The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
The internet is a lot faster for me, and the battery appears to last longer. So far, I've only had problems logging into instagram, but once the cookie is set, I can re-enable blocking ads and tracking.
I guess I am one of those 'dark traffickers' :P
Now, if they voluntarily stopped tracking all or a significant portion of their users, I would be shocked.
Of course, that isn't going to happen.
Surely it is better just to get the data from your own content web server logs ? Wouldn't you get the same information while saving on the extra HTTP request? It would make the site loading times slightly faster as well.
There are a few things to take out to make certain services I like work (E.G. Hulu), so I usually try it in sections to see which services break and comment those.
Linux (well, glibc, from http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81979/how-does-etc-h...):
http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/blob/HEAD:/nss/nss_files/files...
Windows :
#tbd
Excuse me?! How does this trash get published?
Update: He has replied and said he would look into it and correct it. Being that he's aware of the discussion here, i suspect other things might get corrected too. :)
pretty sure they dont know what HTTP is and what a header is.
How many factual errors in other articles that dont deal with the web?
But on the other hand, given how it was the Guardian that published all of the original Snowden articles and information, they of all newspapers should applaud this rapid increase in increased privacy from their readers.
I can't actually read the dates on the charts, but I assume the increase started shortly after the Snowden revelations, when more sites were enabling https by default and people became more privacy-aware.
So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!"
Like spam it's only bad when other people are doing it.
Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'.
I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.
Final remark: A website like Hacker News would not be possible if all the content was behind a paywall. Would that really be a better internet?
The internet is built on free stuff. It got big on free content. HN is free content. Look at all those comments that people leave for free. The belief that things must cost money is a fallacy!
That's how the web started, remember: no ads. Just free sources of information.
Anyway, thank you for reminding me I'm old enough to remember how the web started :D
This parts makes me a bit uneasy.
> The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content.
I am not sure I would be interested in a "tailored" news experienced. (Or "relevant content" is a weasel word for "relevant ads")
I use refcontrol[1] to spoof the referral. I'm always visiting from the front page of the website even though I'm almost never visiting from the front page.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...
It's also very good to avoid those annoying image hostings that serve you a .html page with ads when they detect you click a .png file from another web page or those that just show you a image asking you not to hotlink content.
Maybe get the engineers to have a look instead.
P.S. remember this: http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-gua...
This is backlash, enjoy it.
Actually one of the main reasons why I use various anonymizers is that I don't want relevant content for the same reason I don't want to see Facebooks's "top stories" -- most often it turns out to be totally irrelevant, clickbait or complete bullshit. Leave me the choice to what's interesting for me and what I want to see.
Throwaway because of inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.
Not entirely, no. It is funded by a trust, and part of the Guardian Media Group is an investment fund.
The privacy crowd are right; and so are you. This is a huge internal conflict the web today - how do you make it pay, keep it free and not have it track users?
The alternative is a pay-per-view service, or subscribing to wires. I haven't done any research into the viability of that type of service, but it is a paradigm shift.
The gist of this article is that users have found ways to not be tracked: this was inevitable, the person running the browser has a lot of control over what the browser sends and where.
So, that pick isn't working all the time any more.
Simple referrer information is very valuable to the Guardian (and others who sell ads), and is in most circumstances not a significant privacy leak. Cross-site tracking via third-party cookies, however, has significant privacy implications.
I would like to see a user/advertiser understanding of "this far and no further". But unfortunately the debate is sufficiently polarised I can't see any change to the current situation, where the tech-savvy disable everything and the less experienced stick with their defaults, which effectively reduces it to an arms race between the big browser manufacturers and a handful of ad networks.
The collar doesn't match the cuffs in this article, methinks.
We track campaigns through campaign-parameters but apps are a blind spot of course, that's nothing new. Relying on the referrer is stupid, most apps don't provide a referrer because they are Apps and not websites! Browsers provide a referrer if you are coming from another site. An App isn't a website, so there's no referrer.
Of course there's no referrer, it's a new browser window! Campaign-Parameters here would also not be very helpful. If the Visitor copies the link not from a guardian.com visit, but after coming to the story through a campaign-URL, he would copy the URL with the campaign parameters and paste it into the app. This would be even more wrong, but happens daily!
We Web Analysts should get used to it: People are becoming aware of privacy more than in the past and we can't always measure everything and everyone. Get over it!
A fellow Web Analytic Consultant doesn't know how to remove URL string parameters.
Oh wait! That makes me look better in front of clients. Nevermind, carry on.
I think they meant to say 'relevant advertising' there not 'relevant content' as the content should, in theory, be the same regardless of how you got there. The interesting bit is that I've seen advertising contracts where you can't advertise with unapproved networks on a referred link from a Google SERP. Only on the second click can you do that pop-under or egregious flying frisbee ad. So if you are trying to be 'safe' you don't do any of that nonsense if you can't tell the difference, and I'm guessing that cuts into revenue.
Even assuming The Guardian itself is not a knowing participant in such schemes, its sites could receive such traffic when fraudsters try to make the full behavior of their sources look more legitimate.
Someone really should make it a default to pass the referrer even for https.
edit (less obtuse): there should be less passing of referral headers, not more. Browsing is already such a leaky experience privacy-wise, we shouldn't be clamouring for it to become worse...