Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.
Doesn't DDG contradict that?
Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.
Right, in this context though it's referring to users themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-specific data. You're just logging stats about the results themselves, not the user.
I use them anyway because they at least claim to be private and haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it. I probably should at some point take the time, though, to try to actually understand how they can viably exist in a way that isn’t going to succumb to the same corrupting incentives as google.
- build a useable search engine
- show ads to users
User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent quality that doesn't spy on you.
Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that would otherwise have stayed with Google.
The last few years Google has been busily lowering their quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more thinking.)
I can be an early customer.
I don't have a problem with those ads, since they're not overly intrusive, they're clearly labeled, and they're not targeted to me based on my personal information. Plus, DDG actually gives me the option to disable ads completely.
That's what "don't be evil" should look like.
Note how their predecessor, Google, started out lovable and quirky but then that facade crumbled under the weight of success.
I like DDG, I use DDG, I recommend DDG. And I don't even care about the privacy. All that matters to me is my search habits, emails and business-related-data are controlled by different entities.
But at some point I expect the privacy aspect of DDG will be a memory rather than a current talking point. The incentives are pretty simple.
This is why it's important to have replacements around. Particularly smaller and newer businesses that aren't yet interested in squeezing out every drop from you.
> use them anyway because they at least claim to be private
Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get sued if they’re as terrible as Google. But
> haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it
I do doubt they’re as private as they could be, because they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their source code, and have had serious past privacy problems in other products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 ‘We’re not collecting your info, our servers are receiving it but just trust us we just throw it away’).
When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you.
I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide from the first group.
Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay services.
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
I'm worried about them participating in the global privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere and abusively correlate it with the info others have to learn things about me.
Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort of thing.
I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info away from people, I think it's about the correlation. Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information starvation.
YMMV.
Although, I'm not sure it's reasonable to call linear expense growth "cancerous".
Phone number? 212 555 1212. (You could change to the local area code if you feel like it.)
ZIP code? 90210, in Beverly Hills, of course. Or 01234, which is Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
for my weekly purchase of bread, bacon and ketchup it's definitely not
I'm just glad I'd bought the extended warranty.
The rewards card is a much better model in my opinion because while it gives them quite a bit of data, it does provide some anonymity. I'm sure it is possible to reconstruct from that data who I am (i.e. convert it into direct PII like name and address), but that at least takes a lot more effort and processing than if they have my phone number.
Most people are ok giving up SOME privacy for the sake of convenience/cost savings. I doubt most people are truly willing to give up all privacy for said benefits once they understand what they are actually giving up.
They need a phone number. I've never heard of any store actually trying to use it to contact you.
PS: If you ask nicely the cashier will almost always punch in a working number for you. They want the reward points.
Because if you have, your reward card has probably already been linked to your credit card, phone number, email, etc. by now.
If you truly wanted to be paranoid, set your device to airplane mode (don’t forget your smartwatch or wallet Tile), cover your face (this shouldn’t be hard these days) and only then venture into a store. Oh, and pay your groceries with cash.
[1] This article is from 8 years ago, so just imagine how far we came from that time: https://lifehacker.com/how-retail-stores-track-you-using-you...
You are being rude. The innocent cashier is forced to ask you that question and has no power to change the rules. Why not be polite to them? If you really want to change things, try asking to speak to the manager (after you're done checking out, of course!).
you can be both honest and polite.
Politeness is also relative to whom you are speaking to.
Then the person being rude is the person forcing the cashier to do this. The customer should push back, so the cashier can push back.
The cashier and customer should both realize that neither of them want to do this, and be polite about it.
The cashier has to do that all day, every day though, so I feel like they get a pass.
If the cashier pushes back, they may be punished (up to and including getting fired — there's more competition for cashier-level jobs than you think).
Are you ok with this kind of tracking? Genuinely asking... Personally I see it as "less bad" than straight up selling my data to another company, but I would still prefer companies didn't automatically track me at all, and instead relied on interviews with real users. Or at least make the tracking opt-in, Nielsen style.
Asking a user for their opinion about something doesn't generally provide as much valuable insight as monitoring their usage of a product.
I'm not ok with that data being sold at all. I'm not signing up to receive advertisements
You don't get from your first point to here.
The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place.
This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code.
This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them.
The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it.
It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.
Especially if we add bounties for catching Google's transgressions, I expect we could do quite well open-source, personalized regulation.
What happens if they lie? They have the data, they give you the code that does the user-facing thing with the data, then they copy the data to some other system where some unspecified foreign subsidiary uses it for arbitrary nefarious purposes without telling anybody.
And as much as it might help to have a law requiring cloud services to publish all their source code so people can verify that they're doing at least that part of what they say they're doing, do you really expect that to be enacted?
I don't think a law requiring all code to be published would get passed. But key code for, say, personalization algorithms? That seems doable. Places like health departments, ag inspectors, and workplace safety agencies get to inspect the physical machinery of production all the time. No reason we can't start extending that in to the virtual realm. Companies won't be excited for it, but they might prefer it to some of the more heavy-handed proposals going around now. (E.g., section 230 reform, antitrust concerns.)
Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.
Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.
Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?
No, but it can remove the necessity.
Some people can be satisfied with a business of X profitability, but once it goes public there is really no hope IMHO.
Groceries are also one of the most price sensitive items people buy and grocery stores run on incredibly thin margins so it's dubious to believe that a grocery story has much control over their pricing, independant of a loyalty card. If they could raise prices after the introduction of a card to increase total profits, why couldn't they have done it before then?
Far more likely is that they're using the extra revenue from the card to lower prices for you and gain market share from their competitors but the lower prices are swallowed up by general price increases.
A better example would be something you pay for, and you’re still tracked with no compensation.
Does that answer your question?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
In fact it does the opposite. People with a demonstrated willingness to pay for stuff are more lucrative to track.
"Oh but you don't have to use your loyalty card."
Technically true but it's not "get a discount if you use your loyalty card" it's now "pay really inflated prices if you don't."
If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so.
It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple.
As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.
Demand based systems aren’t always a good measure. Human trafficking has demand and people use those services. And there’s a, sadly, large number of people who want and purchase if available. No it needs to be fought on the supply side by stopping traffickers and protecting trafficked.
Companies use targeted ads because they work and are available. Not because they are moral.
Tracking is amoral, human trafficking is immoral.
Targeted ads and the data slurping involved is immoral to me. Not human trafficking bad, but probably as bad as working for coco cola.
I don’t choose to have my data included for targeted. Victims don’t choose to be trafficked. Marketers choose to buy ads using the data. Perverts choose to buy sex from victims.
Each has people choosing to use, and not choosing to be victims. Both have an intermediary selling the ads or the humans.
That is what you are agreeing to when you agree to the ToS.
There is no "victim" here, because you have agency.
Even if I never log in and go to Google.com without an account they are using data on me and I never clicked anything.
I don’t have agency to avoid Google collecting data on me unless I stop using the internet. Perhaps if I always use TOR or something.
And that’s me who works in this area day in and day out. “Average users” definitely don’t have agency and can’t be expected to give informed consent to these data collections.
In medical research before informed consent [0] was law, experiments would have “click through TOS” that patients would accept without understanding, often with some token offering.
I don’t think it’s accurate or fair to say that random users clicking through agreements in exchange for free services have agency.
[0] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/informed-con...
But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1]
I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors.
[1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the...