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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I hate this data tracking as much as everyone else here, but is this really a surprise to anyone? I used to put Google Analytics on my blog, and I thought most of the people here were pretty aware of how gigantic the Facebook advertising claws stretched.

I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability. Targeted ads perform better, and you cannot expect these giant megacorporations to act ethically when it will cut into their profits and while they're technically not violating any laws.

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The ad-networks will always try to take extra value regardless of dependence. Ads exist on paid services. My Economist subscription requires me to swipe away Oracle ads. The last flight I was on tried to sign me up for a credit card. No matter what a customer pays, there will always be a temptation to make a bit more money by showing an ad.

Ads will exist until people are empowered to block them.

I think this is the same concept as how people will gravitate in a city to have the worst possible commute they can bear because most people value having a nice home and a nice job over a nice commute. In a similar way services will inevitably be crammed with ads until it starts to negatively affect profits, because people value the content and publishers value money more than either value an ad-free experience.

To stretch the analogy, ad blockers are people who drive in the HOV lane without paying. It isn't so bad that you do it, but if everyone did it the system would break. I personally block ads out of principle because I believe we can transition to a micropayment model and blocking ads forces the issue.

That being said, can anything really ever save us from ads? From my logic in the first paragraph, Patreon et al will eventually be as ad-infested as anything else. Maybe the fundamental answer is to consume less content.

They will also continue to exist because we have been conditioned that the whole internet will cease to exist without them and that ad blocking is "stealing" which is immoral and wrong.

Ad blocking is immoral and wrong. Loading a website with ads has an implicit agreement: I will give you my product (website content) if, in exchange, you agree load these ads.

If you don't want to see ads on a given site, your moral option is to stop visiting the site.

Glad we finally resolved that once and for all. /s

No it is not. It is my browser, coming into my house. Prove to me you are not doing something creepy with the data, being annoying, and providing value back in your ads and I will decide to quit blocking you.

What about setting my hostfile to block sites that are known to track me? I'm not explicitly "blocking ads", just "blocking tracking", but a side-effect of this will invariably be that ads are blocked? Is it immoral?

An implicit agreement isn't an agreement at all. there were no terms, was no negotiation, just an expectation projected by the website creator.

The problem isn't ads. The problem is the stock market. Investors want to see growth every quarter or they punish the company. If your business is making money from ads, you have to increase impressions. At first you can put in more ads. But there's a limit. So, next you move to targeted ads. The overwhelming shadiness to all this is a direct result of investors not seeing past this quarter.

Want to see less intrusive business practices? Get rid of quarterly earnings reports.

'Surprise' shouldn't be the standard required to bring it up, otherwise challenging and changing the status quo wouldn't be possible.

I don't disagree, except the title of the blog post began with "Guess What?", kind of implying new information.

In American English, "guess what" is often used in a somewhat 'sarcastic' manner. Used before expressing annoyance with a continued state of affairs.

Example:

> "Guess what, Jimbo 'forgot' to pay his share of the rent again.

It's a "surprise" only to the extent that Facebook's leaders have been hauled before Congress and promised under oath they value privacy. Or something like that. The insidious thing here is: to the layperson, Facebook has promised to the government to play by some rules, so they must not be doing anything too harmful, or else they'd be in trouble.

> I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability.
It's not just the internet. Every industry that sells anything uses direct marketing, and that requires collecting information about people. Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Target famously predicted a teenage girl was pregnant before her father even found out. They did it by tracking and analyzing her purchases, not by digging into data from Facebook. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...)
Privacy violation is a symptom, but the cause is capitalists trying to sell as much crap as humanly possible. I'm honestly surprised there isn't an app that pays you to tell advertisers about your friends.

Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Sort of. There is an acceptable amount of tracking.
For hundreds of years billboard, newspaper, television, and radio advertisers tracked if their ads were working by measuring sales. That was acceptable.
Facebook and Google trying to watch my every move is not acceptable.

It's not only ads, every AB test you run needs tracking user data

> I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability.
I believe that ad networks as they currently exist are actively destroying the internet.

but is this really a surprise to anyone?
Please don't do this.

> I used to put Google Analytics on my blog
Have you found a viable alternative or removed analytics from your blog altogether?

I use Heap Analytics. I get all of the analytics I want, but they aren’t selling the analytics data to advertisers.

Not the parent, but I switched to Matomo (https://matomo.org/ - previously known as Piwik) and have been quite happy with it.

Server-side, goaccess is pretty rudimentary, but it works really well for me.

Not OP, but personally I removed it and don't miss it. But then I'm not trying to monetise everything, so analytics seem more about the ego boost in retrospect. A bit shameful I was willing to compromise my readers' privacy for that.
Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.

I think I will resort to looking at the Apache access logs.
I just want to know the number of daily unique visitors and where they are located (geographically).

In my particular case, I realized I really didn't care about traffic stats with any kind of intimate detail, so I just wrote a thing that tagged the user with a cookie and sent a POST to my site with JS, but even then I eventually just gave up and decided that I really have no interest in the analytics since I really don't have any plans of trying to monetize my blog.

Personally, I just analyze my web server logs to get this data.

>while they're technically not violating any laws.
May you elaborate on that?

As far as I know, Facebook isn't doing anything directly illegal with all this data tracking, and as a consequence there really is no incentive for them to stop. If they were violating a law, we could charge and/or sue the people involved and it would (theoretically) stop.

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