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Why do you need this? Is it because you are paranoid of being tracked? UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is su

Why do you need this? Is it because you are paranoid of being tracked? UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing. Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn't protect your privacy. It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending. Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it. I feel there is a paranoia about being tracked and privacy, where anything that is somehow tracking, is evil and must be stopped. UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.

falcon620 8y ago
In my case: no privacy paranoia (I just assume everything is being tracked and there's very little I can do about it). I just hate a) having ugly URLs b) having to manually edit the URLS before copy/pasting them somewhere else. Many sites nowadays actually have thoughtfully designed URL schemes. But then there's so often this GA crap that destroys the esthetics. As an example, the URL that triggered me to go find this particular extension was: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/05/12/trumps-decision-to-blow-up-the-iran-deal-is-a-massive-attack-on-europe/?utm_term=.c4cd15b2caef https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/... (hex chars randomly manipulated for paranoid reasons, hehe.)
dpedu 8y ago
I strip these when manually sharing a URL for the sake of readability.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  I do the same thing, I would actually like a browser extension that strips the UTM code from my clipboard or from any sharing dialogue box. Sometimes this interferes (I have no idea why?) with link previews on social media, which is highly annoying.
Moru 8y ago
I understand that most people on hackernews sees advertising as something important and that the world would be a worse place without it. But not everyone are able to cope with the modern overload of information competing with our attention so you will have to excuse me for blocking out everything not needed. Its not all about privacy and conspiracy, some of us are just trying to avoid burnout.
- gk1 8y ago
  > ...some of us are just trying to avoid burnout. ... from UTM tags?
- noer 8y ago
  >But not everyone are able to cope with the modern overload of information competing with our attention so you will have to excuse me for blocking out everything not needed I'm not sure how UTM Tags contribute to the modern overload of information competing for your attention.
  - Moru 8y ago
    Im sure you realize that the tags are used for ads sooner or later.
noahth 8y ago
"makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending" ok but... so what? It's absolutely not my responsibility to make it easy for companies to manage their marketing spending. If companies don't like how difficult it is to track or manage their marketing spending, I, for one, won't be losing sleep over their hardship.
annabellish 8y ago
>Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it. Tracking of all kinds aren't inherently evil. If companies didn't abuse the various ways they tell us are "how the world works", then nobody would ever have needed tracking or ad blockers. Reality is that no matter how often marketing departments tell us that marketing is vital to the future of the species, people are generally running pretty short on goodwill in these areas. The responsible actors, if there are any, are swimming in a poisoned pond.
- _jal 8y ago
  Absolutely. Just to pile on a bit, folks who honestly believe in this line of thought should embrace that cliche about marketing being a conversation. Think about how you reacted to the last intrusive, nosey person you had to deal with. "No, I don't discuss my sex life or my wallet with someone I met in line at the coffee shop." I totally understand that metrics are needed to evaluate your plans. Problem is, there is a gradient of behavior your team as a whole gets up to, you don't like to talk about the things you do, and the far end of that gradient is some really smelly, nasty behavior. So in turn, my problem is I'd be fine with a certain degree of tracking, but I don't know exactly where the bad behavior starts. Once data leaks, it doesn't go away. So all of my decent moves involve overshooting and suppressing tracking I'd be OK with, just to be sure. I don't know a way out of this trap, sorry. Getting back to marketing-as-conversation, remember the rebellion over ad-popups? Yeah, that was a big moment of going so far the browser makers slapped you down. We heard all the same wailing, and yet somehow civilization survived. I'm pretty sure you can survive me refusing to allow you canvas-fingerprinting, or unlimited rights to run JS on my machine. Or even Urchin-tag-strippers.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    Rather than popups or popunders, ad companies just open a new tab for their ad. It's the same thing and pays the same. Civilization survived because nothing changed.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
jasonkostempski 8y ago
Marketing isn't evil, the marketing industry is.
- zentiggr 8y ago
  Seconded - marketing that sticks to "how can we put the most compelling description of <product> on our own site so that it is easily searchable" is absolutely cool. It's the other 99% that tries to suck all the information they can out of anyone they come in contact with, they need to go.
sugarpile 8y ago
(Modern) Advertising is a fundamental betrayal of human trust. Anything to hinder it is a step in the right direction, imo
lucideer 8y ago
