Brownells

Noticing more and more of this shit.

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Idle curiosity about their redesign. Using a NoScript-enabled browser then selectively whitelisting things until I could complete a transaction.

Google for the captcha. Google Maps so they can tell you "oh yeah, looks like you know your zip code" GIS shit. Gstatic for the everything. The latter two I already know the rationale behind: everyone does it. (Hypocrisy disclosure: so do I.) But the former is new, AFAIK a consequence of the Apple/iOS privacy changes. Google's response is to route more and more traffic through the base google.com domain because AFAIK the cookies there aren't cross-domain like gstatic.com or googleapis.com are.

So basically you can't buy anything from Brownells now without routing your traffic through Google in a way that correlates your visit to Brownells with the rest of the data they're groping from the wider internet. With the fig leaf of captcha so, I guess, bots don't pay for my order. (Which spoiler alert? I think you should fucking let them.)

The entire firearms industry is glacially slow to adopt new anything, which in this case should work in the end users favor because in the year 2023 everyone should know that yeah, hey, Gun Industry? Google fucking hates your existence and wants to put you out of business. Legacy shit? Well, you're stuck with what you're stuck with. But for brand new shit in 2023? A new site design that doesn't fail gracefully and requires you to route traffic directly through the base google.com domain? Hard pass.

It's getting impossibly difficult to not engage with a facet of the gun industry that isn't in some suicide pact with a company that wants them to die.

Would a VPN routed through some distant server and a non-google email address help much?

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Im concerned that they make you pay for protection to replace an item lost in shipping. I figure until I receive the goods purchased its on the shipper.

Most of the firearm industry is at least 10-15yrs behind the tech curve.

Unfortunately, these observations are industry-agnostic. This is how the internet is now. Developers sell their soul so they can use as many "free" services as possible to save time. For example, most are so tied in to proprietary Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they're screwed if things start getting more oppressive or privacy-invasive.

I get it, no one wants to reinvent the wheel. That said, most developers rarely even consider self-hosting as many resource files as possible to avoid as many external (like external to your domain) HTTP requests as possible. For example, using a font CDN like Google Fonts, as opposed to self-hosting them. Most of that "free" stuff you can use from a CDN is designed for a primary purpose of tracking as much of the internet as possible.

Things like VPN's and non-Google emails may reduce some of the data collected by third parties but, it doesn't truly mask who you are. For example, there's the issue of browser and device fingerprinting which can still identify most people. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers for this.

Welcome to a "free" micro services world. You pay me with all your data and invasive loss of privacy.

IT in the firearms industry is heavily outsourced as best I can tell. They are mostly small companies who lack the resources, experience or skill to build it in house. Especially their ecommerce platforms. Most of them don't even understand how their ecommerce operations work themselves.