[HN Gopher] Who wants to be tracked?
___________________________________________________________________
Who wants to be tracked?
Author : jhpacker
Score : 171 points
Date : 2023-05-18 08:18 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantable.com)
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| So you can accidentally click them.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This is a misleading statistic. Most people will not care if I
| implemented a view counter on my website that uses a cookie to
| prevent the same user as counting as multiple views.
| jhpacker wrote:
| I agree that most people would not mind that scenario, the
| issue is that that scenario requires the same consent box that
| the most invasive adtech would use and it's far too onerous on
| the user as things are now to discern the difference.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The model of regulation-compliance is this. It's not really about
| the specifics. Consent, privacy, kyc... Those may be initial
| motives for regulation, but by the time these exist in the world,
| they are a set of standard, rigid "compliance" protocols.
|
| From formulation stage, it allows two parallel realities. One in
| which "consent" or whatnot have an intuitive meaning. Politicians
| and activists live here. One in which "consent" is a
| specification for a compliant "3rd party solution." Businesses
| live here.
|
| Once functional, the bank, website or other complying business
| can claim the rules were made up by the regulator, and the
| regulator can either claim to be successful or blame businesses
| for problems. Being unremarkable, by copying or using 3rd party
| comliance plugins is more important than respecting the
| regulation's intent.
|
| By the time consumers are affected, "consent" has a technical
| specification. It no longer has much actual meaning.
|
| Think of the hoops, paperwork, informed consent signatures and
| such that you deal with at a bank. All those things had some
| regulatory logic behind them initially. Employees at the bank
| think this is government-required paperwork. What it is is
| compliance.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Because in a society that is optimized for profit, it's not about
| people, it's about what you can get away with for money.
| eru wrote:
| Alas, our society ain't optimised for profit.
| comprev wrote:
| They exist because they're required to through applicable laws.
| The companies want tracking for additional business data and very
| rarely actually are about the users.
| gitgud wrote:
| "We value your privacy" is a very hollow statement, when the
| website is asking to track you...
| mjhagen wrote:
| "But, not as much as our bottom line."
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| They value it, in exact amount of money.
| etiam wrote:
| "... at about 20C/" is how I usually read the implied part.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| We value your privacy because we can sell it!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Followed by
|
| [Accept all tracking] [Ritual Hazing]
| todd8 wrote:
| My spouse will sometimes mention in conversation with others that
| I invented the cookie. This always puts me on the spot, and I
| have to enter into a long explanation of the what and the why of
| cookies least they believe that I some sort of evil software
| hacker. (Now for a short explanation so that HN readers don't
| think that I'm an evil hacker: I invented them, with the help of
| a colleague, while at IBM where we were designing a distributed
| file system. This was before the advent of the World Wide Web.)
| jhpacker wrote:
| Interesting, what kind of cookies? Like I say in the article
| Lou Montulli from Netscape is generally credited with creating
| the HTTP cookie, which they named cookie based upon magic
| cookies in unix, though its obviously quite a bit different.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember in the mid-late 90's when companies would
| actually disable cookies altogether. Most non-technical people
| just don't understand the what/how/why cookies work, or were
| really needed in the browsers.
|
| In the end, it's definitely been used in excessive and somewhat
| intrusive ways. I also wish that browsers had better controls
| over second and third party cookies and tracking (similar for
| nested iframe) in order to bubble some of it closer to the
| surface. In the end, pihole, ublock origin and privacy badger
| goes a long way to limiting this.
| reaperman wrote:
| Many of us remember when cookies were purely a utility-add for
| end users and were restricted only to the domain which set
| them. Thanks for inventing that.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Who can take credit for lifting that restriction.
|
| Some popular browsers are supposedly "open source" yet it
| appears no browser user longing for saner times has ever
| tried reversed this change and recompiling the browser for
| their own use. No third party cookies _by default_.
|
| The most fascinating thing IMO about so-called "modern"
| browsers is that even when their vendors publish source code,
| "99.9%" of people will not even attempt to make changes, even
| something as simple as changing a default from "on" to "off".
| It's like the software is stamped with "Read Only" or "Do Not
| Touch" and "99.9%" of people dutifully obey. The "0.1%"
| appear to be very conservative with the changes they make.
|
| For example, if it was possible to disable auto-loading of
| resources, I might actually use these "modern" graphical
| browsers for tasks other than commercially-oriented
| transactions. Cookies are only one problem with these
| browsers.
| jalk wrote:
| Seems a bit overkill to recompile to get "no third party
| cookies by default" when you can just open the settings and
| disable it when you first install the browser. The setting
| is kept between updates (in Firefox at least) and if you
| are paranoid you can always check with Dev tools or a
| dumping proxy that 3rd party cookies are still disabled
| after an update
| dylan604 wrote:
| Great, so when time travel becomes a thing, I'll add you to the
| list of people to have a chat with about needing to envision
| longer term visions for how nefarious people can be. I love
| that at one point in a not so distant galaxy, er time, that
| there was a thing of innocence. Now, that innocence can no
| longer be tolerated and every new thing must have more time
| invested on how the new thing can be abused rather than just
| used as intended.
| JadeNB wrote:
| The only way to never make things that could be misused by
| nefarious people is never to make things.
| cooperadymas wrote:
| You may as well start by having that conversation with the
| inventor of the time travel device you're using, because -
| whew boy the nefarious things people are going to do with it!
| todd8 wrote:
| Really? I didn't invent it for browsers, I invented it for
| distributed file systems before the "World Wide Web" had even
| been invented. You might as well have a talk with William
| Shockley or Vint Cerf.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Exactly. How could you have known it would be used for
| what's it's used for now. That's the entire point of the
| conversation someone from the future could tell you. Why is
| that unclear? Maybe you're assuming a negative
| conversation? There are many decisions in my life that if a
| future me or someone else could show me exactly how things
| will play out in ways not foreseen by me at the time, I'd
| be less hostile than you apparently are at the idea.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| What? His reply is just a natural reaction to the hostile
| and reproachful tone of your comment.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| This is such a ludicrous comment chain. The tone was
| clearly negative. You said you said you wanted to have a
| chat "about needing to envision longer term visions for
| how nefarious people can be".
| dylan604 wrote:
| right, but it sounds to me as you are reading it as i'm
| calling the inventor of the cookie as nefarious. i'm
| suggesting having a conversation with the inventor about
| how nefarious people will use his invention.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| No, I'm not reading it like that. You clearly say that
| the inventor didn't think of nefarious people, not that
| he was one.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Somewhat probably, don't take it serious. You did good.
| todd8 wrote:
| Thanks...I'm think I'm too sensitive about it since this
| comes up every f'ing time.
| godelski wrote:
| Not too sensitive. All of us get annoyed at things we
| have to constantly reiterate. At least that other user
| revealed their insanity after they kept talking.
| Literally explaining why you could never have known,
| despite claiming you should have "thought harder." Don't
| feel guilty, you're not the one with the evil idea. We
| should, of course think long (and sometimes evil), but
| it's impossible to predict what others will use your tech
| for.
|
| You did good and there's no problems with what you did.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "but it's impossible to predict what others will use your
| tech for."
|
| I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a
| war (with unrestrained city bombing from all sides going
| on), don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked
| with it and people point the finger also towards you.
|
| But a general purpose lightweight distributed storage
| technology? Seriously no, then you can also blame hard
| drive producers for enabling tracking.
|
| We all want _some_ websites to store temporary
| information on out computers. Otherwise we could not log
| in to anything for example. And that the default of the
| browsers is to allow any random website to store
| literally GBs of data on your computer without asking
| (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...) - then this is really the
| choice of ad financed browser developers - and the choice
| of the users to just accept that behavior (ignorance can
| also be a choice).
| godelski wrote:
| >> but it's impossible to predict what others will use
| your tech for.
|
| > I mean, it depends. If you build a atomic bomb during a
| war , don't act surprised if cities indeed will be nuked
| with it and people point the finger also towards you.
|
| You forgot the first part of the sentence you quoted.
|
| >> We should, of course, think long (and sometimes evil)
|
| My intention is to say that you can't do an exhaustive
| search and it shouldn't be expected. What's obvious to
| some isn't to others. This doesn't mean we can just go
| along without concern for morals. As
| scientists/researchers/inventors/developers we must think
| ahead (and evil). But it is like viewing history from a
| modern lens. We have knowledge we didn't back then and
| judgement about intent should come from the view of the
| time. (This also doesn't mean we can't look back at
| history and see "normal" things that people did as
| horrific. These are different things)
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Literally explaining why you could never have known,
|
| That's the entire point of coming from the future to the
| past with information unavailable. It's pretty much Time
| Travel 101 sci-fi trope. Rather than going back in time
| with sports scores and stock picks, I was putting it
| towards nerdy tech dev. Sheesh
| AbsoluteCabbage wrote:
| There are likely dozens of others out there that can lay claim
| to the same. What specifically do you define as the innovation
| behind this "invention"?
