4 ms·

Let's all just stop tracking all together. We don't need tracking at all and bloating up and slowing down websites.

nicbou 3y ago
This would be nice. I don't track users on my personal blog. I don't give a flying duck about what people do there. However I make money from running a website which is really useful to a lot of people. I absolutely need to know what works and what doesn't. I can't write and edit in the dark, possibly missing by a mile what my readers really need. It would be like flying a plane without instruments. For instance, I see that a lot of people use the search to find a single guide, which should definitely be linked on the home page. Without basic tracking, I wouldn't even know which pages are important to my users. There are many gaping holes in your website that you could be completely blind to without a basic sense of what your users do on your website. I also caught many illegal copies of my website through referrer tracking. Three of them were phishing websites, and I got them shut down. So there are many legitimate reasons to have basic traffic counters, and you can have those while respecting your users' privacy and following the spirit and the letter of GDPR.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I wonder if someone's made an AdNauseam for tracking libraries yet. Going on the defensive clearly doesn't work, some more offensive action is required. Send a whole bunch of plausible events, pretending to click every link, changing your identifiers and stuff like resolution every time, make it impossible to determine what data is real and what isn't. Bonus points for leaving websites alone if they don't load tracking scripts until you've consented. We can't stop trackers, but we can try to make them useless. Even if they filter out such tracking they shouldn't be able to figure out what data was real, making their tracking attempts worthless.
- jhpacker 3y ago
  I believe AdNauseam uses EasyList, so if it doesn't include the EasyPrivacy part of that (which contains the trackers) by default it seems like it would be easy to add. That said, I don't think this is an effective strategy at all. Safari has placed a big giant hole in tracking (like 20% of users) and lots of sites are still proceeding like nothing has changed. Google referrer spam was run at mega-scale dumping billions (at least) of spam hits into millions of profiles and didn't effect tracking efforts. A plugin run by .0001% of users or whatever that adds in a bunch of slop to the numbers just makes more analysts pull out their hair rather than leading to change.

This would be nice. I don't track users on my personal blog. I don't give a flying duck about what people do there. However I make money from running a website which is really useful to a lot of people. I absolutely need to know what works and what doesn't. I can't write and edit in the dark, possibly missing by a mile what my readers really need. It would be like flying a plane without instruments. For instance, I see that a lot of people use the search to find a single guide, which should definitely be linked on the home page. Without basic tracking, I wouldn't even know which pages are important to my users. There are many gaping holes in your website that you could be completely blind to without a basic sense of what your users do on your website. I also caught many illegal copies of my website through referrer tracking. Three of them were phishing websites, and I got them shut down. So there are many legitimate reasons to have basic traffic counters, and you can have those while respecting your users' privacy and following the spirit and the letter of GDPR.

jeroenhd 3y ago

I wonder if someone's made an AdNauseam for tracking libraries yet. Going on the defensive clearly doesn't work, some more offensive action is required. Send a whole bunch of plausible events, pretending to click every link, changing your identifiers and stuff like resolution every time, make it impossible to determine what data is real and what isn't. Bonus points for leaving websites alone if they don't load tracking scripts until you've consented. We can't stop trackers, but we can try to make them useless. Even if they filter out such tracking they shouldn't be able to figure out what data was real, making their tracking attempts worthless.

jhpacker 3y ago
I believe AdNauseam uses EasyList, so if it doesn't include the EasyPrivacy part of that (which contains the trackers) by default it seems like it would be easy to add. That said, I don't think this is an effective strategy at all. Safari has placed a big giant hole in tracking (like 20% of users) and lots of sites are still proceeding like nothing has changed. Google referrer spam was run at mega-scale dumping billions (at least) of spam hits into millions of profiles and didn't effect tracking efforts. A plugin run by .0001% of users or whatever that adds in a bunch of slop to the numbers just makes more analysts pull out their hair rather than leading to change.