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Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, ex

by dimes 6y ago

Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.

jerf 6y ago
It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me. Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > It is necessary, but not sufficient Doesn't DDG contradict that?
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    I'm not sure DDG can be considered an example of the default position in the search market. Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    'tracking' is a broad term but websites do track what you click on and if you return to the search results and click another link after clicking on the first link - this indicates that the first link didn't give the searcher the correct answer they were looking for. Whether or not that's tracking is up to you. DDG also of course does tracking for security purposes - scraping their search results doesn't go over well unless you also have a financial stake in outwitting their anti-abuse stuff.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      > 'tracking' is a broad term Right, in this context though it's referring to users themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-specific data. You're just logging stats about the results themselves, not the user.
  - mokus 6y ago
    DDG makes me nervous because I don’t actually understand their business model. Which isn’t to say they don’t have a well-known and viable one but I haven’t personally looked into it and as a result my gut feeling is that they are probably not an exception to this. I use them anyway because they at least claim to be private and haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it. I probably should at some point take the time, though, to try to actually understand how they can viably exist in a way that isn’t going to succumb to the same corrupting incentives as google.
    - prox 6y ago
      DDG does have ads, but with a limited scope, your search patterns are only used for a limited time.
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      Don't they have ads? In reality, tracking doesn't do much when it specifically comes to search engine ads, since the user is literally giving you their intent in the search query itself. Tracking is more useful for showing ads as you browse the web in general. DDG can do effective search ads without any actual tracking, and that's their business model, which is very similar to Google Search.
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      Their business model is simple: - build a useable search engine - show ads to users User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent quality that doesn't spy on you. Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that would otherwise have stayed with Google. The last few years Google has been busily lowering their quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more thinking.)
      - anchpop 6y ago
        My worry with that business model is that people concerned about privacy enough to switch to DDG probably are really likely to use adblock
  - jerf 6y ago
    Well, since the thing it is "necessary but not sufficient" for is me to be convinced you aren't tracking me, it does not. I use them as the best current alternative, but as I alluded to in my first comment, I'd be much more comfortable with them if I could give them some money.
- vinger 6y ago
  But paying for a service connects your real world credit profile to this transaction. I feel privacy is already broken with the credit card companies selling this information. When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you. I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide from the first group. Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay services.
  - mikeiz404 6y ago
    Services like Privacy.com offer single purpose credit cards which can help mitigate the linking of an account to a payment source.
    - vinger 6y ago
      Now you have to trust privacy.com and still worry about the others.
      - mikeiz404 6y ago
        True, although it does shift some of the parties you need to trust. It’s not a perfect solution but, I think, it’s a good solution given what’s currently available. At least privacy.com is a central company which bases its reputation on privacy and as such has an incentive to avoid reputational harm. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
  - jerf 6y ago
    I'm not worried about a company knowing I am their customer, with some name and credit card number. I'm worried about them participating in the global privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere and abusively correlate it with the info others have to learn things about me. Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort of thing. I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info away from people, I think it's about the correlation. Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information starvation. YMMV.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  What about Wikipedia? Do you consider the minimal logging they claim to do to be “user tracking” in the bad sense? Or do you think they’re doing more bad user tracking in secret?
  - burkaman 6y ago
    Wikipedia is a special case for me because it's owned by a non-profit which has thoroughly proven it can sustain itself on donations and grants.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Though perhaps not all that well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
      - tomtheelder 6y ago
        The author of that certainly has a point, but the cancer analogy feels SO forced and is really off-putting.
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Yeah… I almost didn't link it because of that.
      - burkaman 6y ago
