3 ms·

I worked on a growth team so I confirm that you need data, but you can do a lot with agregate data. For example, you can run a campaign and see how that influen

I worked on a growth team so I confirm that you need data, but you can do a lot with agregate data. For example, you can run a campaign and see how that influences high-level metrics like total pagelands (using some kind of first-touch attribution model) and stuff like that. You don't always need individual user data points.

shostack 9y ago
I agree that most of what I care about is typically aggregate anonymous (to me) data. The nuance here though is that this data is often NOT anonymous or aggregate to the 3rd parties providing this tracking and collecting this data. Google and FB absolutely apply this data to an individual profile level. So while I might only see the anonymous aggregate data, my decision to include their tracking means I am making a decision on behalf of my users/visitors to share that data to parties for whom it will not be anonymous or aggregate, and it isn't a decision I take lightly. There is obviously legal protection in the form of Privacy Policies and ToS, but I feel there's an implicit social contract here as well.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > I am making a decision on behalf of my users/visitors to share that data to parties for whom it will not be anonymous or aggregate, and it isn't a decision I take lightly. A suggestion: that decision should be evaluated under the assumption that: 1) data doesn't go away (any data collected or sent to a 3rd party is usually permanent) 2) theft and accidental leaks happen, and 3) we don't know the worst ways data - of any type - can be abused, because those techniques haven't been invented yet (powerful analysis techniques are being invented at an incredible rate). The combination of these properties means that collecting and storing data creates unbounded risk. At any point in the future someone might invent a truly horrific way to abuse the stored data that was collected perhaps decades earlier. Humans are used to information being transient. Information decayed over time as memories were forgotten, paper/parchment/etc decayed over time. Books had to be copied to they risked being lost forever when the library burned. Claude Shannon's digital signals fundamentally changed all of that as they made it possible to automatically preserve information perfectly. Unfortunately, human intuition hasn't caught up to the idea of permanent data. The question "Should I trust $THIRD_PARTY with this data?" misses the full nuance of what is actually being risks. A better question is "Should we trust $THIRD_PARTY and anybody who buys/steals/subpoenas/etc it from $THIRD_PARTY with this data? What if they have analysis capabilities far more advanced than current techniques?".

shostack 9y ago

I agree that most of what I care about is typically aggregate anonymous (to me) data. The nuance here though is that this data is often NOT anonymous or aggregate to the 3rd parties providing this tracking and collecting this data. Google and FB absolutely apply this data to an individual profile level. So while I might only see the anonymous aggregate data, my decision to include their tracking means I am making a decision on behalf of my users/visitors to share that data to parties for whom it will not be anonymous or aggregate, and it isn't a decision I take lightly. There is obviously legal protection in the form of Privacy Policies and ToS, but I feel there's an implicit social contract here as well.

pdkl95 9y ago
> I am making a decision on behalf of my users/visitors to share that data to parties for whom it will not be anonymous or aggregate, and it isn't a decision I take lightly. A suggestion: that decision should be evaluated under the assumption that: 1) data doesn't go away (any data collected or sent to a 3rd party is usually permanent) 2) theft and accidental leaks happen, and 3) we don't know the worst ways data - of any type - can be abused, because those techniques haven't been invented yet (powerful analysis techniques are being invented at an incredible rate). The combination of these properties means that collecting and storing data creates unbounded risk. At any point in the future someone might invent a truly horrific way to abuse the stored data that was collected perhaps decades earlier. Humans are used to information being transient. Information decayed over time as memories were forgotten, paper/parchment/etc decayed over time. Books had to be copied to they risked being lost forever when the library burned. Claude Shannon's digital signals fundamentally changed all of that as they made it possible to automatically preserve information perfectly. Unfortunately, human intuition hasn't caught up to the idea of permanent data. The question "Should I trust $THIRD_PARTY with this data?" misses the full nuance of what is actually being risks. A better question is "Should we trust $THIRD_PARTY and anybody who buys/steals/subpoenas/etc it from $THIRD_PARTY with this data? What if they have analysis capabilities far more advanced than current techniques?".