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Comment by Spearchucker | Hacker News Reader

Tracking is an issue in that your interests, preferences, and proclivities are being used to make others richer. Hey if that's ok with you then I'm cool with that. I'm not cool with me doing that. I run ad blockers. If you make a living from ads then offer me a paid-for alternative. I avoid everything Google. I use a Windows Phone without a Microsoft account. If an app wants access to my contacts it doesn't get installed. My blog is my own code because I own what I write so I want control. In the absolute sense. I'd rather pay than use a free service, because being a cynic I don't believe altruism in it's truest sense exists.

I interact on my terms, or not at all.

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> your interests, preferences, and proclivities are being used to make others richer.

Your logic here villainizes a behavior simply because it benefits someone else.

Let's say that every day you stop at Starbucks and order a cappuccino. The people who work at there recognize that you always show up at 8:10am and order the same thing so they begin to make sure it is ready for you every day so you don't have to wait. Did you give them explicit permission to notice your habits? No. Does their behavior benefit them? Yes, they keep you satisfied and paying obscene amounts of money for coffee on a daily basis. It's mutually beneficial. Now an employee of Starbucks could potentially give information about your daily routine to someone else who was looking for you (say to the police for whatever reason) but you don't hear anyone lamenting the presence of eyeballs in the heads of baristas as massive privacy invasions.

I believe what you are really getting at is that these companies like Google and others can - and have at times - abuse the information they have available. This is exactly my point: what's needed is greater accountability.

It sounds like people are cross-discussing what they're really trying to get at the heart of,

Tracking is a tool.

It can be used for good and for bad. It has been used for good or bad. A healthy debate about the pros and cons and discussing choices one has with their tools/tech is vital to this.

Tracking is an aspect of privacy, but it is not the entirety of it.

It would be great if that was the discussion, but it seems like many people consider tracking to be an absolute bad. Thus, any service improvement that might come of it is tainted by its association with tracking.

It sounds a lot more like you don't actually understand how advertising works.

No, tracking helps to provide you with better services, full stop. Since you use an adblocker, tracking isn't making anyone money at all. Your personal information is worth exactly $0.00 on its own.

> No, tracking helps to provide you with better services, full stop

No. Tracking is about allowing advertisers to better target people that they want to advertise to. A side-effect is providing you with 'better' services.

> No. Tracking is about allowing advertisers to better target people that they want to advertise to. A side-effect is providing you with 'better' services.

Those two are NOT exclusive. Targetted advertising only works because you the user find it more useful.

And, no, it's not about better ads, it's about better services. The vast, VAST majority of tracking is never used in targetted ads. Targetted advertising is a very wide net, not hyper-focused.

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