| todd8 wrote:
| I'm sure that many can make the same claim. In the 1980's, I
| was an operating systems architect working at IBM. I thought
| up many interesting (to me) innovations while working on the
| first couple of releases of the AIX on the IBM POWER
| hardware. It was a great job and I learned a lot doing it. I
| got to work with some really brilliant developers and
| computer scientists (a number from IBM Research).
|
| One project I was responsible for was the development of a
| distributed file system for AIX. The goal was a distributed
| file system that addressed some of the weaknesses found in
| other distributed file systems at the time. Our chief
| competitor was Sun's NFS distributed file system. NFS was a
| really nice design. It was well integrated into the operating
| system and quite reliable because it utilized a (mostly)
| stateless server. This had a number of performance and
| security implications along with some file system semantics
| over NFS that didn't match local file system semantics. We
| wanted to introduce state for the server to address these
| issues and thought of a number of complex protocols to manage
| it in the presence of unreliable clients. That's when I
| thought up the idea of making the clients keep their own
| state to be restored when they reconnected to the server. I
| protected this state from manipulation by the client by
| encrypting it. I didn't call them cookies, I called them
| tokens.
|
| This design was patented by IBM and I was one of the two
| inventors on the patent. This patent was owned by IBM and
| years later they gave a special award for this patent because
| it decided that it was one of IBM's most important patents.
| (They wouldn't have done this unless the patent had held up
| to scrutiny or legal challenges). Unfortunately, by that time
| I had already left IBM to start my own company--I was at the
| top of my game and had confidence that I could create a
| software product of some kind that would be successful--so I
| missed out on the financial award for the patent. By then, I
| was at my new company and already in competition with IBM.
|
| By now, the patent should be long expired. Interestingly, IBM
| ended up buying my company around seven years after I and a
| partner started it.
|
| I was very aware of the academic literature and industrial
| practice during this time so I do believe that my invention
| does reflect original work that ended up with a very
| significant impact.
|
| From a more personal perspective, the invention didn't
| financially benefit me. The work that I did at my company own
| was more creative, inventive, technically impactful, and
| financially important to me. For example, Austin Ventures has
| indicated that my company was the start of Austin becoming an
| important high-tech location, but none of that was related to
| the cookie.
| skzv wrote:
| What was your company?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm going to put my guess in as Tivoli.
| todd8 wrote:
| Yes
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| i did a consulting gig rolling out Tivoli at Dell in the
| mid-90s, i think pre-IBM merger! loved the software,
| hated the [flat] network Dell had in Round Rock at the
| time! thanks for your detailed comment. love reading tech
| history stories.
| s1k3s wrote:
| I don't know how the experience is in US, but in EU it's because
| GDPR is a complete failure of a law which doesn't actually solve
| any problem.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| That law is at least an attempt to fix an existing problem. So
| this is like blaming someone who made a subpar raft for the
| flood that required the raft.
| hbossy wrote:
| It solved my problems with exporting data from proprietary
| webapps such as spotify.
| newswasboring wrote:
| GDPR is the law which at least gave us these prompts. Before
| that there was no rules for consent, they would just track you.
| eska wrote:
| There was a law just for cookies before. And no, companies
| don't need to put up these prompts, IF they don't do any
| UNNECESSARY tracking.
| newswasboring wrote:
| I'm with you, these prompts are garbage. But they are
| better than no prompts, because companies are greedy af and
| they will track. Fixing that is a much larger issue than
| the bandaid of law.
| jruohonen wrote:
| Cookies belong to the e-privacy directive.
| eska wrote:
| What makes you think so? I've seen a lot of good come from it.
| s1k3s wrote:
| IMO the only good thing is it made people aware of what's
| happening with their data online. But then we are still
| tracked, the web experience is much worse, SMEs got another
| "screw you" from the regulator by increasing their operating
| costs to comply with this and big companies who were to blame
| for this in the first place found ways to bypass it because
| they have access to strong legal expertise.
| eska wrote:
| I think the GDPR creates benefits in more areas than you
| may be aware of.
|
| For example I used to work for a hosting provider. An admin
| noticed that one of the hosted customers had customer data
| exposed to the internet without a password. Due to the GDPR
| he was forced to contact the customer about it, or our
| company could be held responsible (since we knew about it).
| kuschku wrote:
| GDPR takes quite a while to get results, but even Google now
| has a "deny all tracking" button.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| The GDPR is on the whole a very successful law which has
| improved the way companies handle personal data a great deal.
|
| What you are objecting to is specifically the part of that law
| which mandates consent for gathering personal data, and which
| resulted in these cookie banners. That's annoying (mostly
| because a lot of media companies rather continue hovering up
| data instead of critically assessing the need to do so), but it
| doesn't invalidate the better parts of the GDPR. Calling it a
| complete failure is unnecessarily hyperbolic.
| Ciantic wrote:
| Also the Cookie Banners work, I have installed multiple, and
| Google Analytics has become completly useless. We now see
| from stats that only ~20% people accept Google Analytics
| tracking. This has lead to new market of trackers that
| doesn't require banners, for instance based on User agent and
| IP hashing from logs.
|
| What is unfortunate that law puts the onus on implementing
| the dialog for individual sites, it should be feature of
| browsers. This way users could enforce from browser settings
| that they don't want to be tracked.
| jruohonen wrote:
| Consent is only one way for obtaining a legal basis under the
| GDPR.
|
| And the consent banners are industry's own inventions. They
| could have honored do-not-track and be done with it. Instead,
| they opted for these dark patterns.
| cccbbbaaa wrote:
| There's 6 legal basis under GDPR, but that's irrelevant for
| cookies (or anything that allows you to store or retrieve
| information on the user's device, really), because they're
| covered by the older ePrivacy directive. If a cookie is not
| "strictly necessary", consent is required.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's the classic corporate dark pattern to undermine
| regulations.
|
| Choose the most disruptive, asinine way to comply with
| them. Then argue that the regulation is at fault, and lobby
| to have it removed.
|
| For example, there's been plans recently in Norway to tax
| the salmon farming industry more heavily. The response from
| the industry has been to pretend that this will completely
| decimate the industry(we'll have to fire tons of folks to
| protect our massive profit margins hurr durr), which the
| numbers don't seem to bear that out. But now they've
| managed to convince the workers and they've been protesting
| to "protect their jobs" when they're actually just being
| used as pawns to protect a billionaire from taxes.
| barbs wrote:
| Is there a browser extension to turn these off?
| kuratkull wrote:
| One of the best ones (as in actually working) is the browser
| addon: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
| kuschku wrote:
| That doesn't turn them off, that just consents to everything,
| including types of tracking that cookie blockers can't get
| rid of.
|
| Please use consent-o-matic instead.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Note that that is a pro-tracking extension.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| uBlock origin with appropriate filter turner on.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| This is what I do, it's pretty effective.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Which filter helps with this?
| kruuuder wrote:
| You still have to find filter lists that work though. I use
| uBlock origin and frequently run into problems where cookie
| popups are half-blocked - the dialog is no longer visible,
| but I still cannot interact with or scroll the website. To
| work around that, I have to deactivate uBlock's cosmetic
| filters so that I can see the dialog again, then deny
| cookies. Pretty annoying, I haven't found a setup that fixes
| that.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Most of the time I have JavaScript disabled as well (only
| for specific sites and in Private Browsing windows do I
| have it enabled), which will slightly confound this
| anecdote, but I believe it was mid-2020 when I last
| encountered a site that uBlock Origin plus cookie-banner-
| blocking lists broke the page in the way you describe, and
| only ever a very few times before that.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Extension named something like Behind The Overlay fixes
| similar cases for me, it gets rid of anything overlaying
| the page blocking inputs. Exceptionally effective
| Tknl wrote:
| Consent-o-matic can automatically reject consent and legitimate
| interest prompts.
| austinjp wrote:
| Yep, for Firefox, Chrome and Edge:
|
| https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies
| rcgs wrote:
| It still feels like these dialogues are really only something
| lawyers could think is a good solution to companies employing
| invasive/overbearing uses of customer data.
|
| My gut feel is that most users don't understand what "tracking"
| really means and simply want to enjoy digital experiences without
| having to engage with the "what & how" that comes with modern
| platforms. My partner (and I reckon many other "normal" people)
| loves the ads on Instagram and enjoys the personalisation on
| YouTube & Netflix.
