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Comment by varshithr | Hacker News Reader

Can tracking be useful, if used correctly?

Yes. Google search is infinitely more useful when mildly personalised rather than based on sheer popularity. If I search for drainage companies, I don't care who the most popular drainage company in the world is, ad it's highly likely to be weighted towards somewhere more populous. When I look at reviews for services, tracking can be used by Google and co to attempt to verify that the person who left a 5* review actually used the service and wasn't an employee, or that the 1* review isn't from a competitor.

Ease of use is another, albeit less clear cut. If Ticketmaster knows I like heavy metal, they don't need to send me newsletters (that I opt in to manually of course) telling me about the upcoming country music gigs.

To be clear, I don't think that the current players are being useful to me as a consumer, they are abusing my data, but that's not to say that there is no use for tracking or personalisation,

> Google search is infinitely more useful

I can definitely see how it could be more useful, but I don’t agree that the actual factor of this increase in productivity is infinite. Maybe a factor of 3 to 5.

Having used duckduckgo for a few years, which does not personalize results by default, I don't think it's even that much. More like, a factor of 3-5 on select searches and not at all (occasionally even negative) on others.

I thought it was fairly clear that I was being hyperbolic. I don't see how you would decide what that factor actually is, but to me, anonymised results across the population of gogoele search are often going to be useless, so if the addition of any metadata gives them any use whatsoever, then it's infinitely useful than a completely useless query.

That said, you're arguing semantics about the relative worth of the results, even if it is a factor of 5, that is more useful, and the answer to OPs question of is tracking useful is "yes".

I appreciate your rather lengthy rebuttal to my rather trivial retort.

Tracking in this context involves cross-organizational sharing of user information, usually information behavior in particular. So it isn't that Google has my location data or that Ticketmaster knows I've been to a heavy metal concert - it is that Google finds out I was at a Ticketmaster heavy metal concert.

I disagree that it's cross organisational. OPs question was "is tracking useful" and the article is talking about sharing info between apps.

Being logged into Facebook messenger because I'm logged into the Facebook app, gmail having access to info from gcal, Ticketmaster having access to livenation preferences are all examples of sharing within the same organisarion that benefit a user.

It isn't even usefull for advertising.

Google keeps giving me french ads even when I speak dutch, live in the dutch half of Belgium, and have a http request header saying i speak dutch or english. I get ads for all kinds of stuff I don't care about. In fact, I get ads for things I can't even buy in my country or continent if I wanted it. If google would tune their ads to the language i ask them, based on the query I entered, the results would be a lot better.

I presume the real value of all this tracking is they can companies to buy ads with them, even if the actual ad delivery mostly fails.

Now I bought a rubber mat on ali express, for opening all kinds of electronics. For weeks they tried to sell me rubber ... stuff ... and latex ... stuff ... and other related ... stuff .... until my wife started mocking me enough to stay of their site for a few months. That's another cost of relevant advertising ;-)

Ad targeting is done by the buyer. They're probably setting location but not language. This happens all the time.

Why you even getting ads in the first place? Never heard of uBlock Origins? Stop using Chrome, use Firefox. Then you can put safely Origins on both mobile and desktop for Firefox and never see any ads.

Your issue is ad targeting, and most of it is done manually by advertisers. Ironically, this shows why ad targeting can be done much better at the hands of Google and Facebook because they can track the user behaviors more accurate than advertisers.

If it is, then the user should still consent to it. Just because something is “useful” in Google’s or FB’s eyes doesn’t mean I want to be a part of that.

Exactly. I was about to pull the trigger and pay for a subscription for the Overcast podcast player just to support the author. He wasn’t offering anything useful for the subscription - I am not complaining. It was more of an honor system.

Then he introduced ads - mostly podcast ads. Marco created his own ad platform just for his app and he doesn’t use any third party ad SDK. I both found the ads useful and I didn’t feel guilty because he was generating revenue.

Of course, there are use cases where user wants to be recognized as he travels across web domains.

For example single sign on, or a chat with a company representive when the company has several domains.

This "tracking" just needs to be clearly visible and controllable by the user.

It would be good if web browsers had a mode, where every time a site is trying to access cross domain cookies, a confirmation dialog was shown with details of the data requested, how the site is going to use it, their privacy policy. With options Allow once, always, 3 days, etc.

Yes, in which case you should be able to communicate its usefulness to the users, who will allow it.

Define "correctly". Intra application "tracking" (logging) is helpful and can help for product flow for sure. Cookie based ad networks may make for more efficient marketing efforts which in theory "lower prices" but at what cost?

I can think of a few cases. For example, an app monitoring memory usage in other apps. Or an app made to intercept certain types of calls from other apps. (A music scrobbler, for example.)

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