121–130 of 151 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any evidence that law enforcement could virtually eliminate spam?
Severe dents have been put in spam production when specific individual senders were shut down.
Analytics is here to stay. Unless this practice is regulated (which in turn can end up being heavy handed and far reaching and in turn could discourage innovation) analytics will remain a big piece of what IT will focus on, mainly in getting a 360 degree view of their customers. Instead of regulating everytime we see a practice that we may not agree on, how about we treat it like when the "iPhone location" fiasco bro…
I bought this computer. I pay for my internet connection. And someone like KISSMetrics wants to spy on me using MY stuff?
To profit from MY computer tracking me against my express commands? Incognito mode, cookies turned off and they're tricking my computer into tracking me?
These are people who have lost all perspective of what's right and wrong.
Analytics is a solved problem, there's no innovation here, there's cookies and a way of opting out of it. If regulation is what's needed to stop scum like Kissmetrics from violating my privacy, then regulation's what's needed.
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But here's the problem - on a whole, no one is paying marketers to solve these problems. Marketers make their money by shilling for products that are the opposite of the issues you listed above. For example, a newly minted MBA in Marketing needs to pay back school loans. Who has the money to pay them? Who has the job that will bring the most prestige and future earnings? The local farm selling grass-fed beef and orga…
Marketer is not a well-defined class. People who market may not identify as such- many don't even know they market. Marketing is just a word, a neat little box, it contains exactly and only what you want. While you have a lot of bile for marketers behind closed big corporate doors (and I agree they deserve much of this derision) the fact of the matter is, you always have a choice: stop buying their shit. It may take…
At this moment, you're probably mad and probably wondering what you did wrong as well as wondering if I'm just being an asshole. You're also looking at the score of your post and wondering why it is what it is; "Did he down-vote me and someone else up-voted me? Or is he just trying to make a point?"
I was just making a point, so no, I did not actually down-vote you. The thing is, you and many others have fallen, "For exactly the same traps marketers set." The trap, even if entirely fake, is the reason for the your initial anger, confusion and pondering.
This is an odd and harsh way of both supporting your point and refuting it. You are only human, so you'll get angry if you fall for a trap. None the less, you are correct; often the answer is to stop interacting with or buying from those who would try to trap you, but unfortunately, you do not always have the choice until after the fact.
I've quite a few /etc/hosts entries, blocking third party cookies, clearing cookies & cache on close, no flash cookies, and so on, but I always expect they'll be something they can find still.
Analytics is here to stay. Unless this practice is regulated (which in turn can end up being heavy handed and far reaching and in turn could discourage innovation) analytics will remain a big piece of what IT will focus on, mainly in getting a 360 degree view of their customers. Instead of regulating everytime we see a practice that we may not agree on, how about we treat it like when the "iPhone location" fiasco bro…
I disagree completely. I bought this computer. I pay for my internet connection. And someone like KISSMetrics wants to spy on me using MY stuff? To profit from MY computer tracking me against my express commands? Incognito mode, cookies turned off and they're tricking my computer into tracking me? These are people who have lost all perspective of what's right and wrong. Analytics is a solved problem, there's no innov…
You may pay for your computer and internet connection but not for the (vast majority of) sites you visit. This popular sense of entitlement is problematic when "your" stuff live in 3rd party servers running 3rd party software that you're not paying for.
I've worked with the KM folks. Great people, genuinely kind, and they want to make a great product. I think it's disgusting to single out a startup like this, especially right as they are gaining traction with some big-name clients. There is value in what they are doing, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. They are tracking user behavior completely anonymously.
I'll leave discussion about valid of KM's activity aside, what is it about the "I know X, genuinely great people and really want to do good stuff" formula (with no substantive arguments) that seems to make to the top of these hn debates? (I'm sure the KM people love puppy dogs, etc).
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Give me a break. This isn't evil marketers hiding in their underground lair. This is web developers, designers, and product managers gaining insight about their users. They don't package this information and sell it wholesale to advertisers. They use it to make the product better . You are taking this -way- too seriously. The ability to have perfect information on how users interact with your product is one the earth…
Bullshit. If it was used to improve a product, they wouldn't use a tracking method that tracks me between sites. They can track what I do on their site, but if I'm going from goat-sucking-maggot.com to hulu.com, then Hulu has no business knowing that and knowing that doesn't improve their damn product. This is entirely just an attempt to get competitive analysis about their competitors at the expense of user privacy.
If Hulu sees that noticeable numbers of visitors to sites like goat-sucking-maggot.com, or that site and a combination of other sites, tend to watch movies of a certain genre or other attribute, they can offer more movies like that, and suggest them for visitors to g-s-m.com. Which does improve their product, especially for visitors to g-s-m.com.
I usually use Firefox with it set to forget everything on exit, along with the Noscript plugin. Does anyone know if this tracking service would work on a FF user running Noscript? By the way, using Noscript has made me aware of something that I didn't previously know: many sites call Javascript from lots of other domains. I've seen websites with as many as 18 other domains listed on the Noscript pull down menu. And I…
Amen to JS from third-party domains. I see this as biting us in the butt sometime. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. What's more annoying is playing the "NoScript allow roulette" game of trying to figure out which domains/scripts you have to allow for some site feature to work.
I suppose when the government gets in the game, either through direct tracking or just making laws requiring tracking companies to keep particular data for particular lengths of time, then it will be a civil liberties issue and I'll care more. But it will probably also be illegal by then to circumvent tracking.
But that's just crazy. That would be like the government demanding that ISPs keep credit card information on their customers.