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The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

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Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#41

Post by beagle3 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #35
beedogs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that situation? Optimally. It plays out optimally. If everyone suddenly installed and ran an aggressive ad-blocker, we could strangle all of the tracking networks overnight and the Internet would become a noticeably nicer place. People who refuse to concede that allowing ads is functionally the same thing as inviting third parties to monitor your browsing patterns and invade your privacy are being disingenuous.

Explain to me how some of the world's most popular services would operate without advertising revenue?

That’s a cousin of the broken window fallacy, I am not sure it has a name, though.

How would the horse merchants operate if everyone used cars?

How would window fixers survive if there were no stones being thrown?

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#42

Post by Someone »

ams6110 wrote: post #23
ehnto wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case see the last part of the post you replied to. I personally don't mind if web advertising phases out. I have no idea what the alternative is, but web advertising has become a cesspool of privacy invasion and coercive commercial intent that the world is better off without. In this day and age you might imagine that nothing exists in the world but commerce and advertising for that commerce, and without it…

The web existed for many years without pervasive advertising and tracking. To me the obvious alternative is a return to generally targeted ads as are found on television or in print publications. They are targeted to general audience for the program/publication, and can be served inline with the main content (and therefore not blocked) and require no tracking.

If you have enough visitors it can still be better targeted than television or print. You can A/B test a series of ads, and if it turns out one of them statistically gets clicked less on drop it from the pool.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#43

Post by gaius »

fulafel wrote: post #38
gaius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I do feel this sort of thing is hypocritical Wait ‘til you find out where the Graun is based for tax purposes... Left-wing-ness is just a product that they sell. They don’t believe in it anymore than everyone in McDonald’s head office eats Big Macs every day...

They're centre-left, like the european social democractic mainstream, not against market economy. You should look elsewhere if you want a paper that doesn't bow to commercial interests.

Centre-left as in bleat about “our NHS” while dodging the taxes that pay for it.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#44

Post by slivym »

This is the problem with wikileaks. This has nothing to do with protecting people, or informing them of shady goings on. Wikileaks doesn't like The Guardian's reporting. So they're trying to claim that they're doing something wrong. In reality every single ad-supported website will do the same thing- including practically every website in existence from Breitbart to WashPo.

So next time wikileaks sends out leaked info about bombs in Syria or intelligence gathering in the US ask yourself this question:

Are they telling you everything, or are they serving their own political agenda?

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#45

Post by dingaling »

lwansbrough wrote: post #34
TeMPOraL wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best content - done by passionate individuals for no monetary reasons - will stay. The good content will be kept afloat by donations. The usual corporate content will be written off as "marketing expense". The ad-supported worthless crap will disappear. The Internet would become leaner, but I can't see how it would not also become better.

> The best content - done by passionate individuals for no monetary reasons - will stay. That's assuming these people have other jobs (which will have to somehow be funded by something other than ads or selling data -- bye bye 90% of Silicon Valley.) Having other jobs means they won't be able to spend as much time on it and quality will suffer. > The good content will be kept afloat by donations. Donations often don'…

> You mean like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter...?

Three of those provide paid-for tiers. The other two that do not, well...

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#46

Post by whiteandnerdy »

stblack wrote: post #16

I'm Steven Black and these are the hosts files some diligent friends and I continuously curate for you. Try the variant with the social media blocking if you really want to go cold turkey. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Your hosts file is amazing. I killed two hours trying to get decent ad blocking in midori, gave up, and got essentially perfect blocking with your hosts entries in under 5 minutes.

Thanks for the work you do in curating this resource - it's awesome stuff.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#47

Post by tom_mellior »

slivym wrote: post #44

This is the problem with wikileaks. This has nothing to do with protecting people, or informing them of shady goings on. Wikileaks doesn't like The Guardian's reporting. So they're trying to claim that they're doing something wrong. In reality every single ad-supported website will do the same thing- including practically every website in existence from Breitbart to WashPo. So next time wikileaks sends out leaked inf…

While I completely agree with you about Wikileaks, and I do like the Guardian's reporting in general, (some of, depending on what and how you count) this tracking is a fact, and it's worth pointing out. On this particular issue, the Guardian is weaker than it could and should be. Especially because it keeps asking you (in a friendly and absoutely tolerable way!) for paid subscriptions. Would they keep tracking me if I paid? I'm fairly sure they would. In which case, meh.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#48

Post by baud147258 »

stblack wrote: post #16

I'm Steven Black and these are the hosts files some diligent friends and I continuously curate for you. Try the variant with the social media blocking if you really want to go cold turkey. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I've started using your host files, it's working really well, thank you!

The only downside is now I can't support ad-funded website by whitelisting them in my ad-blocker.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#49

Post by gnode »

flukus wrote: post #10
timbit42 wrote: post #8

According to my Ublock Origin, NoScript, Privacy Badger, and Cookie AutoDelete plugins, it's doing no such thing.

It's about time browsers started including UBlock Origin by default. Mozilla anyway, I can't see google doing it any time soon.

Mozilla have rolled out built-in tracking protection in private browsing mode, at least.

Re: The Guardian covertly sends your data to 58 tracking services

#50

Post by gnode »

mysterypie wrote: post #17
jadedhacker wrote: post #7

What do you guys think of this solution? I've considered it in the past but never tried it. https://matomo.org/ This way you get data analytics without dispensing user data to third parties.

Self-hosted analytics like Matomo tell you who visited your site for how long and from what IP address and what country, etc. But is this the only reason that people run trackers? I thought people ran trackers for the following reasons (in addition to analytics): (1) To get targeted ads, and thereby money because you showed a targeted ad. So if the Doubleclick tracker you embedded on your site sees that your visitors…

Google and Facebook also have personal information about users which a self-hosted / privacy respecting solution inherently doesn't, such as gender, age, "likes", etc. I haven't used these analytics platforms myself, so I don't know how much of such data they reveal to customers.
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