|
| The current solution of "be transparent and it's okay" just
| forces decisions onto consumers that they do not want. The "good"
| solution outlined in this article (accept/reject) is a big yes or
| a big no - a green light for everything vs a red light for
| nothing.
|
| There needs to be further regulation in this space that defines
| legal vs illegal uses of user data beyond the principals laid out
| in GDPR. The regulation should aim to define the "what & how",
| relieving the burden of choice from users and removing this
| "consent and it's okay" loophole for invasive use of data.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| 94% don't want tracking... and the remainder 6% of responses can
| be attributed to the lizardman constant
|
| https://gwern.net/note/lizardman
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Heard this called flatlining. I.e. answer all "mostly agree" or
| whatever.
| brookst wrote:
| I wonder what percentages you'd get if you asked "do you want
| to eat for free at every restaurant?"
|
| My guess is about the same 94% / 6%. But I'm not sure it's the
| 6% that represents lizardman.
| lawn wrote:
| Because companies prefer to track them?
| yalogin wrote:
| Because no one wants to give up the data, and the revenue that
| comes with it. They just annoy the hell out of the users until
| they cave in and just accept it. Since it's a law and every
| website has to do it, there is no competition to think of. It's a
| no brainer
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Better question here is, why is this not handled through the
| browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it.
|
| Block third party cookies by default, delete other cookies on the
| last tab or window closed and prompt user to save cookies on a
| form submit ("do not delete cookies for this domain when leaving"
| type of prompt, for pages with logins, settings, etc).
|
| Also remove features that make easy fingerprinting possible, the
| site doesn't need to know every font I have installed, just have
| a "standard set" included with the browser, and use web fonts or
| whatever for other fonts.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| GDPR is not about cookies, it's about tracking.
|
| Browsers can (and do in the case of Firefox and other privacy
| respecting browsers) try to make it harder to track you, but
| it's not something they can just unilaterally turn on or off.
|
| Consent dialogs are about what sites do with the information
| they get about you, not just about what information they get.
| godelski wrote:
| > Also remove features that make easy fingerprinting possible
|
| Is this (reasonably) possible? If you ever do a graphics
| project you'll find that it is pretty difficult to get a pixel
| perfect render. Hence canvas fingerprinting[0]. (same happens
| for text rendering)
|
| The problem can come down to the silicon lottery as well as the
| browser[1]. If you render the same code on two different
| machines, with the same compiler and libraries, you won't get
| pixel perfect difference. And GPUs don't match CPUs, though can
| if you edit the FMA instructions. Usually the best way to
| ensure images are exactly the same is to compare between Macs
| because the hardware is very similar and similarly binned. So
| Macs tend to have lower fingerprints in general (to the best of
| my knowledge) Current canvas blockers tend to just return a
| value, but that can obviously be a fingerprint itself.
|
| So my question is if this is reasonably solved? I don't see it
| by being just the browser unless they can specifically just
| block a lot of that tracking. Which may require a big actor
| like Google or Apple to make a stand.
|
| (Note: not an expert, but have done a decent amount of
| visualization work)
|
| [0] https://privacycheck.sec.lrz.de/active/fp_c/fp_canvas.html
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47696956/display-
| pixel-p...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The last thing a browser wants to do is break experience for
| older sites. If a site relies on 3rd party cookies for log in,
| it will no longer work on your browser. It makes your browser
| look shit. Same reason we allow unclosed tags, crossed tags,
| etc.
| lloeki wrote:
| Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies by default.
| pavlov wrote:
| Browsers already detect login forms to offer autocompletion
| and password storage. Surely it wouldn't be insurmountable to
| detect cookies being set after a login flow, and let users
| confirm that they want this login to persist.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| We also had shockwave flash, blink tags, keygen tags for cert
| generation, etc., so yeah, we can change stuff if we need it.
| But since the biggest browser is owned by an ad company that
| earns money by tracking us, this will probably never happen.
|
| An alternative would be to have a cookie jar per domain.
| ssdspoimdsjvv wrote:
| Is this really different from disabling JavaScript, which
| will also break the majority of sites?
| sauercrowd wrote:
| I've been thinking about the same thing - this feels like it
| deserves a native API, so we can get rid of all these dark
| patterns currently being employed.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| It's there. It's "Do-Not-Track" and it sadly was never
| respected by the big platforms (and any developers, really).
| I've never seen a single case where setting the DNT header
| made a difference -- which is dumb considering how infested
| the web is with privacy prompts...
|
| Server owners can track you with the data they collect,
| client side can have little control of that. I wonder if
| there's a better way possible in the current iteration of the
| web platform, or if a substantial overhaul is necessary for
| privacy respecting services.
|
| Perhaps DNT would've been more effective if it was written in
| law? To gather user information for marketing purposes, you
| must respect this header. But then, how'd you enforce that...
| other problems: if browsers always set DNT to true by
| default, then the whole effort is pointless, because nobody
| will opt-in. This is ideal, but marketers will definitely not
| like that idea. Thinking out loud here.
|
| EDIT: found an interesting HN thread from 2017
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14377877
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| > I wonder if there's a better way possible in the current
| iteration of the web platform, or if a substantial overhaul
| is necessary for privacy respecting services
|
| Web browsers taking the reigns is the best option we have.
| Adblock + anti-fingerprinting + cookie jars/cookies being
| deleted by default are all necessities in the modern day.
| Ideally, moving people to more privacy conscious choices
| (i.e. not Google/Microsoft) are great steps to reducing the
| power of the Internet surveillance capitalism machine.
| mazlix wrote:
| Lynx browser does this, for every website I choose which Set-
| Cookie headers I want to respect and which to ignore.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > why is this not handled through the browser
|
| Did you forgot what happened the last time 'the browser was
| handling it'? I would remind you: Internet Explorer, Do Not
| Track.
| eimrine wrote:
| If the law has some stack overflows, can we really blame M$
| for exploiting them? Dogs are never being controlled by their
| tales.
| pornel wrote:
| We had P3P spec for it 20 years ago, even implemented in IE!
| And Google has been sending intentionally malformed P3P header
| to bypass it. Their trillion dollar business relies on users
| having difficulty stopping tracking.
| eternalban wrote:
| TIL. Here is the relevant summary from the spec:
| https://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#goals_and_capabs
|
| (for amusement, google P3P and see what comes up first.)
| jefftk wrote:
| 1. Your proposal is not enough for EU privacy law, so you'd
| still see banners. First-party tracking is still tracking and
| you still need a banner if you're going to store any data on
| the client that is not "strictly necessary" for the user's
| request.
|
| 2. Your proposal gives a pretty crummy experience in cases
| where users do expect the site to store data on the client
| longer. For logins you're popping up a confusing banner, and
| for client-side only storage (shopping carts, preferences, work
| in progress) you're silently discarding people's work.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| No consent is required to store cookies required for the site
| to function. Login cookies, shopping carts etc are fine. The
| only reason websites display these banners is because they
| want to track you, and they rely upon misunderstandings like
| you are propagating to whitewash the request.
| jefftk wrote:
| Login cookies, yes: by entering the username and password
| the user is requesting that you log them in.
|
| Shopping carts, sort of: if they don't check out
| immediately and you keep the item in their cart (which they
| may want but didn't explicitly request) you're in
| violation: https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/document
| ation/opinio...
|
| Other things: it has to be "strictly necessary" which is a
| high bar and many things don't meet it. For example,
| implicitly learning your preferences from your behavior
| doesn't.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Sites can function just fine without storing my shopping
| carts locally.
| jefftk wrote:
| They don't have to store the whole contents of your cart
| locally, but they need to store at least a token on your
| machine so they can remember that this cart is yours.
| davedx wrote:
| Because the most popular browser is made by an AdTech company
| arendtio wrote:
| To be fair, I think it was Microsoft who killed the DNT
| header by enabling it by default.
| Filligree wrote:
| Given a boolean flag, if 94% of users would select state X,
| then selecting X by default doesn't seem problematic at
| all.
|
| Microsoft (for once) did nothing wrong. The problem is the
| DNT flag was unenforceable, and that's something
| governments should have pushed on.
| lloeki wrote:
| DNT is literally the nice bit, the symmetric of the evil
| bit.
|
| https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt
|
| But hey, clicking those "reject all" (when you can at
| all) does not guarantee a bad actor would comply with
| one's wishes either.
|
| GDPR has had every bit correct _technically_ (needs zero
| dialog if one doesn't track), but it could only work if
| these actors were honest. It turns out it reveals how bad
| they are.
