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Hello, I feel like taking some downvotes today. In the same way that a vendor can't force you to honor their intention for you to view, read, and seriously con
by cookiecaper 10y ago
Hello, I feel like taking some downvotes today.
In the same way that a vendor can't force you to honor their intention for you to view, read, and seriously consider the ads sent alongside their content, you can't force them to honor your intention to maintain privacy when you're visiting their servers. If it's fair game for you to mangle their content inside the browser before it gets presented to you, it's fair game for them to ask your browser to send back some bits so they can derive benefit they want. It's your responsibility to select a browser/extension combo that is providing the level of privacy and anonymity that you desire.
There's a bit of an escalatory reciprocal at work here; users demand more and more for free, and companies are left with fewer and fewer ways to get consumers to consciously pay for their goods and services.
I have never worked in adtech or user tracking, but I understand the mindset of those who do, and I don't feel that it's at all inherently evil, as some people make it out to be.
Part of the reason that sophisticated spam operations like private link rings and social media astroturfing are a required part of today's web marketing toolbox is because users are doing everything they possibly can to avoid seeing advertisements alongside their content. All this accomplishes is that ads migrate from explicitly-labeled boxes on the side of the page to the content sections, as "sponsored stories" on news sites, astroturfed comments on blogs, and stuffed product reviews on ecommerce sites.
I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with end-users running an ad blocker extension if that's what they want to do, and by no means am I suggesting any restriction on their freedom to do it. I run such an extension myself (though I usually wait until I come across a particularly egregious site to install it).
But by the same token, I don't think there's anything wrong with a company attempting to extract what data they can from a user's interaction with them, as long as it's voluntarily given by the user or the user's browser. There is no reason that they shouldn't be free to attempt to fingerprint individual users who are visiting their site, especially since in most cases, the goal is to enhance user experience by providing ads they might actually find relevant instead of asinine.
Just my two cents. I know it doesn't fit everyone's favorite narrative of "business trying to make money are evil", but I think this group of frequently-maligned developers deserve someone to stand up for them once in a while.
- hueving 10y agoYou are completely conflating two orthogonal topics: not wanting to view ads vs. wanting privacy. User A doesn't mind seeing ads, but user A doesn't want to be tracked by corporations that sell personal information so she clears cookies on each browser exit. User B hates ads because reason (malware, performance, distracting, etc), so he uses an ad blocker. He doesn't care about fingerprinting across sessions so he doesn't bother clearing cookies. Do you see how you are are throwing user A under the bus because you have a problem with user B? There is no excuse for trying to correlate users trying to maintain privacy as a response to an entirely different group of users using ublock.
- cookiecaper 10y agoI don't have a problem with either of your hypothetical users. I simply believe that it's the user's responsibility to ensure that their browser is not disclosing more information than they want. Servers are not committing any ethical violation by attempting to track unique user identities through non-disruptive utilization of normal browser features like cookies, plugins, and ETags. The unifying thing is that companies want to display ads, but users don't respect that want and employ technological solutions to block ads. That's all well and good. But by the same token, when a user wants to browse anonymously, there is no reason that servers shouldn't utilize the resources that are regularly available in a typical client-server exchange to attempt to identify the user. The only contrary argument is that companies should be forced to respect the user's wishes, just because the user wishes for it. That's not how the world works. If the user is concerned that their browser may be leaking information, they should take responsibility and ensure it isn't. It's not on the company's head to ensure that the user's wish for privacy is respected any more than it's on the user's head to ensure that the company's wish to display ads is respected.
- hueving 10y agoThis logic is all based on not having any ethical concerns about doing something the user didn't intend to participate in. If you don't care about ethics, then you could just extend your argument to say that exploiting vulnerabilities in the user's browser to install tracking code directly into the binary is acceptable as well. Are you okay with that logical conclusion? >The only contrary argument is that companies should be forced to respect the user's wishes, just because the user wishes for it. That's not how the world works. It actually is how much of the world works. What ends up happening is people with no regard for ethics keep abusing this until regulations get passed to force people to stop doing things they know people don't want.