161–170 of 216 posts
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Obviously, "making all locks insecure" is a different situation than bypassing a single door. Which is why we don't do the former, but (currently) do the latter, judiciously. But hey: what if the lock company makes a standard lock, with a plain ol', low-security, five-pin key, and attaches it to a bomb that destroys the apartment when it's picked incorrectly? Does the lock company now get to beg off when the police c…
This makes no sense whatsoever.
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"Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?" I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and la…
But when the FBI gets the key or picks the lock it does not make any other door more insecure, or enables other parties to get into other doors. What if the FBI would ask all landlords to install a special door to every apartment, but only the FBI has the key to this special door? What if someone successfully copies that key? Now they have access to all apartments.
Second off, the FBI is not asking for a special door to every apartment. They are asking a lock manufacturer to create a key and use it to unlock a single lock that is brought to them, after the lock manufacturer explicitly designed their locks to make the creation of such a key possible, so that this legal case would exist.
There is an interesting debate to be had here, but this rhetoric using overly simplified analogies is not it.
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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."
If you don't like it, that's your prerogative - you can go somewhere else. If enough people do that, the person who owns the site loses out. But I can't see why it's not entirely within a provider's rights to say "if you use our service, you must agree to X. Otherwise, Y."
I think a better use of resources than the clunky EU cookie law would be to say "sites can analyze what visitors do on their site - but only there." Then it's truly opt-in (by virtue of using the site), and sandboxed. There's no "following you home" - the site owner would only have access to what you do on their site.
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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…
In the "good ol' days" (TM the shop-owners in a community knew quite a lot about their customers. Oh Mary just gave birth, Henry is currently sick, Walter likes his coffee a little stronger, James a little weaker (something with his stomach). Danielle drinks only tee, has two kids and the marriage is not really happy. And so on. A lot bordered on gossip, a lot was very valid and relevant information. People talked. S…
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…
uBlock didn't block it. I blocked it, by using uBlock, which I picked because of its stance on trackers. So its more like I found a cloak of invisibility so I don't show up on your cameras. You can't blame the store selling the cloaks, because I and every user like me chooses to wear them. You have to blame the user for using the cloak... but to what point? You are blaming me for not letting your code run on my machine.
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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 requi…
Do you block images, css, and other stuff that doesn't pertain to the content at hand?
> 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.
Yeah if all you want is referrer, user agent, url requested, and ip. But what about other great information in help with making your site BETTER for your users, like screen size?
> 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.
I find it strange given the demographics of HN that people still believe by me putting Pwiki on my site to gather analytics about my visitors, that somehow taps into your bank account to see your income, requests your tax documents, downloads your birth certificate and gives me a full list of your last 100 visited urls.
That data is only available if I somehow put a tracking pixel on as many sites as I can. Such as a 3rd party script.
So because of that I can see blocking Google Analytics, or 3rd party trackers, but what are you doing by blocking 1st party stuff like Pwiki other than giving a big fuck you to the website owner?
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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 requi…
> I'll block every single request I can, if it's not just fetching the content that I want. Do you block images, css, and other stuff that doesn't pertain to the content at hand? > 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 bac…
No. In many cases, the styles and images are content that I'd actually like to see. In some cases, sure - I'd eagerly jump right back on that Gopher train and trim out all the extra crap you want to funnel into my browser.
> Yeah if all you want is referrer, user agent, url requested, and ip. But what about other great information in help with making your site BETTER for your users, like screen size?
Screen size? In 2016, optimising for specific screen sizes is archaic. Exercise responsive design. As for things like javascript feature availability - if you're already using javascript (a rich web app, as opposed to simple content), then you'll already have the facility to pass this data back to the server, the same server, that's serving the requested content.
> I find it strange given the demographics of HN that people still believe by me putting Pwiki on my site to gather analytics about my visitors, that somehow taps into your bank account to see your income, requests your tax documents, downloads your birth certificate and gives me a full list of your last 100 visited urls.
You're being facetious. I don't think anyone made this suggestion. I know I certainly didn't.
My issue with things like Piwik is primarily the additional requests my browser makes to help you accomplish something that you could have done on the server side. When I'm reading your blog, my browser shouldn't be expected to make extra requests once the content has loaded, just to give you a better idea of how people use your site. It doesn't benefit me, and you're not entitled to my cooperation. I can choose to block Piwik if I'd like. You can always log the limited data on server side.
> [...] giving a big fuck you to the website owner
And by expecting users' browsers to make additional requests (using additional data, and additional CPU cycles - however few), I could maintain that you're "giving a big fuck you" to the user.
This sense of entitlement to user data, usage data, analytics, and the right to make the client behave as you wish is relatively new over the past decade. I don't like it, and it sets a dangerous stage for the future of the web.
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To be fair, you're not entitled to free content free of tracking either.
True, but we aren't really given much choice either. Even if I buy for a service or buy a product from a company, I'm not going to be excluded from tracking. Amazon isn't going to not data-mine the shit out of my purchases, even though I paid for a product. I do question the value of all that data collection though. Sure it's interesting, but I don't really believe that data collection and analysis at the current sca…
Exactly! I subscribe to SiriusXM for my car, because I really like the music options. Last night I looked at installing it on my phone. It requires access to my contacts (why?); to my phone status and identity (what the heck?); to direct-dialing my phone (WTF‽); to view my network connexions; to pair with Bluetooth devices; to install shortcuts.
It plays music. It should need access to my SiriusXM username and password, and to the network. That's it. There's no way that I'll install the app: I may be paying, but I'm apparently not the customer.
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It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing. However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American prot…
I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.