|
| I suppose the only thing that could possibly work is
| legislation that would guarantee these bad actors to be
| sued to oblivion + burden of proof on them that they
| don't track.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > and that's something governments should have pushed on
|
| They did. Our current anti-tracking laws all come from
| pushing on that.
|
| The problem is that the DNT is way too simplistic.
| Browsers fail to inform the users abut it and keep track
| of sites independently, and the protocol fails to allow
| the site to request fine-grained authorizations and
| inform why they are needed.
|
| There's a sibling talking about P3P that has neither of
| those problems.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Mozilla should put a red tracker count in the URL bar.
| That would make people aware of how they're being
| exploited.
| Yizahi wrote:
| [flagged]
| arendtio wrote:
| The 'general victim blaming' feels weird in contexts when
| there are at least three parties involved (MS, Google,
| End-Users + X)(NATO, Ukraine, Russia).
|
| And how would you call it, when you compare a
| technological detail like the default setting of a HTTP
| header with a war where thousands of humans die?
| Hyperbole? Metaphorical exaggeration?
|
| I think that is not a good base for a constructive
| discussion.
| Yizahi wrote:
| A literal cartel or corporations expected to prey on the
| individual humans betting on the gaps in our psychology.
| A different corporation has bridged these gaps simply by
| saying out loud what individual humans actually want,
| working as a simple re-transmitter of human thoughts. And
| cartel said that "oh, since we can't win easily now, then
| you are at fault now" (and not the cartel who blackmailed
| the world in the first place).
|
| Same happened with Ruzzia. They wanted an easy win (to
| re-capture everything up to west Berlin again), and
| because of their blaickmail were quickly denied most of
| those easy wins, when their prey has hidden under NATO
| protection. They finally tried to capture whatever
| remained and when encountering resistance they blamed
| NATO.
|
| Basically every powerful sociopath, be is Ruzzia or ad-
| tech corpo, want to have absolute freedom of taking what
| they want. And any attempt to deny them something is
| considered a fault of the defending party.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| How the hell did you get from DNT headers to russia-
| ukraine?
| sixothree wrote:
| It helps to have an agenda.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Enabling it by default was objectively the right thing to
| do. Blaming Microsoft for its death is, in my opinion,
| incorrect. The ad companies were never going to allow it to
| be honored.
|
| The thing that killed DNT was making honoring it optional
| in the first place.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Blaming Microsoft for enabling a user-focused feature by
| default is a really weird thing to ding them for in the
| first place.
|
| Especially given all the things you can rightly blame
| them for.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > Better question here is, why is this not handled through the
| browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it.
|
| We had Do-Not-Track header once. Id did not play out very well.
| angio wrote:
| Sometimes I wish GDPR included a clause stating that presence
| of the Do-Not-Track header equals to the user not giving
| consent.
| atvcatole wrote:
| How would that change anything?
|
| DNT = no consent, no DNT = no consent
| vjk800 wrote:
| Has this been tried in any courts? It could be argued that
| this is the case.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Cookie-consent != tracking consent.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Cookie consent also predates GDPR.
| yason wrote:
| I might be wrong but I think the EU regulation that forced
| these cookie acceptance forms--I can't remember if it was GDPR
| or some earlier directive--specifically required that the
| consent submission may not be automated so that the browser can
| be configured to accept everything.
|
| It may have had good intentions as entities such as Microsoft
| would just set their browsers to default to accept all cookies
| anyway and a marginal group of people would know how to turn it
| off and even they couldn't still be sure if a proprietary
| browser still accepts and sends cookies without just telling
| the user.
|
| So as usual the good intentions have turned into a cat-and-
| mouse game in the technical, grassroot realm. There are browser
| extensions that will just kill these consent dialogs
| automatically and websites try (luckily, not very hard so far),
| to work around the kill scripts. Everybody suffers.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > the EU regulation that forced these cookie acceptance forms
|
| No such regulation has ever existed in the EU.
| Rygian wrote:
| That's correct.
|
| The regulation is about providing consent to process
| personal data.
|
| Many people fail to see the difference.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| > Many people fail to see the difference.
|
| By design. The prompt wants you to think the site only
| needs your permission to store necessary cookies such as
| for authentication, when in fact it is always because
| they want to track you and sell the tracking data.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There was a cookie law prior to GDPR. That's when the
| obtrusive dialogs started showing up.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Non tracking ads pay something like 90% less than tracked
| ones.
|
| If your salary was going to be cut 90% tomorrow unless you
| started every conversation with the exact words 'I might
| remember this conversation later', would you just take the
| paycut?
|
| So no, they didn't require them in plain text. But they
| essentially did so when the only real alternative was to go
| out of business.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > I think the EU regulation that forced these cookie
| acceptance forms
|
| Yep, i'm just not sure if it was general incompetence or just
| plain lobbying by third parties to do so.
| operator-name wrote:
| The EU regulation enforced _asking users for permission
| before being tracked_ for non legitimate interests. There
| is new regulation in progress that mandates opting out to
| be as easy as opting in ("the Good").
|
| None of this would be a problem if companies only used
| cookies for legitimate purposes.
| Animats wrote:
| Firefox lets you set "strict tracking protection". The settings
| page warns you that "some sites may break". Some sites whine
| about this, usually using "Admiral" to check for cookie
| blocking. Most of those aren't worth visiting anyway.
|
| There's also Privacy Badger, from the EFF. This turned up that
| the "Who wants to be tracked" site is using "plausible.io" to
| track visitors.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying
| on individual web apps to do it.
|
| Websites want you to explicitly reject consent for using your
| data. There are many untrustworthy places on the internet, so
| trustworthy places want to explicitly ask because they don't
| want the user to reject consent to them just because they are
| being lumped with the other sites.
|
| Now if you had a browser setting that gave consent by default
| and allowed users to deny consent that is something that would
| reduce the need of sites constantly asking you for consent. But
| any attempt to automatically reject consent is just going to
| result in sites asking for consent via another channel. See
| what happened to the do not track header when you try and lump
| all sites together.
| pantulis wrote:
| I think it makes sense to roll your own analytics stack using
| first party cookies, but OP went a little bit overboard by
| removing all tracking cookies altogether.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The problem is that pool is getting increasingly poisoned.
| Websites are increasingly hosting third-party analytics and
| advertising tracker scripts on their own sites in order to
| evade people who are trying to avoid them.
|
| This is making it much less acceptable to allow first-party
| cookies and scripts.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like sites that offer content without a
| subscription keep trying to show ads (which nobody buys
| untargeted because they'd be a massive waste of money). It
| implies that the content needs to be paid for - and that's
| why they're not all just taking a polite "no" and giving up
| on it.
|
| And if you believe that Internet ads could be just as
| scattershot as the Bud Light, Coke, and Toyota spots on TV,
| consider how much of the Internet ad market is niche stuff
| you'd never see on TV ads because they couldn't afford it.
| Consider every SaaS product: they don't advertise on TV
| because their target customer is too niche. Probably 75% of
| ad dollars would simply not be there without targeting.
| People choose over and over again to get content for free,
| and then complain about it because everyone loves to
| complain. No one loves opening their wallet.
| skylurk wrote:
| On mobile safari, private tabs isolate cookies from each other.
| Also, once you are in private mode, all links open in new
| private tabs. Close the tab, and the cookies are gone.
|
| I never turn private mode off. I wish firefox and chrome also
| worked this way.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| My default browser on Android is Firefox Focus. No history,
| no tracking, cookies removed on close.
| anticristi wrote:
| We use zero cookies on our website, so we have no consent banner.
| But people got so used to seeing "cookie consent banners", that
| we are considering introducing a "no cookies here" banner.
| dspillett wrote:
| For some cookies, basic session management for instance, you
| don't need a banner anyway. Many sites want people to believe
| it is needed for necessary cookies, but that is either because
| they want the public to be against all the warnings (so they
| can go back to silently tracking everything) or because they
| have a very skewed idea of what _necessary_ means in this
| context.
|
| In most cases sites could just use _necessary_ tracking without
| permission but seek explicit opt-in for the rest. They won 't
| do it that way of course because most people won't op-in unless
| nagged or conned into doing so.
|
| (the other reason for consent questions where they are not
| really needed is people playing safe lest they have to defend
| the lack of a consent form in legal court or the court of
| public outrage)
| TekMol wrote:
| I have switched one of my sites to cookieless analytics and it is
| bad for everybody.
|
| I can't even say how many users this site has now. It could be
| the same user coming back over and over. Or many users. How would
| I know.
|
| Yes, I could track a ton of stats about every pageview like user
| agent, screen resolution etc and then try to stitch it back
| together. Trying to figure out how many different users there
| are. But this type of "stitching together" would probably also
| count as PII.
|
| I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so
| they come back more often.
