Earlier quoted context omitted.
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How the hell did you get from DNT headers to russia-ukraine?
It helps to have an agenda.
Who wants to be tracked?
151–160 of 273 posts
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#152Earlier 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.
Yeah so I run/build/maintain a platform in the public survey space and we have a feedback box for users at the end. This box is a really good source for feedback, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the feedback is "When I hit the button, nothing happens" or "Totally broken, completely unusable" both of which are useless to us. These users clearly want us to fix something, but we have no visibility on what that is.
I'm 85% sure the problem they have is a problem you can't fix.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#15394% don't want tracking... and the remainder 6% of responses can be attributed to the lizardman constant https://gwern.net/note/lizardman
I wonder what percentages you'd get if you asked "do you want to eat for free at every restaurant?"
My guess is about the same 94% / 6%. But I'm not sure it's the 6% that represents lizardman.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the most popular browser is made by an AdTech company
To be fair, I think it was Microsoft who killed the DNT header by enabling it by default.
Enabling it by default was objectively the right thing to do. Blaming Microsoft for its death is, in my opinion, incorrect. The ad companies were never going to allow it to be honored.
The thing that killed DNT was making honoring it optional in the first place.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#155I 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 cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.
Users coming back more often does not imply that they are happy. There’s no substitute for actual user studies.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like like being issued a state mandated always online tracker and then police would say verbally that they promise not to abuse that data. And before people would nitpick my comment, metadata is surveillance. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/metadata_equa...
I bet HN keeps server logs; would you say you're being surveilled by viewing this page and posting that comment? If not, why not? What's the difference between that metadata and any other?
Surveillance is a deliberate action. If some incidental metadata is temporarily stored at HN and then evicted and deleted permanently in reasonable timeframes then it is not a surveillance. But as soon as it's analyzed, and/or specifically stored for prolonged periods, and/or unnecessary metadata is collected (not required for basic tech support and server administration), and/or linked to the user profiles more than needed to save and display our posts - then it's surveillance.
If I passed by your house and saw you walking your dog at 10:34 18/05/2023 and then promptly forgot about it, it is not a surveillance. If I set up a permanent observation post across the road from your door and will tail you daily everywhere you go - it's a surveillance. Even if I pinky promise that it is my own internal information and I would not share it, sell it, exchange it etc.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#157Better 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…
I think it makes sense to roll your own analytics stack using first party cookies, but OP went a little bit overboard by removing all tracking cookies altogether.
The problem is that pool is getting increasingly poisoned. Websites are increasingly hosting third-party analytics and advertising tracker scripts on their own sites in order to evade people who are trying to avoid them.
This is making it much less acceptable to allow first-party cookies and scripts.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I think it was Microsoft who killed the DNT header by enabling it by default.
Given a boolean flag, if 94% of users would select state X, then selecting X by default doesn't seem problematic at all. Microsoft (for once) did nothing wrong. The problem is the DNT flag was unenforceable, and that's something governments should have pushed on.
DNT is literally the nice bit, the symmetric of the evil bit.
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
But hey, clicking those "reject all" (when you can at all) does not guarantee a bad actor would comply with one's wishes either.
GDPR has had every bit correct _technically_ (needs zero dialog if one doesn't track), but it could only work if these actors were honest. It turns out it reveals how bad they are.
I suppose the only thing that could possibly work is legislation that would guarantee these bad actors to be sued to oblivion + burden of proof on them that they don't track.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#159FTA: > “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…
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Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#160I 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'm not saying it's easy or perfect, but Wikipedia does tracker-less analytics, and yet still produces https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects .
We do use cookies for part of the analysis, but they're not unique user-tracking cookies. Instead there's one that simply tracks a self-reported datestamp on when the user last visited, which looks something like:
WMF-Last-Access=2023-01-01,Expires=Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMT
(we send a Set-Cookie for this with the current datestamp only to the 1-day accuracy, which expires ~32 days after it's set (but rounded to 12-hour accuracy), and is replaced constantly).
There's another more-recent one we use that's explicitly about differential privacy, which send back info on the hashes of the 10 most recent URLs you've visited on the site, IIRC. None of them are unique tracker hashes for a given user, though.