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The article is about an organization called Californians for Consumer Privacy. They use Google and Facebook trackers. The key quote is this: “The irony of crit
by new299 8y ago
The article is about an organization called Californians for Consumer Privacy. They use Google and Facebook trackers. The key quote is this:
“The irony of criticizing Facebook and Google whilst using their services is not lost on us, but this gets back to our rationale for the initiative: Californians should be able to use these services and be secure that their personal information is not being sold. Right now this is not possible,...We end up with this Faustian bargain,”
Which doesn't really ring true. To me it sounds like the founder doesn't have a technical background, probably contracted out development of the site, and just went with "whatever they normally do". Because... come on... it's not that hard to get stats on users without passing the info over to Google/Facebook. Certainly not hard to get enough stats to run an effective campaign.
- Fnoord 8y agoClickbait title indeed, one organization doesn't mean all of them do this. That'd require an investigation (ie. real journalism) which this article so thoroughly lacks as the content can be summed up in two sentences. Sadly a sign of time.
- emodendroket 8y agoThe stats from Google are pretty sophisticated. But let's assume you're right. So what? Should only engineers be able to weigh in? Do I need to get a degree in chemistry before I can object to things getting dumped into drinking water?
- new299 8y agoNo, but I'd expect you not to dump chemicals in drinking water yourself? Personally, I feel it would be better to have people with more technical competence involved in the campaign, because it looks a bit sloppy aside from anything else.
- emodendroket 8y agoI suppose I see this as more akin to driving a car while arguing for more restrictions on carbon emissions. I'm not sure what the case is with these advocates, but in the nonprofit world a lot of times Google Analytics is used to determine what appeals are most effective or what pages people spend time on and it would be difficult to duplicate the sophistication of the tool. To me this is a little different than selling your data to advertisers.
- new299 8y agoYou proposed the initial analogy, so I was responding to that. Determining which appeals/email/campaigns are most effective is pretty trivial with open source tools, you don't need Google for this. Honestly part of the reason Google analytics is so successful is not because it's much better than anything else, it's because it's the de facto standard, and free, and people don't see an advantage to using anything else. The advantage to using something else (ideally self hosted, or at least that you're paying for) should be clear to a privacy advocate.
- emodendroket 8y agoSo what would you recommend instead?