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Comment by rosalinekarr | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised they weren't doing this already.

> “At one point I just ask him, ‘how’s the data science team at Reddit?’ And [Ohanian] said, ‘what data science team?’” Weiner recounts to me.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-cto-marty-weiner-on...

Seriously. Tons of sites do it with Clickrouter or something similar.

Gross, as a user of any site that is definitely a sign I should be leaving and not coming back.

But then again, a user of someone else's site, why would you think the people who run that site don't want to make sure they get the metrics that are relevant to them? If a large part of what makes your business works _is_ links, like reddit, having link metrics makes perfect sense. It's a bit of a shame you can't tell them you only want to opt into the statistics part, not the personalisation part (so: only geo-resolve the IP and then throw the IP away).

Saying you will never come back to a site that is literally doing the thing that allows them to understand their own business is super weird; it suggests you may not know, or never decided to look up, how many sites already mark which internal and outbound links you're clicking. After all, any site you're on can trivially check which links you click with a JavaScript one liner loaded on DOM completion that sends off a network even before the link is allowed to resolve (for instance: any websites that use google analytics, a free service for gathering site metrics)

Sites may only track users if they got explicit approval.

And transmitting that data into another country – as done with Google Analytics – is even more of a problem.

If a site does that, either I write a filter to prevent it from running any JS, or I’ll stop using it.

Do you check the js on every site when you click a link?

Of course not, people in this camp generally block javascript by default (because of its constant security and privacy violating problems)

Kinda. I allow JS to work locally on the site, but do not allow third-party JS, nor any access to third-party ressources from sites by default.

I've never blocked js because it breaks so much functionality. That could be a useful compromise.

You also obviously have to allow the standard CDNs and such, but the result is that 90% of the web then "just works", without most of the tracking or problems.

I dont care if they do or not, they should not do it. I definitely know and decide to look up the amount of sites that mark internal and outbound links I click, and its amusing to me that you think a person ignorant of this fact would also take this stance, they have no idea the amount of additional tracking the sites they use are imposing on them.

I run a site based on links, and I specifically do not make this intrusive choice. I am aware of google analytics and no, they cannot make that js roundtrip because I am also blocking js from loading from their site.

Do not assume ignorance on hacker news or you will appear ignorant yourself.

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