        I'm sure reasonable people can disagree about how much money Wikipedia needs to raise and what projects are essential, but the main point stands. Although, I'm not sure it's reasonable to call linear expense growth "cancerous".
      - yellowapple 6y ago
        That article doesn't seem to account for actual traffic growth.
- nabusman 6y ago
  Grocery stores do not just use the data internally but also sell their Point of Sale data to third parties that analyze it and then sell their analysis to anyone willing to pay for it (mostly that is CPG companies). Point is: it isn't necessarily a direct benefit to the end customer.
  - jonaf 6y ago
    I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is necessary to check out. My response is always, politely, "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a stranger how many children they have or what time they get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use that information!
    - dsr_ 6y ago
      Just poison the data. Phone number? 212 555 1212. (You could change to the local area code if you feel like it.) ZIP code? 90210, in Beverly Hills, of course. Or 01234, which is Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
      - Morizero 6y ago
        Local area code plus Jenny's number has worked everywhere I've ever tried
        javajosh 6y ago
        Smart. Years ago I registered the number 500-5000 everywhere I could in my neighborhood. Just from word of mouth, the number got so popular they banned it at the local grocery store!
      - throw1234651234 6y ago
        The problem is that this info is tied to warranty information sometimes.
- Sodman 6y ago
  Internet companies outside of the ad space also track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, much like grocery stores. They use it to inform product decisions by answering questions such as: Which features are our users using the most? Which features are the most profitable users using the most? How do we get more people to the end of the sales funnel? etc. Are you ok with this kind of tracking? Genuinely asking... Personally I see it as "less bad" than straight up selling my data to another company, but I would still prefer companies didn't automatically track me at all, and instead relied on interviews with real users. Or at least make the tracking opt-in, Nielsen style.
  - n0w 6y ago
    I'm on the fence about this. From personal experience I'll nearly always opt-out just because I can. However I think this kind of user tracking is a better way to inform product decisions than user interviews. Asking a user for their opinion about something doesn't generally provide as much valuable insight as monitoring their usage of a product.
  - 8note 6y ago
    I don't subscribe to magazines because if I subscribe to one, suddenly I'll get dozens of ads to subscribe to different magazines in the mail. I'm not ok with that data being sold at all. I'm not signing up to receive advertisements
imwillofficial 6y ago
Agreed, however thats a poor example. Your purchases are tracked via loyalty programs, which you are compensated for with a reduced price on goods.
- hedora 6y ago
  But, they hiked prices when the loyalty programs started in my area. At the very least, there’s a moral hazard of double dipping (charge normal margins for loyalty card users, double margins for everyone else).
  - shalmanese 6y ago
    You don't have access to the alternate universe where they didn't introduce a loyalty program to compare prices. Grocery prices go up naturally due to inflation so it's impossible to disentangle. Groceries are also one of the most price sensitive items people buy and grocery stores run on incredibly thin margins so it's dubious to believe that a grocery story has much control over their pricing, independant of a loyalty card. If they could raise prices after the introduction of a card to increase total profits, why couldn't they have done it before then? Far more likely is that they're using the extra revenue from the card to lower prices for you and gain market share from their competitors but the lower prices are swallowed up by general price increases.
    - jsnell 6y ago
      People who don't sign up loyalty programs and other similar schemes have shown that they aren't price sensitive. They're the ideal segment to fleece via price discrimination.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I don't understand why that makes it a poor example?
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    The original comment I was referring to mentioned that paying for a service does not free you from tracking, and used groceries as an example. That is a poor example because you are being compensated for your opting in to tracking. A better example would be something you pay for, and you’re still tracked with no compensation. Does that answer your question?
gambler 6y ago
>Government regulation is needed. Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.
andy_ppp 6y ago
The grocery store sells everything I buy to who, and is that information personally identifying? This seems insane that me buying a brand of toothpaste could be fed back into Google for more surveillance, but here we are.
- grecy 6y ago
  It certainly is if you use any kind of reward or "points" card .
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yep. That's why "loyalty cards" exist. Since they're not allowed to associate your purchases (or really any data) with your CC number to build a profile they give you a separate ID number that you key-in/scan when you buy things. "Oh but you don't have to use your loyalty card." Technically true but it's not "get a discount if you use your loyalty card" it's now "pay really inflated prices if you don't."
  - wpietri 6y ago
