4 ms·

> The fact that this is found on so many websites is a controversial thing already. It's controversial to you, it's not controversial to the vast majority of p

> The fact that this is found on so many websites is a controversial thing already. It's controversial to you, it's not controversial to the vast majority of people. Given that, the downsides of e.g. not being able to retarget advertising, not being able to understand effectively how users are using the website (with minimal effort), etc aren't worth the costs. Say they were to just have those trackers pre-login and post-login there is nothing, they probably lose more business trying to emphasize this arcane fact that only extreme privacy-nerds care about on their homepage versus simply just ignoring them.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Given that, the downsides of e.g. not being able to retarget advertising, not being able to understand effectively how users are using the website (with minimal effort), etc aren't worth the costs. Downsides to the company. All upsides to me (you can understand effectively how users are using the website without doing extensive telemetry; in fact, this reduces your chances of A/B-testing yourself into full-blown user-hostility, as is common these days; see also: overfitting, Goodhart's law). Not to mention: if you need detailed analytics, there are couple of self-hosted solutions available. Not at all that more complex to use, and at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties. Note that this particular product targets parents of small children and is bordering on "medical information" territory, so an analytics script from some random third party[0] which can track what FAQ options piqued your interests is especially worrisome in this context. -- [0] - I noticed from your profile that you have experience in the marketing industry, and you seem to not recognize Smartlook.
- jamiequint 7y ago
  > at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties One would have to be extremely paranoid to think that most mainstream third-party data analytics providers are "shady", most of these providers (Segment, Amplitude, etc) all have clauses in the contracts that specify the end-user (the company in this case) as the owner of the data, and limit their usage of data to providing the services (meaning they're contractually obligated to NOT sell or do anything with the data). In any case, it's a meaningless distinction, as the company could easily record all this data with native, first-party JS and proxy it to anyone they want on the backend and you would have no idea and no control over such a thing. This is already starting to happen, making all of the fuss about third-party metrics effectively just "privacy theater". At the end of the day your behavioral data is going to the party whose software you're using, and if you don't trust them there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing whatever they want with that information.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> Given that, the downsides of e.g. not being able to retarget advertising, not being able to understand effectively how users are using the website (with minimal effort), etc aren't worth the costs. Downsides to the company. All upsides to me (you can understand effectively how users are using the website without doing extensive telemetry; in fact, this reduces your chances of A/B-testing yourself into full-blown user-hostility, as is common these days; see also: overfitting, Goodhart's law). Not to mention: if you need detailed analytics, there are couple of self-hosted solutions available. Not at all that more complex to use, and at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties. Note that this particular product targets parents of small children and is bordering on "medical information" territory, so an analytics script from some random third party[0] which can track what FAQ options piqued your interests is especially worrisome in this context. -- [0] - I noticed from your profile that you have experience in the marketing industry, and you seem to not recognize Smartlook.

jamiequint 7y ago
> at least they don't leak visitors' data to various shady third parties One would have to be extremely paranoid to think that most mainstream third-party data analytics providers are "shady", most of these providers (Segment, Amplitude, etc) all have clauses in the contracts that specify the end-user (the company in this case) as the owner of the data, and limit their usage of data to providing the services (meaning they're contractually obligated to NOT sell or do anything with the data). In any case, it's a meaningless distinction, as the company could easily record all this data with native, first-party JS and proxy it to anyone they want on the backend and you would have no idea and no control over such a thing. This is already starting to happen, making all of the fuss about third-party metrics effectively just "privacy theater". At the end of the day your behavioral data is going to the party whose software you're using, and if you don't trust them there is nothing that is going to stop them from doing whatever they want with that information.