> Marketing is not evil. This may be true in theory, but in practice countless examples are showing us—in news story after news story about company behaviours—that this is just not true in practice. Which is what counts. If you can come up with a way to regulate and/or discern those doing "evil" marketing from those doing benign marketing, please do. Until then, unless we can discern, marketing is effectively "evil".
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  Oh, the industry as it stands is absolutely evil. Marketing isn't inherently evil, but this instantion is. Also, it's not "paranoia" when you are being tracked. And while there's not much you can do, there's no reason to not do little things you can.
LandoCalrissian 8y ago
I'll pour one out for the poor marketing companies.
tinus_hn 8y ago
If I buy a product and they ask where I heard about it, I make a decision whether I want to tell them or not and if not, I will tell them nothing or if they insist on something, a lie. These parameters make the choice for me. They have no benefit for me but block my right to determine what I want to give away. You do not have a right to track me. As for these parameters being harmless to my privacy, I will be the judge of that. In my opinion everything that allows you to see something about me harms my privacy, so not allowing you to see it benefits my privacy. It’s just a matter of how much I allow you to harm my privacy.
- millstone 8y ago
  Podcasts are great at this. Sponsors create podcast-specific URLs which are advertised on the show. It's completely up to the listeners, and I find I'm happy to support my favorite podcasts by telling the sponsors where I heard about them by visiting the custom landing pages. Podcasting's zero-telemetry "just an audio file" nature makes the ads feel harmless too. Podcasts are an anachronism, but they're way less user-hostile than the web.
magissima 8y ago
UTMs are aesthetically unpleasing to me and that's all the reason I need to get rid of them.
DINKDINK 8y ago
>stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever. If marketing company derive value off of tracking a user then yes there clearly is a privacy value of stripping UTM from a url. You needn't be that creative to think of an example. client: "Hi I'd like to see what sort of flights you have available." "Hmm ok I see that you're linked to us from WealthyPeople.com, guess I'll mark up your ticket price" There are certainly are markets that open up when users allow themselves to be tracked but allowing users to consent to being surveilled is a fundamental right. The right to privacy is the right to be left alone.
taf2 8y ago
This issue will get worse... As people choose to remove transparent forms of tracking... utm parameters, cookies, etc... we find "better" ways that aren't as obvious. Really it's a choice... we can have clear tracking or we can have hidden tracking... blanket blocking is going to lead to a much harder to block and aware form of tracking. As the saying goes... "be careful what you wish for"
- Moru 8y ago
  We already have hidden tracking, another reason to blanket block everything.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Alternatively we could just regulate matters until the only way for them to make money is to stand in front of a frier and make french fries. Acting like this is a losing battle makes such a foregone conclusion. Marketing is like 0.0001% of the population its ok for the rest of us to disagree and regulate them to the degree required to ensure our continued wellbeing even if this means regulating them virtually out of existence.
  - unpopular42 8y ago
    You, yourself, personally, are about .000000013% of the population. Is it ok for the rest of us to regulate you out of existence? I feel like this is required to ensure our continued wellbeing, given that you spend time spreading utter idiocy.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      In the united states we hold that people have a right to exist and a right to freely express themselves. Even express yourself like you are right now. However both commercial speech and collection of personal data may be subject to both regulation and technical limitation without raising a constitutional question unlike you know killing people with inconvenient ideas. Your industry is odious and if 90% of it dies not much will be lost. You don't have a right to make a living in a certain fashion if the way you make a living is detrimental to the rest of us. Even if I'm the 0.000000013% I and people like myself who don't work in marketing are the 99.999% Our well being matters more than your paycheck. Personal data collection has a good chance to effect millions negatively in the coming years and I can't imagine why we who stand to lose wouldn't regard people like yourself as the enemy. If you don't like making french fries apply whatever useful skills you possess to good ends elsewhere.
fwdpropaganda 8y ago
> Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn't protect your privacy. Yes it does.
jlarocco 8y ago
Honestly, I don't care. I just don't trust that companies won't covertly use them for tracking. I don't plan on using this extension, though, because I block all of the Google Analytics javascript files.
- fredsanford 8y ago
  In that case, they can parse the data from the referrer logs.
danmg 8y ago
The fact this elicits such a strong response is proof that it's needed.
kenneth 8y ago
Because the user experience sucks. I hate copying a URL and have a bunch of meaningless garbage included in wherever I paste it, as happens with pages that leaves UTM artifacts in the query string. I don't care at all about the tracking aspect of removing UTM, I care about how it makes the internet shittier to use.
- harry-wood 8y ago
  Exactly. But not just when copying a URL. Short, simple URLs look nicer and feel better. This is basic web design, but somewhere along the line we've allowed salesy/marketing nonsense to infest our web. This spells out the issues really well (with a funny video) https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url The suggested solution on there "Fresh URL" is interesting, although it's throwing more javascript at the problem.