    For what it's worth, I know people share loyalty cards across large groups to mess this up. Me, I just eat the cost. Developing a "I will not play your games" has been great. I know people who absolutely obsess over gamified consumption (e.g., airline miles) and I'm glad to have the brain space for things that matter.
  - andy_ppp 6y ago
    I have to say I think loyalty cards are a distraction, why can’t they just track my via my card info/Apple Pay? I mean the thing is literally a kind of unique identifier...
    - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      This is already happening, only it's the credit card company doing the tracking and not to grocery store.
fastball 6y ago
Not sure I follow your logic. Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them. If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so. It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple. As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.
- prepend 6y ago
  > Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them. Demand based systems aren’t always a good measure. Human trafficking has demand and people use those services. And there’s a, sadly, large number of people who want and purchase if available. No it needs to be fought on the supply side by stopping traffickers and protecting trafficked. Companies use targeted ads because they work and are available. Not because they are moral.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Pretty wild comparison. Tracking is amoral, human trafficking is immoral.
    - prepend 6y ago
      They certainly aren’t equivalent by any means. But disproving GP’s point that targeted ads are used because people want them, therefore should be allowed. Targeted ads and the data slurping involved is immoral to me. Not human trafficking bad, but probably as bad as working for coco cola.
      - fastball 6y ago
        I didn't say that people want them, merely that they are choosing to participate in the system. People being sex-trafficked are not, which is why it's an apples-to-orangutans comparison.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. You don't get from your first point to here. The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place. This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code. This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them. The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it. It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Seems to me that depends on the kind of regulation. If it's just "trust the regulator to keep ahead of Google" than that's one thing. But we can add other constraints on top of that. E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims. Especially if we add bounties for catching Google's transgressions, I expect we could do quite well open-source, personalized regulation.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims. What happens if they lie? They have the data, they give you the code that does the user-facing thing with the data, then they copy the data to some other system where some unspecified foreign subsidiary uses it for arbitrary nefarious purposes without telling anybody. And as much as it might help to have a law requiring cloud services to publish all their source code so people can verify that they're doing at least that part of what they say they're doing, do you really expect that to be enacted?
deleted 6y ago
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ragnese 6y ago
Agreed. Just look all other paid software, computer services, and even computing machines. Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
danbruc 6y ago
At least you can probably take them to court if you pay for the service and not being tracked but they still do.
- hsnewman 6y ago
  I would assume it would be mediated.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Unless they have a carefully-worded Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Proven 6y ago
> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed. Oh yeah? How about if you sign a contract that says you'll never sell my info? Do I still need the government to protect me?
wpietri 6y ago
Depends on the goal of the organization, really. For organizations that follow the current business dogma (maximize short-term profit/increase shareholder value) then yes, they always have an incentive to screw over whomever they can. But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1] I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors. [1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the-capitalists/?_r=1 https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the...
- yhoneycomb 6y ago
  Craigslist is the exception, not the rule.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Did I give you some reason to think I was suggesting otherwise?
akudha 6y ago
Until the situation improves, maybe we can just pay cash for groceries?
phkahler 6y ago
>> Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. No, but it can remove the necessity. Some people can be satisfied with a business of X profitability, but once it goes public there is really no hope IMHO.
TheKarateKid 6y ago
Exactly. We could end up like cable television where we pay for the service and STILL get shown ads and in the Internet's case, tracked.
wdn 6y ago
We already have enough regulations and we still have so much problems. For one thing, it is selective enforcement. Secondly, the penalty is peanut. If penalty is a percentage of total revenue, it will change the behavior of the executive of the tech giant. Add some jail time for repeating offenders is a good idea too. Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?
bogomipz 6y ago
Indeed. Nearly every cell carrier in the US was selling their customer's data. See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
goatinaboat 6y ago
Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. In fact it does the opposite. People with a demonstrated willingness to pay for stuff are more lucrative to track.

