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Well basic web analytics can come from the http logs. Should we tell people we're logging their HTTP request before we allow them to use our system? Web Analyt

Well basic web analytics can come from the http logs. Should we tell people we're logging their HTTP request before we allow them to use our system? Web Analytics and privacy seem to be the buzzword theme for people to blog about. I get it, there is lots of interest in this area since some companies have been clearly taking the mick on this front. However, it seems to me, lots of people are just going on their high horse for nothing. This blog post has a postscript about paying users for the info, on this subject someone tried to sue Google for using captcha for machine learning training. The judge said it was ridicous idea to expect to get paid for 2 seconds worth of work and we wouldn't expect it in person. At this point in the internet, with the amount of public scandals about data and data collection there has to be some level of awareness of what happens when you go onto a website. The whole informed consent is craziness which we wouldn't apply to any other industry. We don't have informed consent for tracking that happens by supermarkets. We don't have informed consent for the public CCTV systems. Why? Because the reality is, no one cares expect those few that inform themselves. This informed consent nonsense created the cookie banner hassle, seriously I hate that law as a user but not as the person implementing. Implementing it is super easy and done once. As a user, I need to click yes on so many sites it's unreal. And the cookie banner law is basically unenforcable. So people like this author are literally just making the internet worse and not better. Informed consent is the talk of someone who wants to sound right but not make a difference. The real difference is in the processing of data and that is where GDPR really comes into play, it makes dealing with data something you're now careful about. GDPR as a consumer I love it (except the extra banners), as someone who has to implement it, I hate it. And that is how a data law should be. Easy for the consumer hard for the companies.

dboat 6y ago
Rather than throw the whole thing out because the premise was once applied poorly, the legislation could restrict the actions taken with said logs. PII and the selling and collating of said information from multiple sources stand out to me. "This website requests permission to connect your information collected from web page views with your user account" "This website requests permission to sell information gleaned from your web page views to third parties." Implemented at the browser level, with the ability to set preferences like with location and do-not-track cookies, doesn't seem so far-fetched. With log analysis for security purposes being generally permitted. Presumably popular servers would quickly default to a level of logging that complies with a more reasonable middle ground than "log and analyze absolutely everything you can think of." Imperfect, but sounds like a good place to start to me. Frankly, people like you who want to just minimize the concern and pretend privacy is a fringe interest are exactly the problem with our industry. I think most people a) don't have any clue what's going on and/or b) assume, perhaps rightly, that the battle is long since lost. But it doesn't need to be.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  > Rather than throw the whole thing out because the premise was once applied poorly, the legislation could restrict the actions taken with said logs. PII and the selling and collating of said information from multiple sources stand out to me. I would say the premise of informed consent on this scale is flawed. Informed consent means they need to be informed, to inform someone you need to teach them. There are very few people who are actually interested in learning all the stuff that is required for informed consent. And there are people who literally would never be able to give informed consent because they are not smart enough to become informed. Are these people to be deined internet access? Are we only going to allow people of a certain level of intelligence on the internet so they can be informed? Honestly, if you asked people if they would rather be shown ads they're interested in and ads they're not interested in. With it only being a choice of one or the other and neither is not a choice, people would rather have the ads their interested in. Seems like a lot of people are trying to solve a problem for the masses that isn't a problem for the masses. Most people don't care if a website knows they used the website, they care if their data is used to overthrow the goverment. So really, we just need to deal with the stopping it from being possible to use to overthrow the goverment.

dboat 6y ago

Rather than throw the whole thing out because the premise was once applied poorly, the legislation could restrict the actions taken with said logs. PII and the selling and collating of said information from multiple sources stand out to me. "This website requests permission to connect your information collected from web page views with your user account" "This website requests permission to sell information gleaned from your web page views to third parties." Implemented at the browser level, with the ability to set preferences like with location and do-not-track cookies, doesn't seem so far-fetched. With log analysis for security purposes being generally permitted. Presumably popular servers would quickly default to a level of logging that complies with a more reasonable middle ground than "log and analyze absolutely everything you can think of." Imperfect, but sounds like a good place to start to me. Frankly, people like you who want to just minimize the concern and pretend privacy is a fringe interest are exactly the problem with our industry. I think most people a) don't have any clue what's going on and/or b) assume, perhaps rightly, that the battle is long since lost. But it doesn't need to be.

that_guy_iain 6y ago
> Rather than throw the whole thing out because the premise was once applied poorly, the legislation could restrict the actions taken with said logs. PII and the selling and collating of said information from multiple sources stand out to me. I would say the premise of informed consent on this scale is flawed. Informed consent means they need to be informed, to inform someone you need to teach them. There are very few people who are actually interested in learning all the stuff that is required for informed consent. And there are people who literally would never be able to give informed consent because they are not smart enough to become informed. Are these people to be deined internet access? Are we only going to allow people of a certain level of intelligence on the internet so they can be informed? Honestly, if you asked people if they would rather be shown ads they're interested in and ads they're not interested in. With it only being a choice of one or the other and neither is not a choice, people would rather have the ads their interested in. Seems like a lot of people are trying to solve a problem for the masses that isn't a problem for the masses. Most people don't care if a website knows they used the website, they care if their data is used to overthrow the goverment. So really, we just need to deal with the stopping it from being possible to use to overthrow the goverment.