tzahola 8y ago
I don’t care about their marketing campaigns. I consider marketing inherently harmful, as it uses up resources that would have been spent on improving the actual product.
phyzome 8y ago
"This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing." World's tiniest violin, dude.
- gowld 8y ago
  Do you have a job that pays you with funds generated by marketed goods and services?
  - russh 8y ago
    Yes, as a matter fact I do. I work for an ISP and we don't track shit except whether you paid your bill or not.
  - Trundle 8y ago
    Irrelevant. That's like asking why someone is moving a tiny car around a board while playing monopoly just because they had suggested poker for games night. Someone can prefer the world be a different way while still participating in it as is.
  - zentiggr 8y ago
    Would employees still get paid if their company didn't sell their information, or buy others'? Unethical marketing behavior is never going to be the make or break point for a company, it's just plain greed showing through.
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Sure! But that's neither here nor there. 1) I don't have a choice, since everyone does it; 2) many types of marketing are just fine; 3) if everyone stopped doing this kind of tracking, it's not like the businesses would fail.
draw_down 8y ago
Who said they need it? Changing query strings is also not evil. It’s something that can happen on the web and marketers need to deal with that. I can’t believe the sanctimony of this comment.
nkrisc 8y ago
> It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending. Frankly, that's not my problem. I don't know what they're tracking and why, but I'll err on the side of not being tracked, however harmless it may appear.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
You know, I tried politely setting Do-Not-Track in my headers to express my preferences. The marketers and publishers laughed and ignored my expressed preferences. So now all I can do is fight back any way I know how. What I really want is an extension that somehow corrupts the UTM data so that the trackers have bad data.
- wumpus 8y ago
  Hm, I could supply a list of utm parameters observed in the wild. Then you could substitute a randomly picked but valid set of parameters...
  - virtzzz 8y ago
    The only problem with that is that they'd have no idea the data would be bad. Even if they did, there's nothing stopping the marketers from taking the bad data as proof one or the other campaign was actually working.
    - wumpus 8y ago
      I'm OK with both of those "problems".
deleted 8y ago
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ggg9990 8y ago
How did poor advertisers manage when advertising was on TV and billboards and couldn’t be tracked?
- zentiggr 8y ago
  How did poor advertisers manage when advertising was hiring hawkers to stand on street corners and holler out the ad messages?
ChoGGi 8y ago
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on. Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt. Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt. Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water. I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech. Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches. --amicusNYCL https://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8027411&cid=50545331 https://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8027411&cid=5054...
gwbas1c 8y ago
Marketing worked without this kind of tracking for the entire 20th century.
monochromatic 8y ago
I never consented to being tracked, and it provides me no benefits whatsoever. The number of times I’ve made a purchase based on internet advertising can be counted on one hand—probably on a hand without any fingers. I don’t give a damn if stripping garbage out of urls makes it harder for a company to track me. Why should I?
rosser 8y ago
I don't "owe" a business I interact with "clean" data on how well their marketing campaigns are working. The extent of my obligation to J. Random Web Business, vis à vis my interactions with them, is to give them their asking price in exchange for their product or service offerings which I consume.
- hinkley 8y ago
  The tool at the hardware store should cost $30 no matter how badly I need it. Capitalism doesn’t agree with this but Society does. It’s considered predatory to use “too much data” when negotiating with a customer. This is literally a movie trope. Ad absurdum: imagine if a restaurant could charge you more for food if they knew how hungry you were, or how badly you needed to go to the bathroom. This is not information they need to possess.
creatonez 8y ago
>transparent Reddit immediately redirects to hide these parameters. Definitely not transparent. Transparent would be: you're aware about the tracking before it can happen
denzil_correa 8y ago
The paranoia comes from the lack of transparency and "Informed Consent" about tracking.
ordu 8y ago
> UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. Thank you for the offer, but I need no tracking of my movements. > Marketing is not evil. It is evil. Every time I search for info, I need to filter out all the marketing bullshit from google results. All marketing is a lie or at least a manipulation with one goal to make me buy something that I wouldn't buy otherwise. So I will do all I can to make life of marketers harder. I just hate them for all their informational white noise in the Internet.
Trundle 8y ago
I don't see what the sentence "its how the world works" has to do with "marketing is not evil". At least not for your argument.
textmode 8y ago