|
| I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware, software,
| language. Because I wouldn't see if users affected come back less
| often.
|
| I can't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps users
| discover important features. Because I can't make the connection
| between showing the text early on in the user journey and usage
| of features later on. Because I can't see a user journey.
|
| This is a site I run for the enjoyment of me and the other users.
| Probably a few thousand a month. And I can say the site was much
| easier to develop with a normal cookie approach to tracking. I
| have gone the cookieless way for about a year now. And I can say
| with certainty that it would be a better site now if I kept the
| cookie approach. When the developer flies blind, that's bad for
| everybody.
|
| I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10% in user
| experience can tank the business, there is no way around cookie
| tracking to figure out what works for users and what doesn't.
|
| This is another reason, why European internet companies do not
| stand a snowball's chance in hell to compete with their US
| competitors.
|
| European companies need to bug _all_ users and beg for cookies.
| While US companies only need to do that with their European
| users.
| akomtu wrote:
| IP address + User-Agent gives you enough data to track "user
| journeys" whatever this is. I'm curious, what is your favorite
| example of improving your website based on cookies that you
| couldn't do with basic IP+UA tracking?
| ff317 wrote:
| I'm not saying it's easy or perfect, but Wikipedia does
| tracker-less analytics, and yet still produces
| https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects .
|
| We do use cookies for part of the analysis, but they're not
| unique user-tracking cookies. Instead there's one that simply
| tracks a self-reported datestamp on when the user last visited,
| which looks something like:
|
| WMF-Last-Access=2023-01-01,Expires=Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:00
| GMT
|
| (we send a Set-Cookie for this with the current datestamp only
| to the 1-day accuracy, which expires ~32 days after it's set
| (but rounded to 12-hour accuracy), and is replaced constantly).
|
| There's another more-recent one we use that's explicitly about
| differential privacy, which send back info on the hashes of the
| 10 most recent URLs you've visited on the site, IIRC. None of
| them are unique tracker hashes for a given user, though.
| snthd wrote:
| >which send back info on the hashes of the 10 most recent
| URLs you've visited on the site, IIRC. None of them are
| unique tracker hashes for a given user, though.
|
| That seems highly unlikely to never be unique for some users.
| manicennui wrote:
| This is all bullshit. We literally did this sort of thing for
| years on the Internet before all of this tracking was common.
|
| Every company claims that they are doing this stuff to make
| things better for users, and it never is.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > We literally did this sort of thing for years on the
| Internet before all of this tracking was common.
|
| You mean back when your average website was hot garbage? The
| yearning for the days of static HTML pages is childish
| atavism
| manicennui wrote:
| Who said anything about static HTML pages? Keep beating
| that strawman though.
| manicennui wrote:
| You are literally using a website that was created by
| someone who started an online storefront app in 1995.
| Amazon started around the same time. Google a few years
| later.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The average site _today_ is hot garbage. But now it
| requires several orders of magnitude more bandwidth and
| processing power to render. Not sure this is progress.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| Genuinely asking - what is the easiest method for doing this
| other than cookie tracking? I'm inclined to agree with the
| commenter above and it feels like a community of developers
| would sympathize with this but it seems like everyone is
| acting like it's not a big deal.
| operator-name wrote:
| But it's not a question of PII, it's about processing for
| legitimate interests[0]. If you follow the guidelines then
| collecting and processing specific anonamised stories is not a
| problem, cookies or not.
|
| [0]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-
| protectio...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > and it is bad for everybody
|
| Hang on, it's not bad for _me_. If I visit your site, it 's not
| because I want to participate in some kind of A/B testing
| (whose results you'll never tell me about). And if your site
| only works if I happen to have hardware X installed, you don't
| need analytics to tell you that your site is broken.
|
| > European companies need to bug all users and beg for cookies.
|
| That's nonsense. If cookies are needed for the correct
| operation of the site, then there's no need to beg or bug.
|
| So your banner _should_ be saying: "Can I please set tracking
| cookies that make no difference at all to the correct operation
| of the site? [Accept] [Reject]". Then count the number that say
| Accept, note that the number is approximately zero, and then
| scrap the banner.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| If you paid for said site, sure.
|
| If you didn't pay, I'm not sure why you feel entitled to
| anything.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| > If I visit your site, it's not because I want to
| participate in some kind of A/B testing
|
| Nobody wants to be part of the A/B testing; everyone wants
| the polished product that's the result of A/B testing.
|
| > And if your site only works if I happen to have hardware X
| installed, you don't need analytics to tell you that your
| site is broken.
|
| What? Yes you do, or something similar.
|
| > If cookies are needed for the correct operation of the
| site, then there's no need to beg or bug.
|
| _Strictly_ needed. Suppose I have a dark theme slider, or a
| language selector, for users who don 't want me to follow
| their OS's settings (or can't or don't know how to change
| their OS's settings). That's a nonessential cookie which
| requires the banner.
|
| And if you disagree, your opinion is not worth a lawsuit; the
| only way to be sure that your use of cookies is limited to
| those strictly necessary is hire a very expensive european
| consultant.
| layer8 wrote:
| A/B testing is the reason why websites get "optimized" for
| the wrong target values, typically "engagement". It's what
| drives the enshittification of the web. It's not what users
| want.
| xigoi wrote:
| > everyone wants the polished product that's the result of
| A/B testing.
|
| I'd prefer a polished product that's the result of
| communicating with users.
| pelorat wrote:
| Why would you need to know anything but hits/month and ad-
| revenue/month?
|
| Why don't you just hash the IP-address and count unique users
| that way?
| kmlx wrote:
| that's easy: to improve the service.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Okay, how? Provide details, thanks.
| austinjp wrote:
| This is the generic reason that is always given, but I
| don't think I've ever seen exactly _how_ the service will
| be improved and why cookies (or any uniquely-identifying
| data) are the only way to achieve the desired outcomes.
| janejeon wrote:
| I'm sorry, but have you _tried_ making and hosting a
| website? Product Analytics is a very popular category for
| a reason.
| austinjp wrote:
| Many, many times :)
|
| My point is that it's _never described_. Even in the
| detailed options for those cookie banners that permit you
| to tweak things. Sure, there are (some) details about
| "our partners" and advertising etc, but exactly _how_ the
| service will be improved is never explained.
|
| The reason is simple and obvious: nobody knows. Companies
| collect data in the _belief_ it will be useful in
| improving the service, but generally chuck it into a
| data-swamp and occasionally rake it over to extract basic
| info like navigation routes.
|
| I'm also rarely convinced that improvements can't be
| better determined by focus groups and other similar
| methods.
|
| "Improving our service" is a glib catch-all that rarely
| stands up to scrutiny.
|
| There may be specific examples where a cookie is
| genuinely the best method to improve a feature -- in
| which case: name the feature, list the metrics, declare
| success/fail criteria, and stop collecting the cookie
| after the decision has been made.
|
| Edit: typos.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| He gave several valid examples in the comment you're replying
| to.
| seri4l wrote:
| >hash the IP-address
|
| How would that work? I can't think of any approach where
| getting the original IP back from the hash isn't trivial.
| [deleted]
| andirk wrote:
| ?? sha256 the string and you are not going to be able to
| get back to the original from that output.
|
| Edit: The small amount of IP addresses makes it easy to
| brute force through all of them.
| titaniczero wrote:
| ipv4 space is very limited and you can easily compute all
| the hashes. There is salting and combined with rotating
| salts it could work but no one guarantees that you're not
| storing them
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| The hashing doesn't matter when IPv4 has such a limited
| dataset. IPv4 has a little under 4.3B addresses, and a
| cheaper GPU such as the 1080TI has a hash rate of around
| 4300MH/s, so it crushes that in a few seconds at most.
|
| From there, you have a direct correlation between the IP
| and its resulting hash. Meaning you can easily see what
| the original input was.
|
| You don't need to break a hash to know what the original
| input was.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| you dont need to get the original ip back, just need to
| know how many unique ips are there, so sha(ip) is good
| enough
| quesomaster9000 wrote:
| With little over 4 billion IPv4 addresses.
|
| From a stackoverflow post from 12 years ago:
|
| > I know I do 622 million SHA-256's per sec on a Radeon
| HD5830.
|
| Which would take around 6 seconds to brute force a 32bit
| address space.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| you can just salt it with some stable random thing
| toast0 wrote:
| In which case you can just take 6 seconds to generate all
| the new hashes and build a new lookup table.
| operator-name wrote:
| You can further add bucketing, and eventually move closer
| to FLoC.
|
| But this is aside the point, as the spirit of the law
| only allows "processing for legitimate interests". The
| use of technology, cookies or on the server is
| irrelevant. If thread OP has evaluated their
| collection[0] as legitimate, they can use whatever
| technology within guidelines. Otherwise, even a cookie
| less data collection would require consent.
