Hacker News Reader

Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

Imo the last part is a bit too dismissive. It's not too hard to imagine how telemetry from software can be used for ad targeting, or for more nefarious purposes, since the telemetry would have access to track info, including metadata.

If we're imagining worst-case scenarios, my first thought is "use track info to discover unlicensed music usage". Or for ads.

View on HN

I don't think the actual application-specific events would be used by Google - as every application has their own events and ways to use them there would be no generalized way to do it without having developers manually "reverse engineer" the event meanings and assign them to ad targeting signals.

What Google most likely does however is use persistent analytics IDs to track people and improve their on-site tracking. Let's say you clear your cookies and happen to change IPs (dynamic IP, etc) so you appear to Google's web properties as a new user - all they have to do is wait for some other piece of software on your machine to report analytics with a persistent ID and essentially bridge the gap between your old identity and your new one, so now just based on IP alone, Google's web properties can infer with good accuracy (and the more datapoints the higher it goes) that it's you.

This is EXACTLY what I, and I believe MANY other people

#DONOTWANT

I agree that this might be a concern, but since Audacity is open source sending any sensitive information like track metadata would likely be caught very quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com