According to Github the author is affiliated with Pinterest. Perhaps he or Pinterest has a need for this. Outside of the browser, I routinely work with urls in bulk and strip them of unnecessary cruft to make them as short as possible and thus easier for me to store and manage. Cruft attached to urls for tracking purposes serves me no purpose and makes for longer urls and potentially more special characters like ampersands to worry about escaping or encoding. This add-on cruft is not necessary to retrieve the resource identified by the url.
pvg 8y ago
This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing. It is totally not important to me or anyone I want to give a URL to.
ouid 8y ago
>Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it. I can request information about products that I might be interested in. The nice thing about this is that I can request it from a source that I consider to be objective, in the context of alternatives. Moreover, I think you would probably consider it evil if a tech review service were receiving money under the table from say, Intel, to say that their products were better than their competition. Why should I be forced to allow Intel to make those claims directly through injected javascript or whatever? Advertising from the source is intrinsically dishonest.
nialv7 8y ago
How does making company impossible to track me not protecting my privacy? And I think there is a cognitive gap in your argument: I am a user, I am not a company, I am not trying to sell anything to anyone. So why should I be empathic towards marketing? Ads, marketing and tracking does zero, if not negative, good to me. And that is why I will have ad blockers enabled at all time. > Marketing is not evil Whether it's evil or not doesn't concern me. I just really don't like them. > UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever. Again, care to explain why is there not privacy benefit?
andrei_says_ 8y ago
Exactly, stripping UTM just screws with the results of (often small) businesses using google analytics trying to figure what campaigns/content efforts work. GA does not provide any individually identifiable info to its users. Stripping the params does not prevent google from tracking you internally. So I am not sure what this is trying to accomplish.
matheusmoreira 8y ago
Nobody felt the need to justify tracking the personal information of billions of people for their own benefits. Nobody asked if we were OK with it; they just did it. Nobody offered us any compensation for this supposedly valuable data they were gathering about us and our daily lives. Nobody offered us so much as an explanation or made any effort at being transparent about data gathering; they just put up a cryptic terms of service document at the footer of the page that say "we reserve the right to collect this data because reasons". If people hadn't become "paranoid" about user tracking, we wouldn't even have found out about how extensive it is and how much companies share with governments in the first place. So why do we have to justify anything to corporations? Why should we care if they lose some millions marketing to the wrong people? Not our problem. Honestly, it's the company's own fault for trusting user input so blindly. Tracking users is not a right, it is a privilege and it can be revoked.
deviationblue 8y ago
Pay me for my information. That's how the world works- no free lunches. But apparently there are.
vladus2000 8y ago
Bill Hicks does a good job of explaining my thoughts on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 But on a more serious note, while I somewhat agree that not all marketing is evil, some absolutely is. I do not consider the marketing that cigarette companies did to knowingly hook kids on an addictive, cancer causing substance a good thing; I find it rather evil. Since it can be used for evil, I would rather make it as difficult as possible for them to use it against me. It might be a mostly pointless exercise, but it makes me feel better about it.
- dingaling 8y ago
  Even Bill Hicks relied on marketing to advertise his shows.
  - ionised 8y ago
    Was he tracking all of his fans?
  - zentiggr 8y ago
    Once again someone fails to separate passive marketing that provides knowledge about a product and allows customers to decide, from active marketing that seeks to manipulate and deceive.
_o_ 8y ago
It is not harmless. As far I am concerned, it is no problem if you track it with your own analytics like piwik. For that part I don't care (unless you are having urls like aliexpress). But giving those information to 3rd party is something else.
deleted 8y ago
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zippitydoodah68 8y ago
Let's see. 1. They get my browser transmitted information as corollary to my browsing habits which they then resell, pester me with, and analyze in order to create a dialectic which is flawed, impersonal and does not necessarily profit me. 2. Ergo: since when should I care about a random companies spend when they (indirectly) determine what I am spending in the first place? 3. If you really believe that tracking and an open society are good things make them available to all and offer them to everyone. I predict that will go badly. Self interest being what it is whether corporate or individual.
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
I don't want to participate in your multiple channel marketing, thank you very much.
krageon 8y ago
There's a whole slew of arguments that could be made here, but let's keep it simple: Providing anyone with information about me should be a voluntary act. If I choose not to do so, it is none of your or anyone else's business why I do not want to. This choice is not available in the case of UTM's, at least not in a transparent way that doesn't involve manually stripping them from every URL you click (which is sensitive to user error).

