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Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

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Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#31

Post by raverbashing »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
_8j50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This needs to be criminalized. Not liking a good or service is one thing. Having things done to you or your information without consent for the purpose of spying on you is stalking with extra steps. Many of these companies still deprive you of your privacy even without using their services by developing shadow profiles on you.

> This needs to be criminalized Literally criminalised? As in you’ll throw people in jail for putting up a pixel? Made illegal, sure.

Wouldn't be a bad idea to be honest

If they're acting so antagonistically against GDPR maybe , for some of the most egregious cases, throwing some people in jail will do the trick

I mean, whoever does the whole song and dance for rejecting cookies that shows a loading gif and takes a while does deserve it

And if you think I'm exaggerating, guess who has the best info now on the Ukraine war? Tiktok.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#32

Post by beckman466 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #29

As one can see from comments on HN, it bothers some website developers when these basic tactics are openly discussed. The user gets no choice over whether her data is shared, or with whom it is shared. The expectation appears to be that no one will ever complain, whether for the first time or on a consistent basis. Perhaps there is a belief that if a certain amount of time passes without any complaints, this signifie…

> As one can see from comments on HN, it bothers some website developers when these basic tactics are openly discussed.

no in this case i think this post has everything to do with OP believing that this pixel tracking by a non-American/non-Western firm (in this case Chinese) is somehow less kosher compared to tracking by Silicon Valley social media platforms/firms (who, as others have pointed out, use exactly the same tools/strategies).

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#33

Post by LeonM »

Raed667 wrote: post #10
sexy_panda wrote: post #9

Even more concerning is Hotjar.

at least hotjar respects do-not-track settings

DNT is not the solution though.

DNT status is not readable by JS (by design), so DNT cannot be implemented in the client. So all tracking calls are still made over the network. It is then up to the server processing those calls to drop them if the DNT header is present. Thus, there is no way for a user to verify that DNT is actually honored.

Hotjar is probably the only one (claiming to be) honoring DNT consistently. Luckily Hotjar is a SaaS where the customer cannot influence this decision. But for all other tracking solutions, whenever marketeers are given the option, they will always choose to ignore DNT.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#34

Post by black_puppydog »

samwillis wrote: post #30
_fat_santa wrote: post #4

I'm no ads expert but my guess would be they run ads on TikTok and have the pixel on UberEats to figure out the conversion rate on those ads.

This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a conversion event. At the beginning of the online ad industry that’s all it did, advertisers for the first time had the ability to directly, in real time, see the effectiveness of their ads. The economic value and GDP generated due to this innovation is immeasura…

> It’s the innovations since that ...

Nice illustration of how "innovation" != "progress"

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#35

Post by [deleted] »

_8j50 wrote: post #20
sha256sum wrote: post #3

Protip: if user privacy is a concern to you, then not supporting these companies (by handing them your data) is a good place to start.

No. This needs to be criminalized. Not liking a good or service is one thing. Having things done to you or your information without consent for the purpose of spying on you is stalking with extra steps. Many of these companies still deprive you of your privacy even without using their services by developing shadow profiles on you.

[deleted]

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#36

Post by tentacleuno »

dvt wrote: post #13

As someone that has spent a sizable amount of my career in ad products, the outrage here is kind of (sadly) funny. A conversion pixel? Hah, if you only had an idea of what the Facebook data faucet looked like in 2007-2017, your hairs would stand. Pretty sure they were breaking all kinds of PII laws.

The amount of client-side JavaScript code that inconspicuous Like button loads is unnerving.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#37

Post by wy35 »

arkitaip wrote: post #22
dvt wrote: post #13

As someone that has spent a sizable amount of my career in ad products, the outrage here is kind of (sadly) funny. A conversion pixel? Hah, if you only had an idea of what the Facebook data faucet looked like in 2007-2017, your hairs would stand. Pretty sure they were breaking all kinds of PII laws.

"I don't know why you are upset that I'm stabbing you when I've been poisoning your all these years ha ha ha".

Not really accurate analogy. More like “you’re only finding out today that I’ve been poisoning you the entire time?”

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#38

Post by notatoad »

Retric wrote: post #26
ipaddr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an image that loads from a different host. Neither of these companies will create a shell profile if you never visit them. If they are criminal why would you use them?

> If they are criminal why would you use them? People don’t give money to scammers because they know their scammers. It’s the same with privacy issues, people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.

>people who don’t know what’s happening can’t make informed choices.

it's really distasteful how privacy advocates always assume that everybody who doesn't feel the same way they do is uninformed. the average person has a basic understanding that companies keep track of them online. everybody who's spent more than five minutes online without an adblocker understands retargeting.

it's not that people don't understand, it's that they don't care. telling people they're not informed enough to make their own decisions isn't going to convince them to start caring about the issue you care about.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#39

Post by kmeisthax »

samwillis wrote: post #30
_fat_santa wrote: post #4

I'm no ads expert but my guess would be they run ads on TikTok and have the pixel on UberEats to figure out the conversion rate on those ads.

This is it and is how the online advertising industry has worked for over 25 years. In its simplest form the pixel is used to attribute an ad view/click to a conversion event. At the beginning of the online ad industry that’s all it did, advertisers for the first time had the ability to directly, in real time, see the effectiveness of their ads. The economic value and GDP generated due to this innovation is immeasura…

This is also why even Apple and Mozilla (companies with a vested interest in harming the ad ecosystem) are pushing for various privacy-preserving ad attribution technologies. Nobody objects to UberEats knowing that their Tiktok ads are working or not - they object to Tiktok cross-referencing the data from UberEats and everywhere else to build an interest profile on them.

Re: Why is there a TikTok tracking pixel on UberEats what is this crap?

#40

Post by Nextgrid »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
_8j50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This needs to be criminalized. Not liking a good or service is one thing. Having things done to you or your information without consent for the purpose of spying on you is stalking with extra steps. Many of these companies still deprive you of your privacy even without using their services by developing shadow profiles on you.

> This needs to be criminalized Literally criminalised? As in you’ll throw people in jail for putting up a pixel? Made illegal, sure.

Considering this is already illegal, at least under the GDPR and plenty of companies still do so, maybe jail isn't that bad of an idea after all?
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