Trackers • Hacker News Board

Re: Trackers

#151

Post by masswerk » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:35 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #15

Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story. They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty…

Once, a shop had hired an assistant called "Cookie" to do the job and another one even had hired a specialized clerk (named W.B. Alizer, for the record) and I was totally fine with this. But then, stores started to hire some guys from the Tracker bunch, but said it would be ok, since they had strict orders to stay indoors.

Now, this became a little distracting. Every now and then I had to wait for the guy to catch up, who was crawling along with me trying to measure the width of my foot steps with an inch rule, and then there was this guy, who insisted to peek into my pockets and to keep track of its contents in a quart book he had attached to the lining of my coat. (Over time, my coat became that heavy, I had to stop and rip out the lining in order to proceed.) Yay, it was all to my best ...

Then, something funny happened as stores began to engage in something they called "optimizing". Had the super market around the corner once sold 5 different sorts of cheese, it was now just 3 with the 2 best selling ones missing (they didn't have much potential for future optimization as they were sold out constantly). Some months later, they started to hide the bread behind a fake wall as soon as I entered and pushed whole piles of umbrellas in my way (since I had once bought one on a stormy afternoon a year ago – I would have understood, if it had been bagels, because I started to buy these as I was searching for the bread in vain.) That is, until last Halloween, when I discovered that there was still bread to buy, when I entered the shop in disguise.

Last month, I bumped into a girl that looked rather familiar, just as I was preparing my wig and false mustache for getting some bread at the super market. Remember Cookie? She is still working at a store, inside the server room. We chatted a while, and now I'm a habitual to her work place again. The store is a bit farther away than the fancy super market, but it really outweighs the inconveniences of the other place.

Re: Trackers

#152

Post by monochromatic » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #15

Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story. They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty…

Some of us find even that level of tracking to be creepy and invasive, and would rather opt out. You never asked us if we wanted to be "helped" around your store, but we have now answered that question anyway.

Re: Trackers

#153

Post by HillaryBriss » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #50

Baghard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marketing industry is moving beyond trackers and cookies. Hastened by the mobile/tablet revolution (users switch devices way more often) and the stricter privacy laws in Europe (anti-cookie laws). Now they either require you to login to get the "mobile" experience, like Facebook or Twitter, or they use probabilistic statistics to identify you without cookies. That guy reading a newspaper in the park with a paper…

This is - unfortunately - spot on, and there is much worse to come. It's funny how a law that actually confirms a right that is solidly anchored in the declaration of human rights would result in technological circumvention rather than - the expected outcome - compliance.

Yes. And yet, you've also described a general phenomenon, I think. (e.g. the discovery of loopholes in tax law.)

If necessity is the mother of invention, profitability is the mother of circumvention.

(Great blog post, btw.)

Re: Trackers

#154

Post by monochromatic » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

Melk wrote: post #143

Majestic121 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, if you want personal recommendations. But I do not. I want a choice, the choice to share my data and have personal recommendations, or not share anything and have generic ads. But no one give me that choice, so I have to take it by "hiring the bouncers"

This is the direction we should and, I predict, we will be headed. Personal recommendations and analytics should be optional and opt-in. The EU cookie law is a step in the right direction but the reason it's so clumsy is because cookies for now are opt-out. The way to get there is to separate the browsing/shopping process from the tracking/recommendations. Instead of bouncers we should have personal shoppers. The maj…

I've never seen a single site with the EU cookie warning saying "click here if you're ok with cookies, or click over there if you'd rather we didn't use them." It's always "click here to proceed with cookies, or fuck off."

Re: Trackers

#155

Post by terryf » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

flycaliguy wrote: post #150

terryf wrote: post #133

I find it interesting that for most people the problem with ads is the tracking part. For me it's the ads themselves - I don't like seeing them, because I don't really want to buy stuff and think that a large part of the first world's problems (obesity, depression) are caused in part by ads. In the world of ads, I'm constantly reminded that I don't have the perfect body and that my blender does not look as good as th…

Your nice place will probably never happen. There are alternatives. On the internet, you are actually better off allowing sites to make money with these old fashioned banner style ads. The alternative on the web is baking this predatory persuasion into the content itself. By blocking ads, you are pushing your enemy deeper into the medium. Deeper into the story selection process, deeper into the layout decisions, deep…

Sure, but that has already happened. It is ridiculously easy to get almost any newspaper to print a commercial article and already now it is hard to tell the difference between for-pay articles and genuine ones.

If you have a instagram account with ~30k or so followers, you start getting offers to promote products for example. If you have less, you can still get deals, but then you have to hunt for them.

But this will happen regardless of ad blocking, because it is profitable. I certainly don't know how to avoid it, except to generally assume that all content is commercial content in for-profit sites. And also on some others.

Re: Trackers

#156

Post by robbiemitchell » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:43 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #94

robbiemitchell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a giant difference between a site-specific tracker that helps a site owner understand her own visitors and ad networks that share cookie data. analytics != ads.