falcon620 8y ago

In my case: no privacy paranoia (I just assume everything is being tracked and there's very little I can do about it). I just hate a) having ugly URLs b) having to manually edit the URLS before copy/pasting them somewhere else. Many sites nowadays actually have thoughtfully designed URL schemes. But then there's so often this GA crap that destroys the esthetics. As an example, the URL that triggered me to go find this particular extension was: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/05/12/trumps-decision-to-blow-up-the-iran-deal-is-a-massive-attack-on-europe/?utm_term=.c4cd15b2caef https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/... (hex chars randomly manipulated for paranoid reasons, hehe.)

dpedu 8y ago

I strip these when manually sharing a URL for the sake of readability.

partiallypro 8y ago
I do the same thing, I would actually like a browser extension that strips the UTM code from my clipboard or from any sharing dialogue box. Sometimes this interferes (I have no idea why?) with link previews on social media, which is highly annoying.

Moru 8y ago

I understand that most people on hackernews sees advertising as something important and that the world would be a worse place without it. But not everyone are able to cope with the modern overload of information competing with our attention so you will have to excuse me for blocking out everything not needed. Its not all about privacy and conspiracy, some of us are just trying to avoid burnout.

gk1 8y ago
> ...some of us are just trying to avoid burnout. ... from UTM tags?
noer 8y ago
>But not everyone are able to cope with the modern overload of information competing with our attention so you will have to excuse me for blocking out everything not needed I'm not sure how UTM Tags contribute to the modern overload of information competing for your attention.
- Moru 8y ago
  Im sure you realize that the tags are used for ads sooner or later.

noahth 8y ago

"makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending" ok but... so what? It's absolutely not my responsibility to make it easy for companies to manage their marketing spending. If companies don't like how difficult it is to track or manage their marketing spending, I, for one, won't be losing sleep over their hardship.

annabellish 8y ago

>Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it. Tracking of all kinds aren't inherently evil. If companies didn't abuse the various ways they tell us are "how the world works", then nobody would ever have needed tracking or ad blockers. Reality is that no matter how often marketing departments tell us that marketing is vital to the future of the species, people are generally running pretty short on goodwill in these areas. The responsible actors, if there are any, are swimming in a poisoned pond.

_jal 8y ago
Absolutely. Just to pile on a bit, folks who honestly believe in this line of thought should embrace that cliche about marketing being a conversation. Think about how you reacted to the last intrusive, nosey person you had to deal with. "No, I don't discuss my sex life or my wallet with someone I met in line at the coffee shop." I totally understand that metrics are needed to evaluate your plans. Problem is, there is a gradient of behavior your team as a whole gets up to, you don't like to talk about the things you do, and the far end of that gradient is some really smelly, nasty behavior. So in turn, my problem is I'd be fine with a certain degree of tracking, but I don't know exactly where the bad behavior starts. Once data leaks, it doesn't go away. So all of my decent moves involve overshooting and suppressing tracking I'd be OK with, just to be sure. I don't know a way out of this trap, sorry. Getting back to marketing-as-conversation, remember the rebellion over ad-popups? Yeah, that was a big moment of going so far the browser makers slapped you down. We heard all the same wailing, and yet somehow civilization survived. I'm pretty sure you can survive me refusing to allow you canvas-fingerprinting, or unlimited rights to run JS on my machine. Or even Urchin-tag-strippers.
- true_religion 8y ago
  Rather than popups or popunders, ad companies just open a new tab for their ad. It's the same thing and pays the same. Civilization survived because nothing changed.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago

jasonkostempski 8y ago

Marketing isn't evil, the marketing industry is.

zentiggr 8y ago
Seconded - marketing that sticks to "how can we put the most compelling description of <product> on our own site so that it is easily searchable" is absolutely cool. It's the other 99% that tries to suck all the information they can out of anyone they come in contact with, they need to go.

sugarpile 8y ago

(Modern) Advertising is a fundamental betrayal of human trust. Anything to hinder it is a step in the right direction, imo

lucideer 8y ago

> Marketing is not evil. This may be true in theory, but in practice countless examples are showing us—in news story after news story about company behaviours—that this is just not true in practice. Which is what counts. If you can come up with a way to regulate and/or discern those doing "evil" marketing from those doing benign marketing, please do. Until then, unless we can discern, marketing is effectively "evil".

stochastic_monk 8y ago
Oh, the industry as it stands is absolutely evil. Marketing isn't inherently evil, but this instantion is. Also, it's not "paranoia" when you are being tracked. And while there's not much you can do, there's no reason to not do little things you can.

