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Other product companies take note: the tide is turning on all this “tracking” nonsense. Clean up your house now or find yourself shamed into submission later.
by code4tee 7y ago
Other product companies take note: the tide is turning on all this “tracking” nonsense. Clean up your house now or find yourself shamed into submission later.
Consumers increasingly don’t care that “the lawyers said it was OK because it’s on page 73 subsection C line 4 of the use agreement For the product.” Privacy is the new black.
- baxtr 7y agoAhh... I so much wish that this was true. However, there is just too much money involved and consumers don't seem to care, at least the "silent majority". This won't end anytime soon
- tjoff 7y agoUntil the industry realizes that the data was worthless all along.
- judge2020 7y agoCrashlytics/sentry is quite useful for tracking the impact a particular error has on your overall userbase. As for the other trackers, I haven't found statistics other than DAUs/MAUs useful (and these can almost always be tracked via server-side analytics).
- derefr 7y agoThe Hard Problem in analytics is getting data that lets you tell real users apart from bots, when bots are motivated to present themselves as real users. Usually can't be done purely server-side.
- bob1029 7y agoThe time decay of data is something that is rarely discussed in my view. Facebook, Google, et. al. are sitting on mountains of archaeology. Why not purge it all and adapt to a new business model where you actually generate value for other market participants and, god forbid, maybe even the consumer.
- bob1029 7y agoI'm not so sure. I prefer to remain optimistic about this because it does seem positive progress is being made. No problem like this will be solved overnight, even with heavy-handed federal legislation made effective yesterday. Things like this do take time. New companies are being built right now that plan to base their entire identity on personal privacy and respect. Someone is building the next generation of competing products that offer privacy as a priority feature. I would cite Apple as a potential candidate in this pack with some caveats and unknowns... Trust is a tricky thing to establish and virtually impossible to regain. For me, it's not hard to initially gain my trust if the intent is clear. If I feel the vendor of my home security product is actually trying to use the best techniques, encryption schemes, etc. to protect me, I will be much more likely to trust the solution. If I see buzzwordy bullshit on the box or get a whiff of negative experience or intent from other users (whom I trust), you are immediately starting out with -10 to charisma. Good luck getting out of that hole.
- flukus 7y agoI'm not sure it counts as positive progress, it's a positive regression to what was normal 20 years ago and as such requires little to no problem solving. The bigger challenge is making people care, they don't understand how their private information gets weaponized against them, usually to manipulate them to spend more.
- tomc1985 7y agoThere's an entire generation that's growing up with "why bother with privacy I've already lost it". They're comfortable living their lives out in the open and prefer convenience Just look at the popularity of streaming models, "I know Facebook listens to my conversations but what can I do?" type conversations, the prevalence of porn games on Steam (which broadcasts what you're currently playing to friends and anyone who looks at your profile), and the popularity of porn tube sites
- chiefalchemist 7y agoYes. Generational trends are like a pendulum. They swing. This year's "We don't care" is next year's "No way man." The safest route is respecting privacy. A reputation as a violator won't be easy to shake.
- MadWombat 7y agoHow is the view from your ivory tower? Most consumers don't care and are not even aware of these issues.
- novok 7y agoIt's more of a 'too complex to understand' issue than a care issue. If you spelled out what these trackers really track, a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable with it. Since it's tracking is hidden, people are not worried about what they are not aware of.
- smallgovt 7y agoI disagree. I think most people just want to view cat memes and connect with their friends online. If the cost of that is their privacy, so be it. At the end of the day, I think privacy loss will have to have a materially negative impact on people's lives before they start to care enough to change their behavior. Right now, the only material negative impact requires what I would characterize as fear mongering.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoReminds me of that video where Jamie Oliver showed a group of kids the rather disgusting process for making chicken nuggets, and all the children were appropriately disgusted, but when he asked the kids afterwards who wanted to eat some of the chicken nuggets, they all wanted to eat the nuggets.
- qroshan 7y agoThe probability of your data being seen by another human and attributed to you is 0.00000001%. You have better chance of winning lotteries than this. Only ultra losers whose time is worthless or Ultra Rich who have lots to lose due to a data breach care about privacy. It's just manufactured outrage because everything else is comfortable to them (it's usually white dudes because they don't face real persecution in life and they have to manufacture this so that they can claim to be a victim)
- zionic 7y agoHonestly what we need is an equifax-style hack at the NSA/Facebook/Google to absolutely shock people into reality about privacy. Imagine being able to type in anyone's name and see their entire search history for the last 10 years. It would be total chaos. We'd have a constitutional amendment enforcing digital privacy within a few months.
- als0 7y agoI want to believe you but it seems that no matter what happens to Facebook they seem to consistently emerge unscathed.
- CraigJPerry 7y agoEquifax. The Uber God mode. Cambridge analytica. Any one of these on its own should be enough but i'm not convinced the average person on the street could tell you what the deal was with any of these scandals.
