like 7-11 to withdrawal money from one of their machines and do banking from a 7" screen phone.
Phones are horrible computers. Apps are usually garbage that is meant to spy on you somehow.

I have F-Droid and use apps from that and I have TrackerControl to block mobile ad networks, and I usually keep the phone on airplane mode in a faraday pouch. If you're someone I want to talk to, leave a voicemail.

Using Safari on an iPhone and have installed FireFox Focus (but don’t use it).
I never see any ads.
iPhones don't have Web browsers, they have Webkit skins.
 
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