LandoCalrissian 8y ago

I'll pour one out for the poor marketing companies.

tinus_hn 8y ago

If I buy a product and they ask where I heard about it, I make a decision whether I want to tell them or not and if not, I will tell them nothing or if they insist on something, a lie. These parameters make the choice for me. They have no benefit for me but block my right to determine what I want to give away. You do not have a right to track me. As for these parameters being harmless to my privacy, I will be the judge of that. In my opinion everything that allows you to see something about me harms my privacy, so not allowing you to see it benefits my privacy. It’s just a matter of how much I allow you to harm my privacy.

millstone 8y ago
Podcasts are great at this. Sponsors create podcast-specific URLs which are advertised on the show. It's completely up to the listeners, and I find I'm happy to support my favorite podcasts by telling the sponsors where I heard about them by visiting the custom landing pages. Podcasting's zero-telemetry "just an audio file" nature makes the ads feel harmless too. Podcasts are an anachronism, but they're way less user-hostile than the web.

magissima 8y ago

UTMs are aesthetically unpleasing to me and that's all the reason I need to get rid of them.

DINKDINK 8y ago

>stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever. If marketing company derive value off of tracking a user then yes there clearly is a privacy value of stripping UTM from a url. You needn't be that creative to think of an example. client: "Hi I'd like to see what sort of flights you have available." "Hmm ok I see that you're linked to us from WealthyPeople.com, guess I'll mark up your ticket price" There are certainly are markets that open up when users allow themselves to be tracked but allowing users to consent to being surveilled is a fundamental right. The right to privacy is the right to be left alone.

taf2 8y ago

This issue will get worse... As people choose to remove transparent forms of tracking... utm parameters, cookies, etc... we find "better" ways that aren't as obvious. Really it's a choice... we can have clear tracking or we can have hidden tracking... blanket blocking is going to lead to a much harder to block and aware form of tracking. As the saying goes... "be careful what you wish for"

Moru 8y ago
We already have hidden tracking, another reason to blanket block everything.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Alternatively we could just regulate matters until the only way for them to make money is to stand in front of a frier and make french fries. Acting like this is a losing battle makes such a foregone conclusion. Marketing is like 0.0001% of the population its ok for the rest of us to disagree and regulate them to the degree required to ensure our continued wellbeing even if this means regulating them virtually out of existence.
- unpopular42 8y ago
  You, yourself, personally, are about .000000013% of the population. Is it ok for the rest of us to regulate you out of existence? I feel like this is required to ensure our continued wellbeing, given that you spend time spreading utter idiocy.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    In the united states we hold that people have a right to exist and a right to freely express themselves. Even express yourself like you are right now. However both commercial speech and collection of personal data may be subject to both regulation and technical limitation without raising a constitutional question unlike you know killing people with inconvenient ideas. Your industry is odious and if 90% of it dies not much will be lost. You don't have a right to make a living in a certain fashion if the way you make a living is detrimental to the rest of us. Even if I'm the 0.000000013% I and people like myself who don't work in marketing are the 99.999% Our well being matters more than your paycheck. Personal data collection has a good chance to effect millions negatively in the coming years and I can't imagine why we who stand to lose wouldn't regard people like yourself as the enemy. If you don't like making french fries apply whatever useful skills you possess to good ends elsewhere.

fwdpropaganda 8y ago

> Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn't protect your privacy. Yes it does.

jlarocco 8y ago

Honestly, I don't care. I just don't trust that companies won't covertly use them for tracking. I don't plan on using this extension, though, because I block all of the Google Analytics javascript files.

fredsanford 8y ago
In that case, they can parse the data from the referrer logs.

danmg 8y ago

The fact this elicits such a strong response is proof that it's needed.

kenneth 8y ago

Because the user experience sucks. I hate copying a URL and have a bunch of meaningless garbage included in wherever I paste it, as happens with pages that leaves UTM artifacts in the query string. I don't care at all about the tracking aspect of removing UTM, I care about how it makes the internet shittier to use.

harry-wood 8y ago
Exactly. But not just when copying a URL. Short, simple URLs look nicer and feel better. This is basic web design, but somewhere along the line we've allowed salesy/marketing nonsense to infest our web. This spells out the issues really well (with a funny video) https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url https://wistia.com/blog/fresh-url The suggested solution on there "Fresh URL" is interesting, although it's throwing more javascript at the problem.

