Hacker News Reader

Comment by j_s | Hacker News Reader

Orthogonal to this discussion, I use Ghostery because I don't believe MixPanel and their customer's best interests always align with my best interest.

I only mention this here because the linked page does not work when JavaScript is enabled but MixPanel is not. Defensive programming, people!

Timestamp: 1/29/2013 1:28:52 PM Error: TypeError: mp.landing is undefined Source File: https://mixpanel.com/revenue/ Line: 98

View on HN

For anyone wanting to opt-out of Mixpanel's tracking, feel free right here: https://mixpanel.com/optout/ - we try to make it pretty simple.

Thanks for making this easy.

Unfortunately this opt-out approach (not your specific implementation) is not really useful... opting out on every browser that I use, keeping the MixPanel opt-out cookie when clearing everything else, opting out of > 1,000 tracking services individually, etc.

Sounds like the precise idea behind the Do Not Track header. No idea if MixPanel respects it; I'll let one of them answer.

Are you referring to the dislike of your actions being tracked on a website? I share your concern, but isn't that just the cost of doing business with a website? Most applications would be able to build a pretty decent understanding of your usage patterns with or without mixpanel - either through data models or raw logs

Thanks for asking for clarification; it's not really relevant to this discussion. I'm glad MixPanel has this new product, I'm sure website owners will find it useful. My primary intent in posting was to let MixPanel know that people like me can't even click 'See it in Action' because JavaScript processing stops after the first error (counting on MixPanel loading).

I'm all for apps using the data I give them to build usage patterns as a part of improving their service; that's an unavoidable part of the value they provide. Cross-site collectors a-la Google, Facebook, Adobe, MixPanel, etc. eliminate a barrier to a centralized understanding of everything I do online.

Edit: TL;DR - Pikwik yes, MixPanel no. And degrade gracefully if your external JavaScript doesn't load, especially analytics.

I share some of your concerns, but I just wanted to point out that this is not something about Mixpanel or tracking services. It's just the way web applications works. At the very least, the server that the app is running on will always know all your actions because otherwise it couldn't respond to them!

As I explained elsewhere, the problem is when 3rd parties track users across completely different websites.

Your point regarding how the web works makes sense on an individual request basis, but imagine something like Scroogle over Tor... sure my actions would be known, but 'which my' would not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com