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...Just wait until they hear about services like Google Analytics, and MixPanel. Jokes aside, i often find the excitement around "tracking" to be frustrating.
by wiredone 7y ago
...Just wait until they hear about services like Google Analytics, and MixPanel.
Jokes aside, i often find the excitement around "tracking" to be frustrating. Like fears of global conspiracies and mind control, the idea that somewhere a companies engineers are using this data to track your inner most thoughts is crazy in practice. Instead they're using it as a way to diagnose a bug when your ebook crashes or as a way to figure out how to make sure you're not getting stuck in a poorly design UI.
- braythwayt 7y agoIt's not a dichotomy. It can, for example, be that out of 1,000 companies tracking your every click, your every character typed, and your every web site visited, 999 are doing it for better bug tracking or feature development. But the 1,000th company is Facebook. So it feels reasonable for people to ask, "What are you tracking, how is it used, and how can I be confident it won't be abused?"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- noident 7y ago>What are you tracking, how is it used, and how can I be confident it won't be abused? Because of the nature of computer security, you cannot be certain that any data that you give to a 3rd party will be secure. Once it leaves your machine, it's out of your control, forever. Maybe an initially privacy friendly policy vanishes once the company is bought out, or a data breach occurs and the data is suddenly indefinitely in the public domain. This doesn't just apply to Facebook, it applies to every single company storing data. The only way to prevent is to have a data retention policy and invest heavily in security, which pretty much nobody does except for the really big players.