Hi! It me, the hapless nerd who goes, "Sites need this data to use analytics to improve their services."
Who wants to be tracked?
91–100 of 273 posts
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#92I 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…
For some reason my empathy-o-meter isn't really registering your plight. Look, the needle isn't budging, not even a bit.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is similar to law enforcement saying: "You mean we cannot track everything you say and do. How in the world are we supposed to do our jobs safely and efficiently?" Answer is, you basically can't. Not safely and not (as) efficiently. Because the world will turn dystopian and will destroy the very thing we are trying to create/maintain. (Happiness, etc) It's nice to be able to A/B test your blog or product. It's c…
The difference is that keeping cookies is a user choice. You can set your browser to not store cookies at all. Or to discard cookies when you close it. Or you can delete cookies whenever you feel like.
The problem is that there are good and bad cookies:
- session cookie: good
- tracking cookie: bad
I remember a time when browsers would ask you for every website if you wanted to keep the cookies and because most cookies were good cookies, everybody agreed to accept them. Later came the ad industry and started to introduce bad cookies.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#94I don't understand why we still don't have a standard for a built-in tracking preferences system in browsers. We have that for the microphone, webcam, and location access... why do we let websites control tracking preferences with their own design they can make as obscure and manipulative as they wish?
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
>hash the IP-address How would that work? I can't think of any approach where getting the original IP back from the hash isn't trivial.
?? sha256 the string and you are not going to be able to get back to the original from that output. Edit: The small amount of IP addresses makes it easy to brute force through all of them.
ipv4 space is very limited and you can easily compute all the hashes. There is salting and combined with rotating salts it could work but no one guarantees that you’re not storing them
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is similar to law enforcement saying: "You mean we cannot track everything you say and do. How in the world are we supposed to do our jobs safely and efficiently?" Answer is, you basically can't. Not safely and not (as) efficiently. Because the world will turn dystopian and will destroy the very thing we are trying to create/maintain. (Happiness, etc) It's nice to be able to A/B test your blog or product. It's c…
> it also hurts How is simple analytics or A/B testing that's NOT internet-wide tracking (that is, only for the website you're on) or sold (which would be outright illegal without explicit consent) hurting you? Genuine question, because I don't see it. Internet-wide tracking across many sites: sure. But that's a very different thing – it's the difference between "I'm home Darling, I saw Sander at the mall today" vs.…
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...
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
>hash the IP-address How would that work? I can't think of any approach where getting the original IP back from the hash isn't trivial.
?? sha256 the string and you are not going to be able to get back to the original from that output. Edit: The small amount of IP addresses makes it easy to brute force through all of them.
The hashing doesn’t matter when IPv4 has such a limited dataset. IPv4 has a little under 4.3B addresses, and a cheaper GPU such as the 1080TI has a hash rate of around 4300MH/s, so it crushes that in a few seconds at most.
From there, you have a direct correlation between the IP and its resulting hash. Meaning you can easily see what the original input was.
You don’t need to break a hash to know what the original input was.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#98I 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.
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.
Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#99Re: Who wants to be tracked?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the generic reason that is always given, but I don't think I've ever seen exactly how the service will be improved and why cookies (or any uniquely-identifying data) are the only way to achieve the desired outcomes.
I'm sorry, but have you tried making and hosting a website? Product Analytics is a very popular category for a reason.
Many, many times :)
My point is that it's never described. Even in the detailed options for those cookie banners that permit you to tweak things. Sure, there are (some) details about "our partners" and advertising etc, but exactly how the service will be improved is never explained.
The reason is simple and obvious: nobody knows. Companies collect data in the belief it will be useful in improving the service, but generally chuck it into a data-swamp and occasionally rake it over to extract basic info like navigation routes.
I'm also rarely convinced that improvements can't be better determined by focus groups and other similar methods.
"Improving our service" is a glib catch-all that rarely stands up to scrutiny.
There may be specific examples where a cookie is genuinely the best method to improve a feature -- in which case: name the feature, list the metrics, declare success/fail criteria, and stop collecting the cookie after the decision has been made.
Edit: typos.