|
| [0]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-
| protectio...
| seri4l wrote:
| I apologize for the double negative. What I meant is that
| hashing doesn't improve privacy because if you know the
| hash and the hashing function it's easy to build a
| hashmap of all the possible IPv4s (around 3.5B). Unless
| the hash uses some sort of expensive key derivation
| function, but that doesn't scale.
| GordonS wrote:
| You could simply salt the hash, though you'd need to
| treat the salt as a secret.
|
| Alternatively, you could use a new salt every day, which
| would only allow you to track an individual for a 24 hour
| period (likely enough for many).
| mtkhaos wrote:
| Local Storage?
|
| Cookies are just a Dumb Implementation and only persist due to
| advertising.
| Rygian wrote:
| GDPR is about tracking, not about cookies.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| GDPR isn't "about tracking", it isn't even about computers,
| it's _General_ data protection regulation. If your local
| grocer keeps a regular customer 's record on paper to give
| you discounts, that's covered by the GDPR.
|
| See the UK Gov summary site here: https://www.gov.uk/data-
| protection
|
| Or detailed law here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/
| 2018/12/contents/enacte...
|
| And note Part 1 section 3 points 4 and 7: " _' Processing',
| in relation to information, means an operation or set of
| operations which is performed on information, or on sets of
| information, such as-- (a)collection, recording,
| organisation, structuring or storage_" and " _"Filing
| system" means any structured set of personal data which is
| accessible according to specific criteria, whether held by
| automated means or manually_ ".
| Veuxdo wrote:
| You can't use LS or anything like that to get around GDPR.
| arendtio wrote:
| How about tracking the users pulse while he reads your website
| via his smartwatch. Wouldn't that give you even more insights
| into the emotional journey?
|
| My point is: You have to draw the line somewhere (and I think
| the GDPR line is very reasonable). If you are a business
| relying on having a perfect website, you can use other means
| like UX labs.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| For some reason my empathy-o-meter isn't really registering
| your plight. Look, the needle isn't budging, not even a bit.
| dingledork69 wrote:
| Sure you can. Just stop crying because you can't share data
| about your users with 3rd parties without asking them first and
| get over it.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| My violin is probably small-medium sized for this problem.
|
| You can talk to your users in person and ask them, or poll them
| via email. Do usability tests etc. I guess it just costs more.
|
| Other industries have to do this, they can't just default-spy
| on their customers.
| unmole wrote:
| > or poll them via email
|
| Marketing survey emails are infinitely more annoying than
| cookies.
| kmlx wrote:
| > You can talk to your users in person and ask them
|
| doesn't scale.
|
| > poll them via email
|
| doesn't work.
|
| > default-spy on their customers
|
| analytics is not spying.
| pydry wrote:
| You can poll them via pop ups.
|
| Ive seen this done a couple of times. The sites took care
| to make it unobtrusive, sensibly placed and with short,
| meaningful questions.
|
| Frankly I think the data they got drove better decisions
| than analytics.
|
| I liked that they let you write a message too.
| GordonS wrote:
| I like this method. Earlier today I filled in some gov
| forms online, and at the end it asked if I'd like to do a
| short survey on my experience - I was happy to oblige,
| because I have a personal interest in service
| improvement.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| >doesn't scale
|
| Yes it does. Have you never heard of a survey?
|
| >doesn't work
|
| It absolutely can. For instance, polling via newsletter is
| rather effective.
|
| >analytics is not spying.
|
| If it contains any personally identifiable information that
| is not required by law, then yes. Yes it fucking is.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I'm not in agreement with the top comment's cookie needs,
| but no. Surveys are not comparable to using
| analytics/tracking to determine user behavior.
|
| Surveys measure what people say and are sporadically
| filled out. Cookies measure what people do with
| granularity and accuracy and will have near 100%
| coverage.
|
| People aren't concerned about spying via survey because
| they're not even in the same realm of effectiveness.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > If it contains any personally identifiable information
| that is not required by law, then yes. Yes it fucking is.
|
| wahwahwah
| vharuck wrote:
| >doesn't scale.
|
| Much of the math behind surveys is based on finite samples
| taken from infinite populations. It scales really, really
| well. You just have to make sure your samples aren't
| totally biased, which is a little more difficult. But there
| are ways to reduce those problems, if you're aware of how
| the bias is introduced.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| you don't need scale, you need good data
| charcircuit wrote:
| Good data requires statistical significance which needs
| scale
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| you only need 5 people to test poison
| alex-moon wrote:
| Yeah so I run/build/maintain a platform in the public survey
| space and we have a feedback box for users at the end. This
| box is a really good source for feedback, don't get me wrong,
| but a lot of the feedback is "When I hit the button, nothing
| happens" or "Totally broken, completely unusable" both of
| which are useless to us. These users clearly want us to fix
| something, but we have no visibility on what that is.
| reportgunner wrote:
| I'm 85% sure the problem they have is a problem you can't
| fix.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Have you ever actually responded to an email poll and not
| just unsubscribe/block the emails?
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Yes
| reportgunner wrote:
| > _I can 't even say how many users this site has now._
|
| > _I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy
| so they come back more often._
|
| > _I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware,
| software, language. Because I wouldn 't see if users affected
| come back less often._
|
| > _I can 't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps
| users discover important features. Because I can't make the
| connection between showing the text early on in the user
| journey and usage of features later on. Because I can't see a
| user journey._
|
| Why don't you just ask your users about these things ?
| phh wrote:
| Not really cookie-less and it can be considered a regression
| compared to cookies because of JS, but something that can work
| is doing stats + anonymization client-side.
|
| You can store information client-side, without sending them
| over network, but randomly send digests back to your server.
|
| For instance you can store a counter of the times the user went
| to visit the website, and randomly with a 1% probability send
| that counter to your server. (It's better to make it random,
| because if you send every +=1 you would end up being able to
| track users).
|
| At my work, I do a lot of statistics of user usage, but I
| always work to do my best not to leak PII. I'm not a security
| or privacy researcher, so my work is probably not great but
| still, the way I do it I believe is largely private:
|
| - No unique ID sent, but a daily digest (some people send every
| single event to their statistics server, and thus need a unique
| ID to know how many time one person did one action. With a
| digest that already counts the actions there is no need)
|
| - bucketized persistent data: for example the available storage
| size of the device the app is running on. Sending precise value
| would make it easier to track digests from one day to the other
| and track users
|
| - For booleans, add some white noise (because 20 booleans is
| enough to identify someone)
|
| - For open-ended information (for instance the list of
| countries contacted by your SMS app), booleanize it (one
| boolean per country, cf previous line), and maybe keep a
| counter to know how many you didn't take into account to know
| whether you're still missing a lot.
|
| Yes overall doing it with no PII requires much more work, but
| then Big Tech (and smaller techs like Clearview) clearly showed
| that any PII can and WILL be used against their users. The best
| way to never leak user's data remains to never have them in the
| first place.
| SanderNL wrote:
| This is similar to law enforcement saying: "You mean we cannot
| track everything you say and do. How in the world are we
| supposed to do our jobs safely and efficiently?" Answer is, you
| basically can't. Not safely and not (as) efficiently. Because
| the world will turn dystopian and will destroy the very thing
| we are trying to create/maintain. (Happiness, etc)
|
| It's nice to be able to A/B test your blog or product. It's
| cool and efficient, but it also hurts and to me that hurt
| outweighs your company's marginal benefits although it is a
| nuanced and difficult discussion to be fair. I'm being
| simplistic here to make the point clear. I hope.
| TekMol wrote:
| The difference is that keeping cookies is a user choice.
|
| You can set your browser to not store cookies at all.
|
| Or to discard cookies when you close it.
|
| Or you can delete cookies whenever you feel like.
| arendtio wrote:
| The problem is that there are good and bad cookies:
|
| - session cookie: good
|
| - tracking cookie: bad
|
| I remember a time when browsers would ask you for every
| website if you wanted to keep the cookies and because most
| cookies were good cookies, everybody agreed to accept them.
| Later came the ad industry and started to introduce bad
| cookies.
| arp242 wrote:
| > it also hurts
|
| How is simple analytics or A/B testing that's _NOT_ internet-
| wide tracking (that is, only for the website you 're on) or
| sold (which would be outright illegal without explicit
| consent) hurting you? Genuine question, because I don't see
| it. Internet-wide tracking across many sites: sure. But
| that's a very different thing - it's the difference between
| "I'm home Darling, I saw Sander at the mall today" vs. "Hello
| everyone, here is everything Sander did this week".