by dimes 6y ago

jerf 6y ago

It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me. Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402

ehsankia 6y ago
> It is necessary, but not sufficient Doesn't DDG contradict that?
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  I'm not sure DDG can be considered an example of the default position in the search market. Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be strictly true for any social construct that could be called a market.
- judge2020 6y ago
  'tracking' is a broad term but websites do track what you click on and if you return to the search results and click another link after clicking on the first link - this indicates that the first link didn't give the searcher the correct answer they were looking for. Whether or not that's tracking is up to you. DDG also of course does tracking for security purposes - scraping their search results doesn't go over well unless you also have a financial stake in outwitting their anti-abuse stuff.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    > 'tracking' is a broad term Right, in this context though it's referring to users themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-specific data. You're just logging stats about the results themselves, not the user.
- mokus 6y ago
  DDG makes me nervous because I don’t actually understand their business model. Which isn’t to say they don’t have a well-known and viable one but I haven’t personally looked into it and as a result my gut feeling is that they are probably not an exception to this. I use them anyway because they at least claim to be private and haven’t yet given me specific reason to doubt it. I probably should at some point take the time, though, to try to actually understand how they can viably exist in a way that isn’t going to succumb to the same corrupting incentives as google.
  - prox 6y ago
    DDG does have ads, but with a limited scope, your search patterns are only used for a limited time.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    Don't they have ads? In reality, tracking doesn't do much when it specifically comes to search engine ads, since the user is literally giving you their intent in the search query itself. Tracking is more useful for showing ads as you browse the web in general. DDG can do effective search ads without any actual tracking, and that's their business model, which is very similar to Google Search.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    Their business model is simple: - build a useable search engine - show ads to users User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent quality that doesn't spy on you. Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that would otherwise have stayed with Google. The last few years Google has been busily lowering their quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more thinking.)
    - anchpop 6y ago
      My worry with that business model is that people concerned about privacy enough to switch to DDG probably are really likely to use adblock
- jerf 6y ago
  Well, since the thing it is "necessary but not sufficient" for is me to be convinced you aren't tracking me, it does not. I use them as the best current alternative, but as I alluded to in my first comment, I'd be much more comfortable with them if I could give them some money.
vinger 6y ago
But paying for a service connects your real world credit profile to this transaction. I feel privacy is already broken with the credit card companies selling this information. When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you. I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide from the first group. Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay services.
- mikeiz404 6y ago
  Services like Privacy.com offer single purpose credit cards which can help mitigate the linking of an account to a payment source.
  - vinger 6y ago
    Now you have to trust privacy.com and still worry about the others.
    - mikeiz404 6y ago
      True, although it does shift some of the parties you need to trust. It’s not a perfect solution but, I think, it’s a good solution given what’s currently available. At least privacy.com is a central company which bases its reputation on privacy and as such has an incentive to avoid reputational harm. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”
- jerf 6y ago
  I'm not worried about a company knowing I am their customer, with some name and credit card number. I'm worried about them participating in the global privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere and abusively correlate it with the info others have to learn things about me. Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort of thing. I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info away from people, I think it's about the correlation. Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information starvation. YMMV.
tshaddox 6y ago
What about Wikipedia? Do you consider the minimal logging they claim to do to be “user tracking” in the bad sense? Or do you think they’re doing more bad user tracking in secret?
- burkaman 6y ago
  Wikipedia is a special case for me because it's owned by a non-profit which has thoroughly proven it can sustain itself on donations and grants.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Though perhaps not all that well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
    - tomtheelder 6y ago
      The author of that certainly has a point, but the cancer analogy feels SO forced and is really off-putting.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Yeah… I almost didn't link it because of that.
    - burkaman 6y ago
      I'm sure reasonable people can disagree about how much money Wikipedia needs to raise and what projects are essential, but the main point stands. Although, I'm not sure it's reasonable to call linear expense growth "cancerous".
    - yellowapple 6y ago
      That article doesn't seem to account for actual traffic growth.
nabusman 6y ago
Grocery stores do not just use the data internally but also sell their Point of Sale data to third parties that analyze it and then sell their analysis to anyone willing to pay for it (mostly that is CPG companies). Point is: it isn't necessarily a direct benefit to the end customer.
- jonaf 6y ago
  I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is necessary to check out. My response is always, politely, "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a stranger how many children they have or what time they get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use that information!
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    Just poison the data. Phone number? 212 555 1212. (You could change to the local area code if you feel like it.) ZIP code? 90210, in Beverly Hills, of course. Or 01234, which is Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
    - Morizero 6y ago
      Local area code plus Jenny's number has worked everywhere I've ever tried
      - javajosh 6y ago
        Smart. Years ago I registered the number 500-5000 everywhere I could in my neighborhood. Just from word of mouth, the number got so popular they banned it at the local grocery store!
    - throw1234651234 6y ago
      The problem is that this info is tied to warranty information sometimes.
Sodman 6y ago
Internet companies outside of the ad space also track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, much like grocery stores. They use it to inform product decisions by answering questions such as: Which features are our users using the most? Which features are the most profitable users using the most? How do we get more people to the end of the sales funnel? etc. Are you ok with this kind of tracking? Genuinely asking... Personally I see it as "less bad" than straight up selling my data to another company, but I would still prefer companies didn't automatically track me at all, and instead relied on interviews with real users. Or at least make the tracking opt-in, Nielsen style.
- n0w 6y ago
  I'm on the fence about this. From personal experience I'll nearly always opt-out just because I can. However I think this kind of user tracking is a better way to inform product decisions than user interviews. Asking a user for their opinion about something doesn't generally provide as much valuable insight as monitoring their usage of a product.
- 8note 6y ago
  I don't subscribe to magazines because if I subscribe to one, suddenly I'll get dozens of ads to subscribe to different magazines in the mail. I'm not ok with that data being sold at all. I'm not signing up to receive advertisements

