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Comment by dw-im-here | Hacker News Reader

I got some pretty bad vibes from reading about their business model. We don't need more of this adtech shit

Yeah, I'm never calling a toll free number again.

> For instance, they purchased more than a million toll-free phone numbers, and each visitor to their marketing website was shown a different one. So when prospective customers called, Red Ventures knew exactly what they had been looking at on the site, which gave the agents what they needed to make personalized sales pitches. This was a pretty high-tech form of digital surveillance in those more innocent times.

Ethics aside, that is pretty clever.

Cleverness aside, that's pretty unethical.

How so? Most people wouldn't claim it's "unethical" to be addressed by a clerc in context of what they looked at in a store - only in that case you are actually required to interact.

Oh do come the hell on.

I know what I look like in a shop. I know what the clerk knows about me.

I know what the clerk can only guess about me from my appearance.

This is the clerk picking your damn pocket to find examine the contents of your wallet before returning it without your knowledge. You didn't agree to it. You now don't know what they know - but - and this is the real kicker - you probably think you do.

Nobody ever gave informed consent for of this surveillance which has been a massive bait and switch. It does /not/ map to going into a store and having the clerk watch which product you look at before assisting you.

> I know what I look like in a shop. I know what the clerk knows about me.

Just be clear, we are still exactly talking about a website owner tracking what somebody looked at and passing said information on by utilizing unique phone numbers in case they call? Because I can't help but feel like we escalated this thing a notch to vent on pent-up feelings about privacy in general (which we might actually agree on, but yeah, different scope)

And you're completely aware of that and you know what the person selling to you knows about your actions just like you do in a shop?

No? Ok then. It's one example of many of secret and deceptive surveillance. If you want to be angrier about worse ones please feel free...

As an aside, there have been plenty of things from which we defend ourselves from salesmen. Both ethical and not dating from well before Berners-Lee thought "I can use markup to make a documentation system with this new-fangled tcp/ip thing on unix machines right here at CERN!" Some of us are naturally better equipped to defend against all the techniques than others. Arming con-people grifting from the gullible with additional personal information to use as secret ammunition along side psychological manipulation seems wrong to me. The continuum goes all the way from "no such thing as a bad sale" through all selling is wrong. That's where I sit on that continuum. YMMV.

Is me being completely aware of something the linchpin around which we are going to judge if somebody is interacting ethically with me? Because I can see how that would complicate things. Ethically speaking.

Also I am 100% certain I am not completely aware of what a clerk knows about my actions when I enter their shop. Unless I pessimistically assume "potentially everything", including my exact identity because I live around there somewhere.

Why is this unethical? If you go into a shop, can’t the shop keeper see what you’re looking at and talk to you about that item specifically? Do shops not have surveillance cameras that record your every moment?

I start to see ethical problems when they start selling or sharing the personalized data they collect with other parties, or start tracking you when you’re not on their site.

They are the third party...

Lots of things become unethical at scale.

See harry8's reply. But my main reason for nipping this in the bud, is a trend I see wherein shitty behavior somehow becomes okay because it looks clever, as in: hey, I didn't think about that. It's not clever, it's deceptive, rat-like, low behavior. That's something else than clever, in my book. And you probably never thought of it because you're a human being, who doesn't regularly come up with ways to f*ck people over.

Manipulation and lies typically are clever, otherwise people wouldn't fall for them.

They did that years ago. These days Google has a product that can dynamically insert a local area code number to link your call to web behavior. Presumably RV and others can do it too, and if it’s integrated server-side it can’t be blocked.

That the numbers were toll free is entirely unrelated to the surveillance aspect.

There are companies who provide regular local area numbers, with all kinds of analytics (number of answered calls, average length of time to answer, etc) plus recordings and lots more.

See https://www.iovox.co.uk/solutions/advanced-call-tracking for just one example.

WATS lines (toll-free service numbers) provide additional caller information above and beyond a standard toll line, on the premise that it's the callee who's paying for the call.

This has been a privacy concern for decades.

Services have changed substantially and I'm no longer current on information (WATS itself has been retired), but no, a toll-free call is not the same as a standard POTS / direct-dialed toll number, AFAIU.

That's above and beyond the per-user or per-source tracking accomplished here.

Note that similar schemes can be run via postal mail through specific P.O. Box or department routing addresses.

They own 5% of all phone numbers in order to pull this off.

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