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Comment by spanishcow | Hacker News Reader

The problem are not the cookies. The problem is the tracking and the privacy invasion. I don't want some body following me at every step to know every thing I do using cookies or any alternative method.

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Then that's the problem for you, not the problem in general.

You're most likely right, in that most people don't care about being tracked, but Google still isn't solving the basic problem, they are just working around the cookie restrictions.

The focus should be on making a profit, while respecting peoples privacy.

I honestly don't mind being tracked. I don't know if it's just me but I prefer targeted advertising than just generic one. It's always more relevant and I do end up purchasing. Without tracking, there would be no targeted advertising.

You're assuming that advertising is the correct or only business strategy. I wouldn't mind getting tracked, if I felt that I could trust the companies collecting data about me, or perhaps just get access to it.

Honestly I don't see the value of tracking though. I tried running my browser without Ghostery recently. The "tracked" ads are generally pretty poorly targeted. I got a lot of ads for TransIP after browsing their price plans, but that's sort of the wrong time, at this point I'm already aware of them.

Amazons recommendations are pretty good for books, but not much more than that and that's despite them having huge amounts of data.

So why the need to track me, if you can't do anything useful with it?

And it's getting better and better. Recommendation for books is much easier in that context since you have a hard sale and can compare to other hard sales.. and not assumptions based on visits.

I know the suggestion for Katy Perry on Netflix was dead on. The irony is that there is nothing more that I hate than Katy Perry.

How would feel about the data being shared with a prospective employer, perhaps sold to them as part of a recruitment service?

There are ways to do targeted advertising without tracking. For example, you could identify clusters and then have users' browsers do the lifting to determine what cluster they belong in.

Exactly! Or for that matter have clients develop handles for themselves on topics they want, and the advertisers just Multicast the relevant information to the users that have those tags. No need to GUID tracking.

The problem is with privacy and privacy laws. If you read the laws about privacy (like http://www.ico.org.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electron...) you are going to see that they are targeting cookie-like tracking systems.

It's not a technical problem at all. Tracking is as easy to solve as to put a UID to each device (problem solved).

e.g. Apple some time ago forbid developer to use such an unique id (http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/19/ios-5-deprecates-udid-as-iden...) probably on privacy laws grounds.

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