- incongruity 7y agoNone of those things had meaningful impact - either at scale or in newsworthy level awful for a smaller group... without that, the story wasn’t sticky and didn’t scare the masses. E.g.: When a wave of echo users are blackmailed after their private conversations or sexcapades are snooped on, then you’d see outcry.
- jason0597 7y agoI'm already thinking of doing any "sensitive" searches (i.e. stuff i would rather google not know, e.g. my mental health state) on google through chrome's incognito mode, but then I think about it more and I realise that if I do a search on incognito mode, the browser probably knows and marks it as an extra special search and hence becomes even more "sensitive" (and reports back to Google)
- panarky 7y agoWhy fear super secret conspiracies like this? What we already know for a fact is horrible enough.
- caconym_ 7y agoYeah, I wish they did, but nobody gives a shit in any way that actually matters (i.e. one that might change their purchasing decisions).
- api 7y agoAbsolutely this... if it doesn't affect buying decisions it doesn't matter. Whining about it without changing behavior is a waste of time. From what I've seen the most important factors in customer use and purchasing behavior are user experience, user experience, user experience, user experience, and user experience, in that order. Did I mention user experience? I've even been a little shocked in the B2B market by how rarely corporate customers ask about privacy or security. Only the most seriously security-conscious customers have ever asked my company about e.g. what kind of crypto we use, and these are people dealing with financial or national security data. Everyone else seems to not even care.
- sixothree 7y agoNo they do. They just don't know it until it happens to them. I have a perfect example. Someone on reddit was making a statement about how they didn't care that X product was secure. So I entered their username into one of these reddit user analyzers. After I asked them how their dog was enjoying the weather in (wherever they were), they promptly deleted those messages and their account.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ryanmarsh 7y agothe tide is turning on all this “tracking” nonsense It absolutely is not. There is no evidence of this. Also, why do I keep seeing privacy stories about only one of the video doorbell vendors?
- jmccorm 7y agoIt’s easy to say that nothing has changed. I know that I felt that something was changing when Verizon (of all companies) created and publicized a new privacy-focused search engine. You can argue how successful their privacy-first search engine is or isn’t going to be. But I think this is yet more evidence that the pendulum of privacy is starting to swing back in the opposite direction. This is the beginning of change.
- brown9-2 7y agoWhat data shows that this is influencing consumer decisions?
- Sophistifunk 7y agoYou're dreaming, mate. I'm dreaming too, that's a world I'd rather live in, but this will go away as soon as the media remembers that surveillance is how they pay the rent and replaces all these stories with more pro/anti Trump garbage.
- inamesh 7y agoI don't think the tide has turned yet. It's slowly turning, but it will take a couple of years and some more major incidents. When people are willing to pay more for privacy focused products, then we'll know that the tide has turned.
- dumbfoundded 7y agoI don't think a few incidents would turn the tide over. Literally all of every American's personal information is out there. It's really just a question of targeting. Decentralization seems like the only good outcome for privacy but it seems unlikely. Privacy has a monetary value and the simple fact is that most people are willing to trade it for very little. The move for decentralization seems dwindling but I have hope. If companies become the target of sophisticated cyber attacks, there will emerge an economic opportunity for decentralization.
- guug 7y ago> When people are willing to pay more for privacy focused products, then we'll know that the tide has turned. Or when politicians realize that people care and start including stricter laws as part of their electoral campaigns. Privacy shouldn't have to come at a cost.
- sailfast 7y agoOr when this data is used against a politician in a campaign, so they start caring.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago> Privacy is the new black. My internet connected device (not factory IoT) goes through extensive lengths to not ask for a password or ask the user to make an account or provide any data outside exactly what I need to do the job. It’s a lot more work.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoNah, worst case, they'll settle for half of tracking they have now...and then keep adding them one by one. Rinse, repeat. Too much money to be made.
- digitalsushi 7y agoI wish someone would make a router with a subscription service for blocking these connections that in no way benefit me. Throw a nice cpu in the router, make it L7. Charge me 5 bucks a month, I'll pay it so long as you never once challenge my trust in you, future router OS provider. I can't manage this per device. Some, I don't want to, and most, I can't. Let's move the bandaid from the fingers to the wrist. Sell me a privacy aware router that sends 30% of my packets to 0.0.0.0. Yes, yes it will be another page from the arm's race. Yes, websites will stop rendering content for not letting the tracking get through. I don't care, I live a year at a time and that is how this race is run. We won't win it, but we can die before we finish.
- Night_Thastus 7y agoThis is the purpose of something like PiHole. While an ad-blocker will only work on devices that can install one, a PiHole will drop traffic you don't want regardless of the device requesting it. Very useful, and no subscription needed. Is that not sufficient for what you need?
- digitalsushi 7y agoForgive me, I'm not familiar with pihole's feature set; would this protect from connections not relying on the DNS at all? There is no requirement to use DNS to phone home, and it is protection from that I am interested in - at the packet forwarding level.