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Who wants to be tracked?

quantable.com

121–130 of 273 posts

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#121
post #44
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think so? I’ve seen a lot of good come from it.

IMO the only good thing is it made people aware of what's happening with their data online. But then we are still tracked, the web experience is much worse, SMEs got another "screw you" from the regulator by increasing their operating costs to comply with this and big companies who were to blame for this in the first place found ways to bypass it because they have access to strong legal expertise.

I think the GDPR creates benefits in more areas than you may be aware of.

For example I used to work for a hosting provider. An admin noticed that one of the hosted customers had customer data exposed to the internet without a password. Due to the GDPR he was forced to contact the customer about it, or our company could be held responsible (since we knew about it).

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#122
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR is the law which at least gave us these prompts. Before that there was no rules for consent, they would just track you.

There was a law just for cookies before. And no, companies don’t need to put up these prompts, IF they don’t do any UNNECESSARY tracking.

I'm with you, these prompts are garbage. But they are better than no prompts, because companies are greedy af and they will track. Fixing that is a much larger issue than the bandaid of law.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#123
post #15

I have switched one of my sites to cookieless analytics and it is bad for everybody. I can't even say how many users this site has now. It could be the same user coming back over and over. Or many users. How would I know. Yes, I could track a ton of stats about every pageview like user agent, screen resolution etc and then try to stitch it back together. Trying to figure out how many different users there are. But th…

My violin is probably small-medium sized for this problem. You can talk to your users in person and ask them, or poll them via email. Do usability tests etc. I guess it just costs more. Other industries have to do this, they can't just default-spy on their customers.

> or poll them via email

Marketing survey emails are infinitely more annoying than cookies.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My violin is probably small-medium sized for this problem. You can talk to your users in person and ask them, or poll them via email. Do usability tests etc. I guess it just costs more. Other industries have to do this, they can't just default-spy on their customers.

Have you ever actually responded to an email poll and not just unsubscribe/block the emails?

Yes

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#125
post #115

Does someone know why it is legal that in some countries websites are allowed to offer layers that offer a paid version and a tracking enabled version (very popular among newspapers)? As far as I understand the GDPR, there should be no downside to rejecting the tracking technologies. And Websites relying on advertising, could do so with unpersonalized ads (granted with very different metrics). Nevertheless, to me it…

You mustn't reject service based on refusal of non-legitimate-reason data processing consent. Allowing paying to not have ads is orthogonal to the service being provided - in both cases the user gets the news, it's just flanked by ads in one case.

Well, I don't have a problem with the paid version. What I have have a problem with, is the refusal of service if I don't consent to being tracked. So if there would be three versions, like 'personalized ads with tracking', 'tracking-free/unpersonalized ads' and 'paid ad-free', that would be fine with me.

What I don't understand, is that it is okay to refuse the service if you don't consent for the ad-supported tracking version. I mean, not giving your consent, means you have to pay if you want to use the service. Doesn't feel like you have a free choice (pun intended).

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#126

Better question here is, why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it. Block third party cookies by default, delete other cookies on the last tab or window closed and prompt user to save cookies on a form submit ("do not delete cookies for this domain when leaving" type of prompt, for pages with logins, settings, etc). Also remove features that make easy fingerprintin…

> why is this not handled through the browser

Did you forgot what happened the last time 'the browser was handling it'? I would remind you: Internet Explorer, Do Not Track.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you dont need to get the original ip back, just need to know how many unique ips are there, so sha(ip) is good enough

With little over 4 billion IPv4 addresses. From a stackoverflow post from 12 years ago: > I know I do 622 million SHA-256's per sec on a Radeon HD5830. Which would take around 6 seconds to brute force a 32bit address space.

you can just salt it with some stable random thing

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#129
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can talk to your users in person and ask them doesn't scale. > poll them via email doesn't work. > default-spy on their customers analytics is not spying.

>doesn’t scale Yes it does. Have you never heard of a survey? >doesn’t work It absolutely can. For instance, polling via newsletter is rather effective. >analytics is not spying. If it contains any personally identifiable information that is not required by law, then yes. Yes it fucking is.

I'm not in agreement with the top comment's cookie needs, but no. Surveys are not comparable to using analytics/tracking to determine user behavior.

Surveys measure what people say and are sporadically filled out. Cookies measure what people do with granularity and accuracy and will have near 100% coverage.

People aren't concerned about spying via survey because they're not even in the same realm of effectiveness.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#130
post #15

I have switched one of my sites to cookieless analytics and it is bad for everybody. I can't even say how many users this site has now. It could be the same user coming back over and over. Or many users. How would I know. Yes, I could track a ton of stats about every pageview like user agent, screen resolution etc and then try to stitch it back together. Trying to figure out how many different users there are. But th…

This is all bullshit. We literally did this sort of thing for years on the Internet before all of this tracking was common.

Every company claims that they are doing this stuff to make things better for users, and it never is.

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