Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was your company?
I'm going to put my guess in as Tivoli.
Yes
Who wants to be tracked?
241–250 of 273 posts
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> set up a permanent observation post across the road from your door and will tail you daily everywhere you go
But I don't really see how that is happening here? I agree that would be bad, but merely checking "a user visited my website" is a very thing than seeing what someone does all over the interwebz. It's very questionable this minimum of information can even be tracked to you when done right.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#243Better 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…
Firefox lets you set "strict tracking protection". The settings page warns you that "some sites may break". Some sites whine about this, usually using "Admiral" to check for cookie blocking. Most of those aren't worth visiting anyway.
There's also Privacy Badger, from the EFF. This turned up that the "Who wants to be tracked" site is using "plausible.io" to track visitors.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and it is bad for everybody Hang on, it's not bad for me . If I visit your site, it's not because I want to participate in some kind of A/B testing (whose results you'll never tell me about). And if your site only works if I happen to have hardware X installed, you don't need analytics to tell you that your site is broken. > European companies need to bug all users and beg for cookies. That's nonsense. If cookies a…
> If I visit your site, it's not because I want to participate in some kind of A/B testing Nobody wants to be part of the A/B testing; everyone wants the polished product that's the result of A/B testing. > And if your site only works if I happen to have hardware X installed, you don't need analytics to tell you that your site is broken. What? Yes you do, or something similar. > If cookies are needed for the correct…
A/B testing is the reason why websites get “optimized” for the wrong target values, typically “engagement”. It’s what drives the enshittification of the web. It’s not what users want.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#245I 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…
You could ask people! There is hardly a site I use day to day that I couldn't send a ten paragraph rant about poor usability to the company, if that was socially permissible and felt like they'd care. There's hardly a site I use where I think the developers have ever used it themselves, or ever seen someone trying to use it, for that matter.
> "Because I can't see a user journey."
Today's worst offender was trying to follow an invite and register an account within a company account, it took me two goes through the signup form, two attempts to edit my profile, trying to login to three different subdomains, one useless search of their documentation site, three error messages, two rounds of asking my coworker to check their admin side, before I saw the right thing to do. "You" (big silicon valley company) don't need tracking cookies to "see a user journey" or to tell you that "I really love your site because I keep coming back to it and looking around", you need to grab someone in a hallway and push them through the workflow and watch them fall on their face over and over.
> "I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10% in user experience can tank the business"
Imagine how amazing websites would be if that were at all true. Have you seen the user experience of Amazon? or eBay? or Facebook? or 'new' GMail or new Reddit or non-websites like Teams or WebEx?
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, it seems like sites that offer content without a subscription keep trying to show ads (which nobody buys untargeted because they’d be a massive waste of money). It implies that the content needs to be paid for - and that’s why they’re not all just taking a polite “no” and giving up on it.
And if you believe that Internet ads could be just as scattershot as the Bud Light, Coke, and Toyota spots on TV, consider how much of the Internet ad market is niche stuff you’d never see on TV ads because they couldn’t afford it. Consider every SaaS product: they don’t advertise on TV because their target customer is too niche. Probably 75% of ad dollars would simply not be there without targeting. People choose over and over again to get content for free, and then complain about it because everyone loves to complain. No one loves opening their wallet.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Local Storage? Cookies are just a Dumb Implementation and only persist due to advertising.
GDPR is about tracking, not about cookies.
GDPR isn't "about tracking", it isn't even about computers, it's General data protection regulation. If your local grocer keeps a regular customer's record on paper to give you discounts, that's covered by the GDPR.
See the UK Gov summary site here: https://www.gov.uk/data-protection
Or detailed law here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents/enacte...
And note Part 1 section 3 points 4 and 7: "'Processing', in relation to information, means an operation or set of operations which is performed on information, or on sets of information, such as— (a)collection, recording, organisation, structuring or storage" and "“Filing system” means any structured set of personal data which is accessible according to specific criteria, whether held by automated means or manually".
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#248Earlier 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.
How would that change anything?
DNT = no consent, no DNT = no consent
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not too sensitive. All of us get annoyed at things we have to constantly reiterate. At least that other user revealed their insanity after they kept talking. Literally explaining why you could never have known, despite claiming you should have "thought harder." Don't feel guilty, you're not the one with the evil idea. We should, of course think long (and sometimes evil), but it's impossible to predict what others wil…
"but it's impossible to predict what others will use your tech for." I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a war (with unrestrained city bombing from all sides going on), don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked with it and people point the finger also towards you. But a general purpose lightweight distributed storage technology? Seriously no, then you can also blame hard drive producers for…
>> but it's impossible to predict what others will use your tech for.
> I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a war , don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked with it and people point the finger also towards you.
You forgot the first part of the sentence you quoted.
>> We should, of course, think long (and sometimes evil)
My intention is to say that you can't do an exhaustive search and it shouldn't be expected. What's obvious to some isn't to others. This doesn't mean we can just go along without concern for morals. As scientists/researchers/inventors/developers we must think ahead (and evil). But it is like viewing history from a modern lens. We have knowledge we didn't back then and judgement about intent should come from the view of the time. (This also doesn't mean we can't look back at history and see "normal" things that people did as horrific. These are different things)
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#250My spouse will sometimes mention in conversation with others that I invented the cookie. This always puts me on the spot, and I have to enter into a long explanation of the what and the why of cookies least they believe that I some sort of evil software hacker. (Now for a short explanation so that HN readers don’t think that I’m an evil hacker: I invented them, with the help of a colleague, while at IBM where we were…
Many of us remember when cookies were purely a utility-add for end users and were restricted only to the domain which set them. Thanks for inventing that.
Who can take credit for lifting that restriction.
Some popular browsers are supposedly "open source" yet it appears no browser user longing for saner times has ever tried reversed this change and recompiling the browser for their own use. No third party cookies by default.
The most fascinating thing IMO about so-called "modern" browsers is that even when their vendors publish source code, "99.9%" of people will not even attempt to make changes, even something as simple as changing a default from "on" to "off". It's like the software is stamped with "Read Only" or "Do Not Touch" and "99.9%" of people dutifully obey. The "0.1%" appear to be very conservative with the changes they make.
For example, if it was possible to disable auto-loading of resources, I might actually use these "modern" graphical browsers for tasks other than commercially-oriented transactions. Cookies are only one problem with these browsers.