imwillofficial 6y ago

Agreed, however thats a poor example. Your purchases are tracked via loyalty programs, which you are compensated for with a reduced price on goods.

hedora 6y ago
But, they hiked prices when the loyalty programs started in my area. At the very least, there’s a moral hazard of double dipping (charge normal margins for loyalty card users, double margins for everyone else).
- shalmanese 6y ago
  You don't have access to the alternate universe where they didn't introduce a loyalty program to compare prices. Grocery prices go up naturally due to inflation so it's impossible to disentangle. Groceries are also one of the most price sensitive items people buy and grocery stores run on incredibly thin margins so it's dubious to believe that a grocery story has much control over their pricing, independant of a loyalty card. If they could raise prices after the introduction of a card to increase total profits, why couldn't they have done it before then? Far more likely is that they're using the extra revenue from the card to lower prices for you and gain market share from their competitors but the lower prices are swallowed up by general price increases.
  - jsnell 6y ago
    People who don't sign up loyalty programs and other similar schemes have shown that they aren't price sensitive. They're the ideal segment to fleece via price discrimination.
whimsicalism 6y ago
I don't understand why that makes it a poor example?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  The original comment I was referring to mentioned that paying for a service does not free you from tracking, and used groceries as an example. That is a poor example because you are being compensated for your opting in to tracking. A better example would be something you pay for, and you’re still tracked with no compensation. Does that answer your question?

gambler 6y ago

>Government regulation is needed. Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.

andy_ppp 6y ago

The grocery store sells everything I buy to who, and is that information personally identifying? This seems insane that me buying a brand of toothpaste could be fed back into Google for more surveillance, but here we are.

grecy 6y ago
It certainly is if you use any kind of reward or "points" card .
Spivak 6y ago
Yep. That's why "loyalty cards" exist. Since they're not allowed to associate your purchases (or really any data) with your CC number to build a profile they give you a separate ID number that you key-in/scan when you buy things. "Oh but you don't have to use your loyalty card." Technically true but it's not "get a discount if you use your loyalty card" it's now "pay really inflated prices if you don't."
- wpietri 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I know people share loyalty cards across large groups to mess this up. Me, I just eat the cost. Developing a "I will not play your games" has been great. I know people who absolutely obsess over gamified consumption (e.g., airline miles) and I'm glad to have the brain space for things that matter.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  I have to say I think loyalty cards are a distraction, why can’t they just track my via my card info/Apple Pay? I mean the thing is literally a kind of unique identifier...
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    This is already happening, only it's the credit card company doing the tracking and not to grocery store.