| andirk wrote:
| The data is that of "I have a person who likes monkey paws"
| and then they can sell that to the monkey paw conglomerate.
| Next thing you know you're getting monkey paws in the mail!
| arp242 wrote:
| The entire premise of my question is that data is kept
| private between the two parties (the website owner and
| the visitor). I don't see how this connects with that at
| all.
|
| And how do you even get someone's mail address without an
| extensive internet-wide profile (which, again, isn't what
| the premise of my question was in the first place)?
| chazhaz wrote:
| It's one thing to say that you'll keep the data private
| between you, but from the user's perspective there's no
| guarantee. Whether that's because you change your mind
| and decide to sell the user's data, or there's some sorta
| data breach, or or or.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I get the feeling. But to make things very simple, it's
| again like law enforcement tracking everything you say and
| do. Let's say it's a single agency, with a single employee
| doing the tracking to keep it easy.
|
| How is that hurting you? How is your every movement being
| tracked by a single agency such an issue? They said they
| would keep it private, pinky promise.
| mediascreen wrote:
| Law enforcement tracking everyone can have serious and
| unintended consequences in away that a SaaS tracking
| visits are unlikely to have.
|
| An extreme case is on the other side, is to compare
| simple site limited tracking to a coffee shop being able
| to see who enters the door. Why should they track how I
| look and the way I'm dressed? Does it make service harder
| if you have to work blindfolded? Though luck, my privacy
| is more important than your wish to provide your
| customers with good service.
| novok wrote:
| On it's face it is harder for baristas to be blindfolded.
| It would literally be a worse coffee shop at blindfolded
| baristas than normal coffee.
| Yizahi wrote:
| It's like like being issued a state mandated always online
| tracker and then police would say verbally that they
| promise not to abuse that data.
|
| And before people would nitpick my comment, metadata is
| surveillance. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/0
| 9/metadata_equa...
| arp242 wrote:
| I bet HN keeps server logs; would you say you're being
| surveilled by viewing this page and posting that comment?
| If not, why not? What's the difference between that
| metadata and any other?
| Yizahi wrote:
| Surveillance is a deliberate action. If some incidental
| metadata is temporarily stored at HN and then evicted and
| deleted permanently in reasonable timeframes then it is
| not a surveillance. But as soon as it's analyzed, and/or
| specifically stored for prolonged periods, and/or
| unnecessary metadata is collected (not required for basic
| tech support and server administration), and/or linked to
| the user profiles more than needed to save and display
| our posts - then it's surveillance.
|
| If I passed by your house and saw you walking your dog at
| 10:34 18/05/2023 and then promptly forgot about it, it is
| not a surveillance. If I set up a permanent observation
| post across the road from your door and will tail you
| daily everywhere you go - it's a surveillance. Even if I
| pinky promise that it is my own internal information and
| I would not share it, sell it, exchange it etc.
| arp242 wrote:
| > set up a permanent observation post across the road
| from your door and will tail you daily everywhere you go
|
| But I don't really see how that is happening here? I
| agree that would be bad, but merely checking "a user
| visited my website" is a very thing than seeing what
| someone does all over the interwebz. It's very
| questionable this minimum of information can even be
| tracked to you when done right.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| Of course they're being surveilled on Hacker News.
| Keeping a finger on the pulse here is the epitome of low
| hanging fruit for law enforcement and intelligence. Why
| would anyone suspect otherwise?
| SanderNL wrote:
| I'm not claiming the relation is causal. I don't know
| what happens between happy world -> happy world with
| constant surveillance -> dystopian hellscape. The same is
| true for HN logs. I'd say, yes those logs are a form of
| surveillance. If that matters is where the debate is.
| It's hard to say, because these things are slippery and
| take (a long) time.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Oh no. But that's how all desktop programs without telemetry
| work.
| danielrpa wrote:
| UIs were developed in the pre-web world without tracking or
| analytics. If you clearly explain that the cookie is for
| improving the UI and the user doesn't want it, it's because
| they don't care about it as much as you do.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You could _ask_ people! There is hardly a site I use day to day
| that I couldn 't send a ten paragraph rant about poor usability
| to the company, if that was socially permissible and felt like
| they'd care. There's hardly a site I use where I think the
| developers have ever used it themselves, or ever seen someone
| trying to use it, for that matter.
|
| > " _Because I can 't see a user journey._"
|
| Today's worst offender was trying to follow an invite and
| register an account within a company account, it took me two
| goes through the signup form, two attempts to edit my profile,
| trying to login to three different subdomains, one useless
| search of their documentation site, three error messages, two
| rounds of asking my coworker to check their admin side, before
| I saw the right thing to do. "You" (big silicon valley company)
| don't need tracking cookies to "see a user journey" or to tell
| you that "I really love your site because I keep coming back to
| it and looking around", you need to grab someone in a hallway
| and push them through the workflow and watch them fall on their
| face over and over.
|
| > " _I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10%
| in user experience can tank the business_ "
|
| Imagine how amazing websites would be if that were at all true.
| Have you seen the user experience of Amazon? or eBay? or
| Facebook? or 'new' GMail or new Reddit or non-websites like
| Teams or WebEx?
| layer8 wrote:
| > I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so
| they come back more often.
|
| Users coming back more often does not imply that they are
| happy. There's no substitute for actual user studies.
| glitcher wrote:
| "We value your privacy" is usually a true statement about the
| monetary value a company places on exploiting your privacy,
| masquerading as a moral value statement.
| sebastian_z wrote:
| As a successor of Do Not Track, there is Global Privacy Control
| (GPC) [1]. Sites must respect it by law in California. An
| increasing number of other states ---Colorado, Connecticut,
| Montana, and hopefully more soon --- also have provisions in
| their new privacy laws for privacy preference signals like GPC.
| You can check if a site respects GPC [2]. For example, lego.com
| and nfl.com are two bigger ones I recently came across.
|
| Disclosure: I am a privacy researcher and co-founder of GPC.
|
| [1] https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ [2] https://gpcsup.com/
| Gys wrote:
| Because they also want everything for free.
| hourago wrote:
| > Because they also want everything for free.
|
| Maybe people just goes to the cheaper option available because
| increasing inequality has left millions with no disposable
| income.
|
| This is the same logic by which people prefers cheap furniture
| instead of high quality one. It is not a preference for cheap
| but it is just what they can afford, if they had more money
| most people will get the higher quality version and pay the
| price.
| Gys wrote:
| > Maybe people just goes to the cheaper option available
| because increasing inequality has left millions with no
| disposable income.
|
| No disposable income would mean not being able to spend
| money, meaning never buy anything. If this was true the ad
| industry would very quickly run bankrupt. And yet the
| revenues of Google and Facebook indicate otherwise.
| hiatus wrote:
| Even without disposable income, advertising can still lead
| to people choosing alternatives and directing their spend
| someplace else, so your conclusion does not follow. If
| someone is maxing out their income they can still be
| advertised to to get them to switch consumption habits.
| nologic01 wrote:
| the consent charade is a constant reminder that the modern
| digital economy is based on large scale deceit and is therefore
| fundamentally unstable.
|
| yet nothing is done about it, as if it is not important, as if
| digital tech is not the main, if not only, "driver of future
| economic growth".
|
| you cannot build a stable economy (well at least not of a
| democratic, free market kind) relying on complete ignorance and
| regulatory capture.
|
| anybody who has leverage on the matter and is not doing something
| about it is complicit in a gigantic, generational level
| misallocation of resources that will eventually have to be
| written of.
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| alex-moon wrote:
| Hi! It me, the hapless nerd who goes, "Sites need this data to
| use analytics to improve their services."
