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Comment by yashap | Hacker News Reader

I get the sentiment, but wouldn’t this apply to something as simple and fundamental to the web as including an image that I don’t host on my webpage? The 3rd party hosting that image could be collecting a decent amount of data about people accessing it - I really have no idea what they’re doing, or any way to verify it.

This ruling feels poorly thought out to me. Activities on the web aren’t totally private, that’s how it’s always been. Getting rid of 3rd party content makes it ... kind of not the web anymore.

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That's a very D&D Rulebook type interpretation :). Not that rulings should be ambiguous, but usually some common sense can be applied (and is expected to be reasonably applied).

The Facebook like button is a web tracker, disguised as a social engagement button. If not its primary -, then its secondary function is to (indiscriminately) track users and non-users outside of its walled garden, like some reversed Trojan Horse.

Hotlinking an image is just that: hotlinking an image. Facebook relies on us and lawmakers to say: "We just can't ban third party content!", while we perfectly could leave innocent third party content alone, and focus our sights on the spy button. It isn't reasonable, nor common sense to conflate the two: even if similar in syntax, the context is vastly different.

> That's a very D&D Rulebook type interpretation :). Not that rulings should be ambiguous, but usually some common sense can be applied (and is expected to be reasonably applied).

You can't build a business on assumptions made on an ambiguous ruling. And while common sense seems reasonable there it has no definition. Why should investors take the risk?

Lots of businesses, investor-backed and otherwise, currently operate within the “frontier areas” of the law. Some of them step a little too far and get whacked, others stay in the gray area for decades making money. Legal due diligence is not about guaranteeing 100% you’re above board. It’s about weighing the risks.

Do you realise that most tracking products including Google Analytics was/is built around hotlinking an image?

An image served from a third party server can very much have a secondary function to track users.

Yup. And Google Analytics should (and I believe already has) be treated similarly to a tracking beacon.

> Getting rid of 3rd party content makes it ... kind of not the web anymore.

This is what the web used to be like, every site hosted it's own content and the only third party content was typically limited to ads. Embedding third party content was considered a dick move at best, illegal at worst and larger sites would frequently block deep linking or being embedded in frames/iframes. Third party hosting only became prevalent when the web became bloated javascript.

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