7 ms·

You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to

You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.

JohnFen 5y ago
> You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now. You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself). But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.
- Aboh33 5y ago
  '...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...' Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed
scrose 5y ago
How does this work if you’ve never done business with the company or ever intend to? If I get a random email from a company with a tracking pixel, am I ‘doing business’ with them? If a friend shares my name and number with an app, am I doing business with them? If a friend posts a photo of me on a social media service I don’t use, do they send out a PI to track me down and let me know they’re going to be running facial recognition tech on the photo which could build an album of me? This is more the Wild West than a free market.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  For “random websites” there are laws around cookie approvals. For emails, you can’t drop tracking inside that can follow you around, at best you can determine an email was opened (think certified mail, for an IRL analog) If you don’t want your friends sharing your contact info that seems like a problem between you and your friends. Sharing contact info without direct consent is not a new problem in the internet age. That’s been happening forever.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Equifax is a great example of a service which you don't do business with and get opted into without consent.
  - astura 5y ago
    >without consent That's like complaining that they are making you pay the balance when you didn't consent to paying off the charges you made. When you get a credit card you agree to the credit card agreement. I just picked a random credit card agreement I found online (Chase Amazon Visa) and it says: >We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate.
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      Equifax and the like collects massive amounts of data about people whether or not they have a credit card. There is no way to stop that without completely withdrawing from society. That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      I've never had a credit card in my life, but I do have a credit rating.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Disagree strongly. You’re ignoring the disproportionate power that tracking companies have compared to citizens. Is it really a free market if every single website you visit has the same tracking code built in? As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.
letitbeirie 5y ago
Sure, but then that opens up a lot of questions about "is this actually a free market?" It certainly makes sense in a space that is one - if you don't want to be tracked by e.g. an online newspaper, there are certainly plenty of alternative offerings on the market. But what if Comcast wanted to track you? Depending on where you live you may not have the choice not to do business with them, which means your desire not to be tracked gets steamrolled by your only available option - you're forced to accept tracking or be denied access to the internet.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  That is a reasonable concern. Perhaps utilities, or other oligopolies, should have different rules.
_jal 5y ago
> a right to know if a given company wants > right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking I don't get how looking at this as rights and intent does any good. - Getting legalistic about intent immediately makes for more arguing. - Asking for a right to know about someone's "intent to block" is... odd, and seems to set the stage for all sorts of messy shenanigans. How is that supposed to work, exactly? If you want to go this way, contracts seem so much more straightforward. - If you're concerned with a "free market", trying to layer on all sorts of external rules about 'rights to know' just doesn't work. Asymmetric information is the nature of the market, and here we are, right now. If you want "freedom" in that sense of the word, be happy, you've arrived.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  You’re making this unnecessarily complicated and I can’t tell if it is in bad faith or not. - users should know of they are going to be tracked (part of the value exchange) - companies should know if ads/tracking are going to be blocked (part of the value exchange) Both parties should then be able to decide how to proceed accordingly.
  - _jal 5y ago
    I'm trying to take what you're saying seriously, and think through how it would work in the real world. You're just repeating that you think some things "should" be the case. If they were, how would that work, how could it go wrong, what are the costs and benefits relative to other ways of achieving the same goals? Policy is more than random assertions that feel right.
  - websites2023 5y ago
