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In the browser, i didn't login in the google account, and I didn't accept the cookies on that site. Using privacybadger that supposedly should block the 3rd party spyware like that
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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Worth noting, this isn't really a Google thing. It's something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon -- Twitter used to be common. It's just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.
It Is a Google thing. It's a script that Google gives to third party to promote logging in with their account, and it can access Google cookies, so it can get populated with your name and email (which is absurd as some other malicious js on the same page could parse the HTML to extract the personal data of the user without consent)
If you're logged in, there's a setting buried in the Google account (really buried, very difficult to find) which hides this nag.
What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn't just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.
This is something that companies like Reddit see and think "Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site".
I think it's exactly the same as a Doubleclick ad as in it's a 3rd-party script that adds obnoxious content (be it ads or a signin popup) to the site. I think Doubleclick is owned by google which ironically makes it even more similar than if it was, say, a Facebook popup.
Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn't accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it's annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying "we don't want to force that on our users".
Yeah. Also, it's the difference between ads (a very obnoxious thing for 99% of users) and something potentially genuinely useful for a good portion of users like the sign in - I assume the popup isn't there to annoy us Lemmy users, a large percentage of whom I assume use uBlock Origin and find it annoying, but rather for the ~2-5% of users who wouldn't bother creating an account but don't mind signing in with Google due to the convenience (and wouldn't do so on the signin page). And eveb for us who find it annoying, it isn't like ads where you're not supposed to be able to get rid of the popup or the popup being a constant PITA