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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 t
by 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 agoI'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 agoDDG 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 agoDDG does have ads, but with a limited scope, your search patterns are only used for a limited time.
- ehsankia 6y agoDon'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 agoTheir 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 agoMy 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 agoWell, 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 agoBut 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 agoServices like Privacy.com offer single purpose credit cards which can help mitigate the linking of an account to a payment source.
- vinger 6y agoNow you have to trust privacy.com and still worry about the others.
- mikeiz404 6y agoTrue, 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 agoI'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 agoWhat 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 agoWikipedia 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 agoThough 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 agoThe author of that certainly has a point, but the cancer analogy feels SO forced and is really off-putting.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoYeah… I almost didn't link it because of that.
- burkaman 6y agoI'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 agoThat article doesn't seem to account for actual traffic growth.
- nabusman 6y agoGrocery 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 agoI 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 agoJust 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 agoLocal area code plus Jenny's number has worked everywhere I've ever tried
- javajosh 6y agoSmart. 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 agoThe problem is that this info is tied to warranty information sometimes.
- Sodman 6y agoInternet 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 agoI'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 agoI 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