Yes, this is true. But: (1) the number of parties that only use site specific trackers is relatively small to the number of parties that use networks, (2) even those parties usually carry facebook/google and other embedded resources, effectively still leaking your data and (3) in the end, you can't be sure that they don't combine that data on the backside with data procured elsewhere.

I'm not sure whether we're talking about the same thing, but plenty of the web is people running sites tracking analytics on sites that have nothing to do with ads. Of those, Google Analytics would be the most common, and yes, Google is in the ads business.

But there are numerous services that provide analytics and have no part in tracking you elsewhere. Is Mailchimp involved in cookie trading? Segment? Intercom? Mixpanel? To my knowledge, no, there is nothing there -- they only know you via session cookies in the browser, and those businesses do not make data available to third-party ad networks.

Even in cases where they do bring in data, such as Intercom using FullContact to merge an email address with social data from Twitter, it's a one-way API call from Intercom, with nothing identifying the actual sites that will make use of it.

I 100% agree with you on trackers/beacons like "Scorecard Research", and to a lesser extent, Google Analytics, but "you can't be sure" seems like weak ground on which to take a strong categorical stance against any use of analytics tracking. There are real differences to the value they provide and the ability they have to do beyond that even if the incentives are there.

Re: Trackers

#157

Post by spobin » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #45

spobin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. This analogy is good up to the point where you consider that these trackers don't really know or care who you are. To them you're an anonymous hashed id. Yes, they 'follow' you around, but they are essentially invisible and mostly aim to improve the targeting of ads/information. It's easy to forget that a lot of this technology is very new and for a while there will be cases where it's seen as intrusive. Thi…

> To them you're an anonymous hashed id. You wish.

I've worked very closely with tracking companies. They are very strict about not storing any unhashed identifyable information such as email adddress, postcode etc.

Re: Trackers

#158

Post by robbiemitchell » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 3:46 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #67

jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's all you got from it then I should really do my best to write better. One of the key parts - to me - is that the data silos start trading your data as if it is theirs to whoever pays for it, and that goes a lot further than a real time bidding on ad space, even if that was the initial drive to collect that data.

Maybe an allegory about how, based on the tracking data, the price you pay for something (say airline tickets) changes. Or the availability of health insurance for your kids? I don't have any facts on which to base the latter, however, but I suspect it's either happening or only a matter of time.

Health insurance is regulated way beyond what you would expect. At least for the individual market, many plans are standardized across all carriers as mandated by the ACA. And in New York (if not elsewhere), rates are proposed in advance to the state and either approved or rejected (and forced to adjust), which can happen for being too high or too low compared to other players. The rates are then set for the year. This is not something subject to real-time bidding.

Re: Trackers

#159

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 4:03 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #148

marincounty wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have been doing it for a long time, but we know the game now. Most people haven't figured out they are being digitally tracked, but when that happens, I have a feeling consumers will get proactive, and really begin to withhold, or make it difficult for entities to track buying habits. As to eggs in the back of the store, yes milk and eggs are always in the back of every store I can recall. We all know the game.…

I made a small purchase in store at Home Depot with a credit card (a bad habit, which I've resolved to do less of [0]). A few weeks later I received an email asking me to review it, to an email address I had used for online ordering. In retrospect, it wasn't so amazing that they'd correlate this information, but that they'd have the audacity to assume I wanted my relationships with them to converge. It's similar to p…

[deleted]

Re: Trackers

#160

Post by davb » Fri, Mar 11, 2016, 4:08 PM UTC

akavel wrote: post #118

davb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that a lot of content producers have feel entitled to users' participation in analytics at all. Sure, it may be frustrating when a user blocks tracking tools (especially self hosted ones) but that's the their choice. We got by for decades without analysing user habits (even in a local only context, without correlation with third party data). There are so few examples of cases where analysing use…

You write "Do it on your application servers back end" , but then the parent comment actually argues specifically for "self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools" . So, I'm now confused: do you actually agree with it? or disagree? or what? was there something edited in the parent comment in the meantime? did I miss something?

There's a difference between using tools like Piwik (which still burden the browser with additional HTTP requests), and logging the relevant data in the application or server code itself (Apache/nginx logs, or writing your own context aware logging code in your Django/Rails/whatever framework application).

What I'm suggesting is that applications can completely unobtrusively log visitor data internally, without requiring the client to make additional requests. In the same way that ad networks could serve data through your own application backend (rather than being requested by the client), if the ad networks and advertisers could stomach losing access to cross site user data tracking.

The GP was complaining that users still block Piwik and other self-hosted solutions. Of course they do. I'll block every single request I can, if it's not just fetching the content that I want.

Some developers and content providers complain that by blocking analytics services (including internally hosted ones) means they'll be left completely in the dark. This is wrong. They can always log visits through their web app code on the server side - they'll have the benefit of complete request context access ("Is the user logged in?", "Is their account in credit?", "Did they buy this item at some point in the past?") but simply won't be able to correlate this data with other websites logs (a benefit to the users, from a privacy perspective).

As a user, there is absolutely no benefit to me whatsoever of your site knowing my age, income bracket, recent (off-site!) browsing history and interests. None. Ad networks, advertisers and content providers will benefit. I won't.