    Your statements lack agents, which contributes to the feeling that they are intentionally slippery. Who is responsible for telling users they are going to be tracked? Further more, whose responsibility is it to ensure the user understands the implications of that tracking? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that tracking is not abused? Secondly, who is responsible for telling companies that their ads/tracking are going to be blocked? The user? If so, why? I don’t care one bit about the business model of the websites I visit. As a user, my attention has been manipulated for years, my behavioral data has been harvested, resold, abused… to be totally blunt, I don’t trust a single one of you any further than I can throw you. If you go under, I’ll find something else that meets my needs. I’ve already had to do that dozens of times in my life because it’s not like companies have any commitment to me as a customer in the first place. I’m just a big ol’ bag of potential sales determined through my data. You’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of these simplified terms, wherein you appear to propose me and giant mega corporations, who I can’t see, can’t sue, and don’t even know I’m doing business with, are on a level playing field. The information asymmetry is and lack of equal recourse are a bit hard to overcome in your simplified world. As a notion user I’m now concerned with the data that application is harvesting from me, given the stance on privacy you gave here.
piva00 5y ago
Sure, now let me know how that works when you have massive corporations, controlling products that you can't really move completely away from because there is simply no competition, or they also serve (and get revenue from) part of the competition? My choices are to simply completely disregard a huge chunk of the market, like messengers, I would have to communicate with my family on the other side of the world through some app that my parents or older family members would not use, I would have to train them because the massive corporations bought out all the competition, so I either suffer a massive pain in the ass on every corner of my life or I have to surrender my data. Because I have no other choice: it's my data or death through a thousand cuts over my life due to all the inconveniences when these corps sprawl over more and more markets with their unlimited cash machine coming from the crops of data from all people they sell profiles about. Either give me regulations to never allow monopolies to ever hint at appearing in a free market or give me regulations about how well my personal data, something that tells a lot about me as a living person, will be treated, marketed, etc. It's a resource being extracted from me, so why the fuck can the free market bleed me out if they are also going to inconvenience my life by taking more and more market share? The free market is an illusion, it's just an ideology. Not too dissimilar from believing in real communism.
Tade0 5y ago
That's assuming a maximally unregulated market is an ideal we're striving for, which isn't the case - at least not in the EU, and that is a good thing.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  An unregulated market cannot be a free market.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    For long at least and this is the reason why GP's assumption is doubly wrong.
mehlmao 5y ago
Oh hey, the "growth consultant" thinks we shouldn't have privacy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- clevergadget 5y ago
  this is true in a non malicious way and has basically gone berserk in the realm of complicity
- AlexB138 5y ago
  This is an ad hominem. He's making a fair point, attacking him personally doesn't improve the conversation.
  - darkwater 5y ago
    It is an ad hominem, I agree, but the opinion stated by GP is clearly dictated by their past career and experience. Actually seeing the ad-hominem made me check the GP profile.
    - AlexB138 5y ago
      Sure, pointing out a bias is fair, but it needs to be followed with an actual refutation of the idea presented. Just saying "you're wrong because of who you are" doesn't add much.
- DSingularity 5y ago
  Hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it. Aside from growth consultants, importance of privacy will be lost on a large and critical subset of engineers. This is why a huge blame goes on academics who train wave upon wave of new engineers with pathetic levels of ethical training.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  Better than being a self-important navel-gazing privacy nerd.
Intermernet 5y ago
"The free market" is demonstrably a sham. It, like communism, is good in theory, but broken by human behaviour.
trollski 5y ago
great. i am letting you know i, just for shits and giggles will hire someone to follow you 24/7 and report your daily routine to me. i am assuming you will try to evade/block this and that is fine. have a nice life.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quickthrowman 5y ago
On behalf all the non-millionaires out there, Fuck You. Money took away your ethics and morals and broke your brain. A right to privacy should be something we strive for, not maximizing profit by spying on people. We do not have a free market in the US either.
- seneca 5y ago
  > On behalf all the non-millionaires out there, Fuck You. Money took away your ethics and morals and broke your brain. Less of this, please.
  - fouric 5y ago
    Yeah, the quoted line clearly breaks the HN guidelines.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't do this on HN. I don't want to ban you and we can't have this kind of thing here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    Noted, you can [dead] my post if you haven’t already. I’ll refrain from personal attacks in the future.
    - dang 5y ago
      Appreciated!
6r1d 5y ago
> This is how a free market works. Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us. Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/index.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa... Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there. I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".

