Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who wants to be tracked?

quantable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 273 posts

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#141

Post by GordonS »

pydry wrote: post #77
kmlx wrote: 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.

You can poll them via pop ups. Ive seen this done a couple of times. The sites took care to make it unobtrusive, sensibly placed and with short, meaningful questions. Frankly I think the data they got drove better decisions than analytics. I liked that they let you write a message too.

I like this method. Earlier today I filled in some gov forms online, and at the end it asked if I'd like to do a short survey on my experience - I was happy to oblige, because I have a personal interest in service improvement.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#142

Post by aidenn0 »

titzer wrote: post #138

FTA: > “We value your privacy…” There's a special place in hell for the originators of this Orwellian triple-speak. Three meanings overlapped: meant to give users the impression that "we respect your privacy" or "we protect your privacy"--but it doesn't say that. It says they value your privacy, which is literally true; they're happy to put a dollar amount on it and sell or mine it, because it's of value to them . Th…

As a rule, the more that marketing language tries to imply something, the less it is likely to be true.

See e.g. "fat free" labels on sugar-candy.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#143

Post by GordonS »

seri4l wrote: post #81
throwaway71271 wrote: post #70

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

I apologize for the double negative. What I meant is that hashing doesn't improve privacy because if you know the hash and the hashing function it's easy to build a hashmap of all the possible IPv4s (around 3.5B). Unless the hash uses some sort of expensive key derivation function, but that doesn't scale.

You could simply salt the hash, though you'd need to treat the salt as a secret.

Alternatively, you could use a new salt every day, which would only allow you to track an individual for a 24 hour period (likely enough for many).

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#144

Post by jobs_throwaway »

manicennui wrote: post #130
TekMol wrote: 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.

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

You mean back when your average website was hot garbage? The yearning for the days of static HTML pages is childish atavism

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#145

Post by vharuck »

kmlx wrote: post #37
quickthrower2 wrote: post #33

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.

> 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.

Much of the math behind surveys is based on finite samples taken from infinite populations. It scales really, really well. You just have to make sure your samples aren't totally biased, which is a little more difficult. But there are ways to reduce those problems, if you're aware of how the bias is introduced.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#146

Post by jobs_throwaway »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #88
kmlx wrote: 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.

> If it contains any personally identifiable information that is not required by law, then yes. Yes it fucking is.

wahwahwah

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#147

Post by vjk800 »

angio wrote: post #111
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better question here is, why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it. We had Do-Not-Track header once. Id did not play out very well.

Sometimes I wish GDPR included a clause stating that presence of the Do-Not-Track header equals to the user not giving consent.

Has this been tried in any courts? It could be argued that this is the case.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#148

Post by reportgunner »

TekMol wrote: 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…

> I can't even say how many users this site has now.

> I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.

> I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware, software, language. Because I wouldn't see if users affected come back less often.

> I can't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps users discover important features. Because I can't make the connection between showing the text early on in the user journey and usage of features later on. Because I can't see a user journey.

Why don't you just ask your users about these things ?

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#149

Post by toast0 »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #128
quesomaster9000 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In which case you can just take 6 seconds to generate all the new hashes and build a new lookup table.

Re: Who wants to be tracked?

#150

Post by jacobsimon »

manicennui wrote: post #130
TekMol wrote: 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.

Genuinely asking - what is the easiest method for doing this other than cookie tracking? I’m inclined to agree with the commenter above and it feels like a community of developers would sympathize with this but it seems like everyone is acting like it’s not a big deal.
Post reply on HN