4 ms·

Hey, I'm interested to see someone who's actually in this specific line of programming comment! I'm pretty sympathetic to the general argument that interactions

Hey, I'm interested to see someone who's actually in this specific line of programming comment! I'm pretty sympathetic to the general argument that interactions with websites aren't private because they're two-party interactions with the site, but there are a few things that trouble me that I'd be interested to ask. First, I guess: do you think that users are broadly aware of how much they're tracked and ok with it, or do you think the tracking is alright independent of that? (This question is more relevant if you're on the "tracking browser resizes" side of things than "recording products in a cart".) Second: do you have any worries about data that's tame in isolation or on average causing problems as it's gathered and shared - deanonymizing aggregate data, revealing pregnancies by shopping history, etc? Third: do you worry about keeping identifiable data in existence more generally? Assuming you trust yourself and your partners, there's still the concern that maintaining data troves like these increases the attack surface for everything from hacking to government demands.

soared 8y ago
1) I don't do any browser fingerprinting or things like that, but we definitely pay vendors to do it for us (crosswise, owned by oracle does a lot). Users know as much about tracking as they do about how a website works - none. If you tried to get an average person to learn about http, html, javascript, cms, dns, cdn, caches, cookies, etc it would be impossible.. tracking is equally as complicated. 2) I only support data in aggregate. Anything personally identifiable should be illegal IMO. As long as target finds 10,000 people who are pregnant due to their shopping habits, I think thats fine. If the system is set up correctly with one company collecting and aggregating data, then another company buying access to that data it is safe. Its a misconception that facebook sells data, they just sell access to it. So most data you can't actually de-anonymize. 3) I definitely support legislation around data storage and yeah I think thats a huge problem right now. Its super easy to collect a ton of data, even when you have no idea how to store it or even use it. Its literally 2 minutes of effort for me to grab every single name of someone who purchased something on ~50 ecom sites, but I know nothing about how to securely store that. As far as the justification for where I work - Ads fuel the internet and create more benefit than they do harm. Millions of people run websites, create content, make free apps. That simply would not occur without ads to monetize them since people are unwillingly to pay for content. Microtransactions for content would be awesome but they haven't worked yet. We're also on year <30 of widespread internet use. Its the wild west right now but we will fix it.

soared 8y ago

1) I don't do any browser fingerprinting or things like that, but we definitely pay vendors to do it for us (crosswise, owned by oracle does a lot). Users know as much about tracking as they do about how a website works - none. If you tried to get an average person to learn about http, html, javascript, cms, dns, cdn, caches, cookies, etc it would be impossible.. tracking is equally as complicated. 2) I only support data in aggregate. Anything personally identifiable should be illegal IMO. As long as target finds 10,000 people who are pregnant due to their shopping habits, I think thats fine. If the system is set up correctly with one company collecting and aggregating data, then another company buying access to that data it is safe. Its a misconception that facebook sells data, they just sell access to it. So most data you can't actually de-anonymize. 3) I definitely support legislation around data storage and yeah I think thats a huge problem right now. Its super easy to collect a ton of data, even when you have no idea how to store it or even use it. Its literally 2 minutes of effort for me to grab every single name of someone who purchased something on ~50 ecom sites, but I know nothing about how to securely store that. As far as the justification for where I work - Ads fuel the internet and create more benefit than they do harm. Millions of people run websites, create content, make free apps. That simply would not occur without ads to monetize them since people are unwillingly to pay for content. Microtransactions for content would be awesome but they haven't worked yet. We're also on year <30 of widespread internet use. Its the wild west right now but we will fix it.