Unsanctioned Web Tracking

We get lumped in with super questionable networks in tools like Adblock and Ghostery and I have to explain to people when I tell them that I work in analytics that we aren't evil because the default assumption is more and more becoming that analytics and ads are all doing shady things. That sucks. I wish there was a way to combat unsanctioned tracking without diminishing the value that legitimate, and user controlled, tracking and attribution tools provide.

As long as people are willing to do anything to squeeze out more money or beat their competition, questionable techniques will find their way into the market, and that's bad for us all :(

That still doesn't solve all the political dealings that happen but it would be a good strong start to cleaning up a lot.

However (and without revealing too much about specific IP), there are various mathematical techniques that can be used to discuss the privacy disclosing properties of queries against a set of data and ways in which you can force the data to be both fuzzy and self-destructing.

The reality is that customers (rightly) won't see a difference between analytics companies until one of them actually puts their money where their mouth is on privacy, and removes personal data from being an asset than can be sold or combined later (both by limiting number of queries to prevent reconstruction and with fuzzing applied to prevent over-targeting).

For those looking for some technical details: I work at a marketing company (we're early stage start-up, so I don't want to name names, as we're not really ready for attention), and we're currently in the process of developing a technology which fuses the research in to what questions you can ask of a database (and how many) before the privacy is depleted with non-fully-homomorphic encryption, which destabilizes after a period of time. This approach will let us build containers which homomorphically process data, and decay in a number of questions less than the number which would deplete the privacy of the data in the container. (For various reasons, operating in homomorphic space gives you increasingly fuzzy answers the more questions you ask, and thus you cross a probability bound on your answer being useless near when the privacy is depleted.)

While this isn't perfect, since you still need to trust that we're both a) not storing the base keys and b) did our math/implementation correctly, it's a substantial improvement over the trust asked for by marketing companies now. (Especially since contracts could require us to do those things fairly easily, thus exposing us to breach of contract if we failed to. Once those actions are properly completed, there's no taking them back, so our technology mainly protects the case of "We're the good guys now, but tomorrow is a different day".)

This is something everyone should be encouraging - unfortunately, browser vendors seem to be slowly removing and/or making more opaque any configurability, in the name of "simplicity". I agree it certainly is simpler to not think about web tracking or privacy at all, but perhaps these are things worth thinking about.