tzahola 8y ago

I don’t care about their marketing campaigns. I consider marketing inherently harmful, as it uses up resources that would have been spent on improving the actual product.

phyzome 8y ago

"This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing." World's tiniest violin, dude.

gowld 8y ago
Do you have a job that pays you with funds generated by marketed goods and services?
- russh 8y ago
  Yes, as a matter fact I do. I work for an ISP and we don't track shit except whether you paid your bill or not.
- Trundle 8y ago
  Irrelevant. That's like asking why someone is moving a tiny car around a board while playing monopoly just because they had suggested poker for games night. Someone can prefer the world be a different way while still participating in it as is.
- zentiggr 8y ago
  Would employees still get paid if their company didn't sell their information, or buy others'? Unethical marketing behavior is never going to be the make or break point for a company, it's just plain greed showing through.
- phyzome 8y ago
  Sure! But that's neither here nor there. 1) I don't have a choice, since everyone does it; 2) many types of marketing are just fine; 3) if everyone stopped doing this kind of tracking, it's not like the businesses would fail.

draw_down 8y ago

Who said they need it? Changing query strings is also not evil. It’s something that can happen on the web and marketers need to deal with that. I can’t believe the sanctimony of this comment.

nkrisc 8y ago

> It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending. Frankly, that's not my problem. I don't know what they're tracking and why, but I'll err on the side of not being tracked, however harmless it may appear.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

You know, I tried politely setting Do-Not-Track in my headers to express my preferences. The marketers and publishers laughed and ignored my expressed preferences. So now all I can do is fight back any way I know how. What I really want is an extension that somehow corrupts the UTM data so that the trackers have bad data.

wumpus 8y ago
Hm, I could supply a list of utm parameters observed in the wild. Then you could substitute a randomly picked but valid set of parameters...
- virtzzz 8y ago
  The only problem with that is that they'd have no idea the data would be bad. Even if they did, there's nothing stopping the marketers from taking the bad data as proof one or the other campaign was actually working.
  - wumpus 8y ago
    I'm OK with both of those "problems".

deleted 8y ago

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ggg9990 8y ago

How did poor advertisers manage when advertising was on TV and billboards and couldn’t be tracked?

zentiggr 8y ago
How did poor advertisers manage when advertising was hiring hawkers to stand on street corners and holler out the ad messages?

ChoGGi 8y ago

I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on. Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt. Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt. Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water. I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech. Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches. --amicusNYCL https://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8027411&cid=50545331 https://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8027411&cid=5054...

gwbas1c 8y ago

Marketing worked without this kind of tracking for the entire 20th century.

monochromatic 8y ago

I never consented to being tracked, and it provides me no benefits whatsoever. The number of times I’ve made a purchase based on internet advertising can be counted on one hand—probably on a hand without any fingers. I don’t give a damn if stripping garbage out of urls makes it harder for a company to track me. Why should I?

rosser 8y ago

I don't "owe" a business I interact with "clean" data on how well their marketing campaigns are working. The extent of my obligation to J. Random Web Business, vis à vis my interactions with them, is to give them their asking price in exchange for their product or service offerings which I consume.

hinkley 8y ago
The tool at the hardware store should cost $30 no matter how badly I need it. Capitalism doesn’t agree with this but Society does. It’s considered predatory to use “too much data” when negotiating with a customer. This is literally a movie trope. Ad absurdum: imagine if a restaurant could charge you more for food if they knew how hungry you were, or how badly you needed to go to the bathroom. This is not information they need to possess.

creatonez 8y ago

>transparent Reddit immediately redirects to hide these parameters. Definitely not transparent. Transparent would be: you're aware about the tracking before it can happen

denzil_correa 8y ago

The paranoia comes from the lack of transparency and "Informed Consent" about tracking.

ordu 8y ago

> UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. Thank you for the offer, but I need no tracking of my movements. > Marketing is not evil. It is evil. Every time I search for info, I need to filter out all the marketing bullshit from google results. All marketing is a lie or at least a manipulation with one goal to make me buy something that I wouldn't buy otherwise. So I will do all I can to make life of marketers harder. I just hate them for all their informational white noise in the Internet.

