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Comment by laythea | Hacker News Reader

I hate all these user spying tools, whether home grown or bought in. Please, if you write software, don't do it.

Just let us buy the software and run it. Like in the good old days.

This is an important sentiment that I want to respond to. Because on one level, I absolutely agree. But the nature of the web is different. HTTP is not software that you "buy and run". It's a back and forth communication, request / response.

Analytics in this context is a kind of self-awareness. I'm not spying on you the user, I'm listening to our conversation, so that I can improve where I make mistakes, and help serve you, the customer/user/visitor better.

Now if I stick a cookie in your pocket that keeps listening after you've left, or I let 3rd parties listen in to our conversation, then absolutely, that's spying.

I don't see anything wrong with keeping track of how users interact with your site in aggregate. It helps you improve it.

Where is the distinction between spying on a user using a piece of traditional software and a web site. At the end of the day, you are spying on users to better yourself and sometimes at the cost of the user, who mostly is not aware of the manipulation that goes on. Sorry for the cynicism, but that is the reality.

First-party analytics is like blocking people in face masks entering a store, using security cameras or counting daily visitors. Your "cynicism" is more Luddide-ism.

As with physical venues that employ analytics, you can easily just not visit those sites that want to know a bit more about how people consume content than seeing "GET /page.html" in HTTP logs.

I'm writing this text to you as a huge free-software proponent so I'm not a "corporate shill" when I say analytics are really useful even to the most privacy-respecting pieces of software, it allows to spend resources much more effectively than making blind decisions about what users want - the vocal users opening GH issues about things are the 0.01% and those people shouldn't be the ones people building webpages, -services make decisions upon.

When any normal person visits a store they can see the security cameras watching, and they can likely image that they may be counted.

It is not accurate to say that it is like that the average person who goes to a web site is even in the slightest aware of all the different ways in which they are being used.

Just like when entering a store visiting a webpage implies already that the thing your visiting does not belong to you, that the content there is not yours, the door might be counting visitors and to dissuade thieves from stealing there most likely are CCTV cameras. If you do not agree with that, don't enter the store or visit the web page, it's that simple. It is not accurate to say that someone else's ignorance is a reason alone not to do something that in the end will benefit both you and maybe other customers.

We need a more nuanced conversation that "spying tools".

Developers creating software should see that 80% of people can't finish filling in a form or that 80% of people click on something that isn't supposed to be clickable. That way they can identify UX bugs and improve the product.

Sure, asking users to opt-in to telemetry for improving the product is a best practice.

Are developers trying to improve the product, or are you just collecting data to sell to 3rd parties? Big difference.

"Are developers trying to improve the product, or are you just collecting data to sell to 3rd parties?"

Problem is, there is no way to know or properly police this.

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