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Comment by morningmoon | Hacker News Reader

How many people here track their users? How many people here track where their users come from, what they click on, who they are, etc?

The constant articles deriding Facebook ring hollow considering most of HN’s audience is engaged in similar behavior.

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There’s a very large difference between:

- Tracking the behavior of your own users on your own app, for product improvement purposes (which most users will expect)

- Sending the behavior of your own users on your app to an advertising surveillance company, with an ID that can be used to correlate that behavior with behavior elsewhere, without their knowledge, consent, or reasonable expectation

And before anyone says it, no, a generic line about third-party service partners in a sadistically long TOS/Privacy-policy does not count as meaningful consent. Even Supreme Court justices admit that they don’t read them.

> Tracking the behavior of your own users on your own app, for product improvement purposes (which most users will expect)

Depends. I think it's clear that users do not expect you to record their session, even though it's tracking behavior for product improvement.

I'm not too up to date on the news, but isn't FB building a shadow profile of everyone?

So even if you're not a user, you get tracked and your data gets sold. That to me was a step too far, and got me to really scale back what I share on the Internet.

They don't have shadow profiles. That was FUD spread by the news, and articles like the one we're commenting on now that constantly get voted up to the front page.

Here's Facebook's post explaining what they collect for people who haven't registered: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/data-off-facebook/

TLDR: They collect what Google and all the analytics and ad-network companies collect, in order to target ads, along with incidental "user data" like IP address, etc.

> How many people here track their users?

Right across the Internet? Very few, I imagine!

> Right across the Internet? Very few, I imagine!

Mainly because they don't have the resources to do it.

I'd like to think plenty of folk here would have ethical objections, too. Perhaps that's wishful thinking.

It's easy to object to something you can't do. I'm sure there's a decent amount of people who would maintain their objections, but many others would "evolve their values" when such behavior became possible and beneficial to them.

I wouldn't do it regardless of resources, because I'm not a sociopath.

Everyone using Google Analytics is letting a third party track their users across the Internet for the DoubleClick ad network.

https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1101402001907372032

This is a pretty annoying part.

This just means that people who already know your phone number and are already your Facebook friend will see your profile if they search for your phone number. That seems pretty harmless to me.

Not to me, for a bunch of reasons -- starting with the fact that it assumes that the phone # you use for 2FA (which nobody should be doing anyway) is the phone # you want people to contact you through.

If lots of people, or very few, do it would that change the ethics?

Speak for yourself! I'm using Piwik but it's not giving me that kind of information.

Why would you defend Facebook with a Tu Quoque?

I'm not defending Facebook. I'm not responding to a logical argument, therefore I'm not committing a logical fallacy. Whether someone believes user tracking is unethical or not is a value judgement, it can't be proven true or not true.

Consider the possibility that there are legitimate cases for limited tracking.

Maybe the scale, motivation and intent matter.

No, those don't matter in my view. The only thing that matters is if the people you're tracking have given you their informed consent to be tracked. If they haven't, then it's simply wrong.

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