JohnFen 5y ago

> You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now. You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself). But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.

Aboh33 5y ago
'...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...' Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed

scrose 5y ago

How does this work if you’ve never done business with the company or ever intend to? If I get a random email from a company with a tracking pixel, am I ‘doing business’ with them? If a friend shares my name and number with an app, am I doing business with them? If a friend posts a photo of me on a social media service I don’t use, do they send out a PI to track me down and let me know they’re going to be running facial recognition tech on the photo which could build an album of me? This is more the Wild West than a free market.

jamiequint 5y ago
For “random websites” there are laws around cookie approvals. For emails, you can’t drop tracking inside that can follow you around, at best you can determine an email was opened (think certified mail, for an IRL analog) If you don’t want your friends sharing your contact info that seems like a problem between you and your friends. Sharing contact info without direct consent is not a new problem in the internet age. That’s been happening forever.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
Equifax is a great example of a service which you don't do business with and get opted into without consent.
- astura 5y ago
  >without consent That's like complaining that they are making you pay the balance when you didn't consent to paying off the charges you made. When you get a credit card you agree to the credit card agreement. I just picked a random credit card agreement I found online (Chase Amazon Visa) and it says: >We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    Equifax and the like collects massive amounts of data about people whether or not they have a credit card. There is no way to stop that without completely withdrawing from society. That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    I've never had a credit card in my life, but I do have a credit rating.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Disagree strongly. You’re ignoring the disproportionate power that tracking companies have compared to citizens. Is it really a free market if every single website you visit has the same tracking code built in? As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.

letitbeirie 5y ago

Sure, but then that opens up a lot of questions about "is this actually a free market?" It certainly makes sense in a space that is one - if you don't want to be tracked by e.g. an online newspaper, there are certainly plenty of alternative offerings on the market. But what if Comcast wanted to track you? Depending on where you live you may not have the choice not to do business with them, which means your desire not to be tracked gets steamrolled by your only available option - you're forced to accept tracking or be denied access to the internet.

jamiequint 5y ago
That is a reasonable concern. Perhaps utilities, or other oligopolies, should have different rules.

_jal 5y ago

> a right to know if a given company wants > right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking I don't get how looking at this as rights and intent does any good. - Getting legalistic about intent immediately makes for more arguing. - Asking for a right to know about someone's "intent to block" is... odd, and seems to set the stage for all sorts of messy shenanigans. How is that supposed to work, exactly? If you want to go this way, contracts seem so much more straightforward. - If you're concerned with a "free market", trying to layer on all sorts of external rules about 'rights to know' just doesn't work. Asymmetric information is the nature of the market, and here we are, right now. If you want "freedom" in that sense of the word, be happy, you've arrived.

jamiequint 5y ago
You’re making this unnecessarily complicated and I can’t tell if it is in bad faith or not. - users should know of they are going to be tracked (part of the value exchange) - companies should know if ads/tracking are going to be blocked (part of the value exchange) Both parties should then be able to decide how to proceed accordingly.
- _jal 5y ago
  I'm trying to take what you're saying seriously, and think through how it would work in the real world. You're just repeating that you think some things "should" be the case. If they were, how would that work, how could it go wrong, what are the costs and benefits relative to other ways of achieving the same goals? Policy is more than random assertions that feel right.
- websites2023 5y ago
  Your statements lack agents, which contributes to the feeling that they are intentionally slippery. Who is responsible for telling users they are going to be tracked? Further more, whose responsibility is it to ensure the user understands the implications of that tracking? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that tracking is not abused? Secondly, who is responsible for telling companies that their ads/tracking are going to be blocked? The user? If so, why? I don’t care one bit about the business model of the websites I visit. As a user, my attention has been manipulated for years, my behavioral data has been harvested, resold, abused… to be totally blunt, I don’t trust a single one of you any further than I can throw you. If you go under, I’ll find something else that meets my needs. I’ve already had to do that dozens of times in my life because it’s not like companies have any commitment to me as a customer in the first place. I’m just a big ol’ bag of potential sales determined through my data. You’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of these simplified terms, wherein you appear to propose me and giant mega corporations, who I can’t see, can’t sue, and don’t even know I’m doing business with, are on a level playing field. The information asymmetry is and lack of equal recourse are a bit hard to overcome in your simplified world. As a notion user I’m now concerned with the data that application is harvesting from me, given the stance on privacy you gave here.