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I would assign the probability of them using this data to
| improve their services at well under 1%.
| jhpacker wrote:
| Hey, 3x more people clicked that then "I've reviewed the site's
| terms and they are acceptable to me." :)
| Haga wrote:
| [dead]
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I'm more curious about the question of 'who wants free content'.
|
| Because that's really the question here. Would I prefer
| everything in my life was free with no strings attached?
| Obviously.
|
| But youtube/news/reddit/facebook/literally any website needs to
| make money somehow, and non tracked ads pay rediculously lower
| amounts(90+%). So the real question is, would you trade what is
| essentially anonymous tracking (literally no one at Google gives
| a damn who you are, it's just a unique id fed into an algorithm)
| for content, or would you rather pay for each and every site on
| the internet?
| alkonaut wrote:
| I'm happy to enter any sort of transparent business transaction
| of information-for--content or money-for-content.
|
| But that's not what the adtech web is, and that's why it needs
| to die.
|
| I'd be absolutely delighted to see 99% of ad funded content and
| services wiped off the face of the web tomorrow, even if a lot
| of it is stuff I use and enjoy. Which is why I'm bullish on
| "nuclear options" for regulation such as binding DNT to GDPR,
| or making opt out default and not even allowing pop-up opt in,
| or suing a few large companies into bankruptcy for using
| consent dark pattens or other slight violations, just to make
| an example.
|
| Because it's not that ads would be banned by that. It's
| tracking and micro targeted ads. And while ads may be necessary
| to provide "free" services, we need to get away from the idea
| that the only ads worth showing are ones with precise targeting
| and advance led fraud countermeasures.
| nullc wrote:
| Your dichotomy ignores other possibilities. To what extent are
| we stuck on costly distribution models specifically because
| those are the ones you can tap for a revenue stream, to what
| extent are the costs driven by the monetization itself?
|
| I used to help out with the technical infrastructure for
| wikipedia and even as the 8th most trafficked site on the
| internet the cost was _radically_ lower than that of some of my
| dayjob customers with comparable levels of traffic. A non-
| trivial part of the reason for that was that it didn 't need
| all the surveillance and realtime per-request bespoke
| generation that advertisement encumbered services require. Part
| of it was just that there is an awful lot of fat in big
| commercial operations, since they have enough revenue that it's
| not a concern. Some is probably because when you're chasing ad
| dollars the extra spend required to get a 30 ms response
| instead of a 60ms response might be justified on the basis of
| the marginal clicks it generates, but those costs shouldn't
| properly be considered part of the underlying distribution
| costs.
|
| I think "yes, I'd be happy to pay for all of it" would be
| significantly more attractive if paying meant just the
| component of the cost that actually went to the authors of the
| material -- on the order of a hundredth of a cent per view.
| Here is $1, that'll cover the authors share of all my
| household's youtube viewing for the next several years.
| neon_electro wrote:
| For me, personally, I invest enough time watching YouTube for
| Premium to be worth it solely to avoid ads.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I'm told that this is how cable used to work. Ads aren't just
| a necessary annoyance that goes with no-fee products, it's a
| way to turn users into money and so will be with us no matter
| how much or little we're asked to pay.
| xigoi wrote:
| Have you noticed that there are many people making cool stuff
| for free?
| Zealotux wrote:
| I don't understand why we still don't have a standard for a
| built-in tracking preferences system in browsers. We have that
| for the microphone, webcam, and location access... why do we let
| websites control tracking preferences with their own design they
| can make as obscure and manipulative as they wish?
| layer8 wrote:
| Because there are legitimate uses for cookies etc. that do not
| require consent, like for example for shopping carts. But you
| can't distinguish them from consent-requiring tracking in an
| automated fashion. In addition, there are finger-printing
| techniques that are virtually impossible to prevent, so
| websites would just start to rely more on those. It's a bit
| like asking "why don't we just block spam mails?"
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 94% of people want me to be president. Caveat: I did not define
| what it means for them to want me to be president.
|
| In other words, what does it mean to be "tracked"? How was the
| question worded? You can change this value from 1% all the way up
| to 99% depending on how you ask the question, because "being
| tracked" is open to interpretation.
|
| Truly a useless poll.
| jhpacker wrote:
| Hi, the exact wording on the poll was "If given the option, I
| would prefer not to be tracked online."
|
| The reason why I didn't define "tracked" for the people taking
| the poll is that I think that's the most representative way to
| replicate the question that consent boxes are theoretical
| asking, but in an abstract way out of the context of a specific
| website. When a user sees that consent box, they have little to
| no idea of what tracking is actually happening.
| api_or_ipa wrote:
| Someone should do a talk a la "Birth and Death of Javascript"[0]
| on the topic of cookies. What started nearly 30 years ago as a
| crude means of storing state over a stateless protocol spawned an
| entire industrial ecosystem around systematically tracking and
| spying on internet users. Take a step back and it's an insane
| journey.
|
| 0 https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
| gostsamo wrote:
| [flagged]
| anotheronebytes wrote:
| My question would be "who is able to NOT be tracked?"
| sundvor wrote:
| Related: 99.999% of users don't read T&C's, so why do consent
| checkboxes exist?
|
| (I made the number up, but I'd be very surprised if I am off by
| magnitudes).
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Why did nobody tell the GDPR folks to require websites and
| browsers use one standard interface for the permission updates?
| It could have been so simple. Just let the browser prompt me so I
| can tell the browser once and for all what I want. Instead it
| created a website UX virus.
| gsatic wrote:
| Cause the prob being solved by search rankings, newsfeeds, maps
| etc is info overload. People forget that all the time.
|
| There is too much info out there. Context about the user shrinks
| the ever growing info sphere.
| arendtio wrote:
| Does someone know why it is legal that in some countries websites
| are allowed to offer layers that offer a paid version and a
| tracking enabled version (very popular among newspapers)?
|
| As far as I understand the GDPR, there should be no downside to
| rejecting the tracking technologies. And Websites relying on
| advertising, could do so with unpersonalized ads (granted with
| very different metrics).
|
| Nevertheless, to me it feels, like these paid vs tracked offers
| are not what the authors of the GDPR intended.
| tpxl wrote:
| You mustn't reject service based on refusal of non-legitimate-
| reason data processing consent. Allowing paying to not have ads
| is orthogonal to the service being provided - in both cases the
| user gets the news, it's just flanked by ads in one case.
| arendtio wrote:
| Well, I don't have a problem with the paid version. What I
| have have a problem with, is the refusal of service if I
| don't consent to being tracked. So if there would be three
| versions, like 'personalized ads with tracking', 'tracking-
| free/unpersonalized ads' and 'paid ad-free', that would be
| fine with me.
|
| What I don't understand, is that it is okay to refuse the
| service if you don't consent for the ad-supported tracking
| version. I mean, not giving your consent, means you have to
| pay if you want to use the service. Doesn't feel like you
| have a free choice (pun intended).
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe it's for the same reason that a pay-only service
| is legal.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I have a notion to test cookie banners, to check whether it makes
| any difference whether you [Accept] or [Reject]. I strongly
| suspect that for many sites, it doesn't.
|
| Many sites seem to be offering a choice of [Accept] or
| [Settings]. I've never clicked on [Settings]; it might as well
| lead to a goatse, as far as I care. I don't want to choose
| options on a cookie banner at all, so why would I opt to see a
| complete separate page of options?
| titzer wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > "We value your privacy..."
|
| There's a special place in hell for the originators of this
| Orwellian triple-speak. Three meanings overlapped: meant to give
| users the impression that "we _respect_ your privacy " or "we
| _protect_ your privacy "--but it doesn't say that. It says they
| _value_ your privacy, which is literally true; they 're happy to
| put a dollar amount on it and sell or mine it, because it's _of
| value to them_. That 's two true senses; one inferred and one
| real. But the second gives rise to the third, Orwellian meaning:
| these people actually don't value your privacy at all. It's a
| _lie_ , pure and simple. A special kind of lie that has such a
| flippant, corporate-speak, technically-accurate dry meaning that
| is meant for a court of law--it holds up when lawyers start
| arguing long technicalities before a judge--but just one level
| deeper it is despairingly careless and dystopian.
|
| When I see this phrase I just know I don't want whatever it is
| these people are going to do with my data. They benefit and I
| don't.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| As a rule, the more that marketing language tries to imply
| something, the less it is likely to be true.
|
| See e.g. "fat free" labels on sugar-candy.
| jhpacker wrote:
| This is a great way to unpack that phrase, thank you! I started
| the article with that phrase because of the insincere absurdity
| of it exactly as you describe.
| glitcher wrote:
| Or said another way, they can't say "we take your privacy
| seriously" without first saying "we take your privacy"!
| kasperni wrote:
| My main problem is cross website tracking. I don't really have a
| problem with a website keeping track of all my visits to that
| particular website.
|
| I think it works similar in real life as well. You don't mind if
| a store clerk recognises you coming back to a shop. But you would
| be kind of creeped out if he also knew where and when you last
| visited your dentist.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm fine with them keeping my purchase history for example. And
| then maybe even sending me offers based on that. Now tracking
| what I viewed or browsed on their site get bit harder.
|
| And sharing with anyone else is right out.
| ajuc wrote:
| I recently tried to disable the consent to share my data with
| external companies on one website.
|
| There was "accept all" and "manage" buttons, and under the
| "manage" button there were 100s (yes, multiple 100s) of sites
| listed, each with consent on by default, and to disable
| everything I had to manually scroll through it all and click on
| each item.
| capkutay wrote:
| Anecdotal but my wife actually likes that she's fed such relevant
| ads on instagram and ends up researching and buying many of the
| products.
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