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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

If you think Google and Facebook are the only companies doing this on the internet, you're in a for a huge shock. There are tons of companies that do this without providing any service for you.

Recall a recent story on HN about Exactis leaking data on 100s of millions of people? That's just one of them, and until the breach almost nobody had ever heard of them.

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True. Basically, every time you get an annoying GDPR popup, you've found someone complicit.

That's a stretch. I worked on GDPR compliance and it wasn't because of anything underhanded or nefarious. Just had to comply with new regulations.

If you need a popup you are complicit. In that case it's very likely you are spewing my personal data to third parties.

It's the law! I'm not sure how you don't get that. People have to get explicit consent to Terms of Service and marketing. If you don't understand that times change and companies have to adapt to follow the law (with a popup modal of all things gasp) then I'm not sure what to tell ya. Good luck with that mindset.

Arguably though that's just a level of indirection though, isn't it?

Ie, I assume most of the sites I visit track me for advertising purposes. This is no different than Google, it's just that with Google I expect the developers of the tracking to be Google directly. With the NewYorkTimes or w/e I don't expect them to be doing it. I expect some random 3rd party to be doing all the real tracking.

Now I know nothing about Exactis, but I'd wager (perhaps incorrectly) that their product is directly related to a product I was consuming, such as written news content or w/e.

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