fastball 6y ago

Not sure I follow your logic. Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them. If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so. It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple. As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.

prepend 6y ago
> Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them. Demand based systems aren’t always a good measure. Human trafficking has demand and people use those services. And there’s a, sadly, large number of people who want and purchase if available. No it needs to be fought on the supply side by stopping traffickers and protecting trafficked. Companies use targeted ads because they work and are available. Not because they are moral.
- fastball 6y ago
  Pretty wild comparison. Tracking is amoral, human trafficking is immoral.
  - prepend 6y ago
    They certainly aren’t equivalent by any means. But disproving GP’s point that targeted ads are used because people want them, therefore should be allowed. Targeted ads and the data slurping involved is immoral to me. Not human trafficking bad, but probably as bad as working for coco cola.
    - fastball 6y ago
      I didn't say that people want them, merely that they are choosing to participate in the system. People being sex-trafficked are not, which is why it's an apples-to-orangutans comparison.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. You don't get from your first point to here. The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place. This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code. This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them. The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it. It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.

wpietri 6y ago
Seems to me that depends on the kind of regulation. If it's just "trust the regulator to keep ahead of Google" than that's one thing. But we can add other constraints on top of that. E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims. Especially if we add bounties for catching Google's transgressions, I expect we could do quite well open-source, personalized regulation.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant code be open source, and that they must give you data all data related to you, such that individuals could audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior matches their claims. What happens if they lie? They have the data, they give you the code that does the user-facing thing with the data, then they copy the data to some other system where some unspecified foreign subsidiary uses it for arbitrary nefarious purposes without telling anybody. And as much as it might help to have a law requiring cloud services to publish all their source code so people can verify that they're doing at least that part of what they say they're doing, do you really expect that to be enacted?

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ragnese 6y ago

Agreed. Just look all other paid software, computer services, and even computing machines. Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.

deleted 6y ago
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danbruc 6y ago

At least you can probably take them to court if you pay for the service and not being tracked but they still do.

hsnewman 6y ago
I would assume it would be mediated.
_underfl0w_ 6y ago
Unless they have a carefully-worded Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Proven 6y ago

> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed. Oh yeah? How about if you sign a contract that says you'll never sell my info? Do I still need the government to protect me?

wpietri 6y ago

Depends on the goal of the organization, really. For organizations that follow the current business dogma (maximize short-term profit/increase shareholder value) then yes, they always have an incentive to screw over whomever they can. But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1] I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors. [1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the-capitalists/?_r=1 https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the...

yhoneycomb 6y ago
Craigslist is the exception, not the rule.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Did I give you some reason to think I was suggesting otherwise?

akudha 6y ago

Until the situation improves, maybe we can just pay cash for groceries?

phkahler 6y ago

>> Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. No, but it can remove the necessity. Some people can be satisfied with a business of X profitability, but once it goes public there is really no hope IMHO.

TheKarateKid 6y ago

Exactly. We could end up like cable television where we pay for the service and STILL get shown ads and in the Internet's case, tracked.

wdn 6y ago

We already have enough regulations and we still have so much problems. For one thing, it is selective enforcement. Secondly, the penalty is peanut. If penalty is a percentage of total revenue, it will change the behavior of the executive of the tech giant. Add some jail time for repeating offenders is a good idea too. Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?

bogomipz 6y ago

Indeed. Nearly every cell carrier in the US was selling their customer's data. See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...

goatinaboat 6y ago

Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. In fact it does the opposite. People with a demonstrated willingness to pay for stuff are more lucrative to track.