piva00 5y ago

Sure, now let me know how that works when you have massive corporations, controlling products that you can't really move completely away from because there is simply no competition, or they also serve (and get revenue from) part of the competition? My choices are to simply completely disregard a huge chunk of the market, like messengers, I would have to communicate with my family on the other side of the world through some app that my parents or older family members would not use, I would have to train them because the massive corporations bought out all the competition, so I either suffer a massive pain in the ass on every corner of my life or I have to surrender my data. Because I have no other choice: it's my data or death through a thousand cuts over my life due to all the inconveniences when these corps sprawl over more and more markets with their unlimited cash machine coming from the crops of data from all people they sell profiles about. Either give me regulations to never allow monopolies to ever hint at appearing in a free market or give me regulations about how well my personal data, something that tells a lot about me as a living person, will be treated, marketed, etc. It's a resource being extracted from me, so why the fuck can the free market bleed me out if they are also going to inconvenience my life by taking more and more market share? The free market is an illusion, it's just an ideology. Not too dissimilar from believing in real communism.

Tade0 5y ago

That's assuming a maximally unregulated market is an ideal we're striving for, which isn't the case - at least not in the EU, and that is a good thing.

JohnFen 5y ago
An unregulated market cannot be a free market.
- Tade0 5y ago
  For long at least and this is the reason why GP's assumption is doubly wrong.

mehlmao 5y ago

Oh hey, the "growth consultant" thinks we shouldn't have privacy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

clevergadget 5y ago
this is true in a non malicious way and has basically gone berserk in the realm of complicity
AlexB138 5y ago
This is an ad hominem. He's making a fair point, attacking him personally doesn't improve the conversation.
- darkwater 5y ago
  It is an ad hominem, I agree, but the opinion stated by GP is clearly dictated by their past career and experience. Actually seeing the ad-hominem made me check the GP profile.
  - AlexB138 5y ago
    Sure, pointing out a bias is fair, but it needs to be followed with an actual refutation of the idea presented. Just saying "you're wrong because of who you are" doesn't add much.
DSingularity 5y ago
Hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it. Aside from growth consultants, importance of privacy will be lost on a large and critical subset of engineers. This is why a huge blame goes on academics who train wave upon wave of new engineers with pathetic levels of ethical training.
jamiequint 5y ago
Better than being a self-important navel-gazing privacy nerd.

Intermernet 5y ago

"The free market" is demonstrably a sham. It, like communism, is good in theory, but broken by human behaviour.

trollski 5y ago

great. i am letting you know i, just for shits and giggles will hire someone to follow you 24/7 and report your daily routine to me. i am assuming you will try to evade/block this and that is fine. have a nice life.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

quickthrowman 5y ago

On behalf all the non-millionaires out there, Fuck You. Money took away your ethics and morals and broke your brain. A right to privacy should be something we strive for, not maximizing profit by spying on people. We do not have a free market in the US either.

seneca 5y ago
> On behalf all the non-millionaires out there, Fuck You. Money took away your ethics and morals and broke your brain. Less of this, please.
- fouric 5y ago
  Yeah, the quoted line clearly breaks the HN guidelines.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dang 5y ago
Please don't do this on HN. I don't want to ban you and we can't have this kind of thing here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quickthrowman 5y ago
  Noted, you can [dead] my post if you haven’t already. I’ll refrain from personal attacks in the future.
  - dang 5y ago
    Appreciated!

6r1d 5y ago

> This is how a free market works. Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us. Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0 and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioactive-quack-cures/index.html https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa... Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there. I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".