Trundle 8y ago

I don't see what the sentence "its how the world works" has to do with "marketing is not evil". At least not for your argument.

textmode 8y ago

According to Github the author is affiliated with Pinterest. Perhaps he or Pinterest has a need for this. Outside of the browser, I routinely work with urls in bulk and strip them of unnecessary cruft to make them as short as possible and thus easier for me to store and manage. Cruft attached to urls for tracking purposes serves me no purpose and makes for longer urls and potentially more special characters like ampersands to worry about escaping or encoding. This add-on cruft is not necessary to retrieve the resource identified by the url.

pvg 8y ago

This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing. It is totally not important to me or anyone I want to give a URL to.

ouid 8y ago

>Marketing is not evil. It's how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it. I can request information about products that I might be interested in. The nice thing about this is that I can request it from a source that I consider to be objective, in the context of alternatives. Moreover, I think you would probably consider it evil if a tech review service were receiving money under the table from say, Intel, to say that their products were better than their competition. Why should I be forced to allow Intel to make those claims directly through injected javascript or whatever? Advertising from the source is intrinsically dishonest.

nialv7 8y ago

How does making company impossible to track me not protecting my privacy? And I think there is a cognitive gap in your argument: I am a user, I am not a company, I am not trying to sell anything to anyone. So why should I be empathic towards marketing? Ads, marketing and tracking does zero, if not negative, good to me. And that is why I will have ad blockers enabled at all time. > Marketing is not evil Whether it's evil or not doesn't concern me. I just really don't like them. > UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever. Again, care to explain why is there not privacy benefit?

andrei_says_ 8y ago

Exactly, stripping UTM just screws with the results of (often small) businesses using google analytics trying to figure what campaigns/content efforts work. GA does not provide any individually identifiable info to its users. Stripping the params does not prevent google from tracking you internally. So I am not sure what this is trying to accomplish.

matheusmoreira 8y ago

Nobody felt the need to justify tracking the personal information of billions of people for their own benefits. Nobody asked if we were OK with it; they just did it. Nobody offered us any compensation for this supposedly valuable data they were gathering about us and our daily lives. Nobody offered us so much as an explanation or made any effort at being transparent about data gathering; they just put up a cryptic terms of service document at the footer of the page that say "we reserve the right to collect this data because reasons". If people hadn't become "paranoid" about user tracking, we wouldn't even have found out about how extensive it is and how much companies share with governments in the first place. So why do we have to justify anything to corporations? Why should we care if they lose some millions marketing to the wrong people? Not our problem. Honestly, it's the company's own fault for trusting user input so blindly. Tracking users is not a right, it is a privilege and it can be revoked.

deviationblue 8y ago

Pay me for my information. That's how the world works- no free lunches. But apparently there are.

vladus2000 8y ago

Bill Hicks does a good job of explaining my thoughts on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 But on a more serious note, while I somewhat agree that not all marketing is evil, some absolutely is. I do not consider the marketing that cigarette companies did to knowingly hook kids on an addictive, cancer causing substance a good thing; I find it rather evil. Since it can be used for evil, I would rather make it as difficult as possible for them to use it against me. It might be a mostly pointless exercise, but it makes me feel better about it.

dingaling 8y ago
Even Bill Hicks relied on marketing to advertise his shows.
- ionised 8y ago
  Was he tracking all of his fans?
- zentiggr 8y ago
  Once again someone fails to separate passive marketing that provides knowledge about a product and allows customers to decide, from active marketing that seeks to manipulate and deceive.

_o_ 8y ago

It is not harmless. As far I am concerned, it is no problem if you track it with your own analytics like piwik. For that part I don't care (unless you are having urls like aliexpress). But giving those information to 3rd party is something else.

deleted 8y ago

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zippitydoodah68 8y ago

Let's see. 1. They get my browser transmitted information as corollary to my browsing habits which they then resell, pester me with, and analyze in order to create a dialectic which is flawed, impersonal and does not necessarily profit me. 2. Ergo: since when should I care about a random companies spend when they (indirectly) determine what I am spending in the first place? 3. If you really believe that tracking and an open society are good things make them available to all and offer them to everyone. I predict that will go badly. Self interest being what it is whether corporate or individual.

Traubenfuchs 8y ago

I don't want to participate in your multiple channel marketing, thank you very much.

krageon 8y ago

There's a whole slew of arguments that could be made here, but let's keep it simple: Providing anyone with information about me should be a voluntary act. If I choose not to do so, it is none of your or anyone else's business why I do not want to. This choice is not available in the case of UTM's, at least not in a transparent way that doesn't involve manually stripping them from every URL you click (which is sensitive to user error).