Even Privacy Advocates Are Tracking You Online | Hacker News Reader

Even Privacy Advocates Are Tracking You Online

bloomberg.com

22 pointsEurongreyjoy11 comments

The article is about an organization called Californians for Consumer Privacy. They use Google and Facebook trackers. The key quote is this:

“The irony of criticizing Facebook and Google whilst using their services is not lost on us, but this gets back to our rationale for the initiative: Californians should be able to use these services and be secure that their personal information is not being sold. Right now this is not possible,...We end up with this Faustian bargain,”

Which doesn't really ring true. To me it sounds like the founder doesn't have a technical background, probably contracted out development of the site, and just went with "whatever they normally do". Because... come on... it's not that hard to get stats on users without passing the info over to Google/Facebook. Certainly not hard to get enough stats to run an effective campaign.

Clickbait title indeed, one organization doesn't mean all of them do this. That'd require an investigation (ie. real journalism) which this article so thoroughly lacks as the content can be summed up in two sentences. Sadly a sign of time.

The stats from Google are pretty sophisticated. But let's assume you're right. So what? Should only engineers be able to weigh in? Do I need to get a degree in chemistry before I can object to things getting dumped into drinking water?

No, but I'd expect you not to dump chemicals in drinking water yourself?

Personally, I feel it would be better to have people with more technical competence involved in the campaign, because it looks a bit sloppy aside from anything else.

I suppose I see this as more akin to driving a car while arguing for more restrictions on carbon emissions.

I'm not sure what the case is with these advocates, but in the nonprofit world a lot of times Google Analytics is used to determine what appeals are most effective or what pages people spend time on and it would be difficult to duplicate the sophistication of the tool. To me this is a little different than selling your data to advertisers.

You proposed the initial analogy, so I was responding to that.

Determining which appeals/email/campaigns are most effective is pretty trivial with open source tools, you don't need Google for this. Honestly part of the reason Google analytics is so successful is not because it's much better than anything else, it's because it's the de facto standard, and free, and people don't see an advantage to using anything else. The advantage to using something else (ideally self hosted, or at least that you're paying for) should be clear to a privacy advocate.

So what would you recommend instead?

Is content based advertising such an ineffective thing that we _need_ individually targeted advertising powered by trackers?

Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers. Anyone going to Gizmodo gets the same ads for tech gadgets, maybe even refined by article. Etc, like the pre-internet days.

Maybe you think the ads are irrelevant and want the "better experience" that Google and FB profess, then you get to opt-in to tracking for refined ads. Maybe we can even have fine grained controls over the data/advertising such that we can control our privacy or that one weird search we did doesn't stalk us for months/years later.

edit: I would be so ok with this business model that as long as the content based ads of a given website respect my attention and security I would actually whitelist that website.

Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers.

I can see a case where tracking might be useful: if my previous search was for "drums", and "leaf springs" before that, maybe I'm looking for brakes for an old truck, not sneakers.

But I'd much rather have the organic results than an ad anyway, modulo SEO spam.

Isn't it the same as complaining about groups, that are against private funding of politicians election campaigns, giving money to politicians in order to change that system? It rings a bit hollow.

The nature of the internet makes online tracking and the minimization of user privacy a natural progression of where things inevitably head. We do, for the most part, live in a capitalistic world. The irony of a privacy advocacy group using the exact tech they’re supposed to advocate against reminds me of the argument for transparency: “Works, but only for the other guy please.”

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