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4 billion actions but none of those are mine. Checks Ghostery to make sure that Mixpanel is blocked I'm curious, because a lot of people on HN seem to be genui

by kijin 15y ago

4 billion actions but none of those are mine. Checks Ghostery to make sure that Mixpanel is blocked I'm curious, because a lot of people on HN seem to be genuinely concerned about the spread of online surveillance. Collusion was on the front page just a few hours ago. But a lot of startups and other web services also benefit from tracking everything their users do. How does one resolve this apparent moral dilemma?

dangrossman 15y ago
> 4 billion actions but none of those are mine Some of them almost definitely are. Half the benefit of Mixpanel is tracking how people use your web and mobile apps. HN could be using it. "User kijin logged in. User kijin viewed a story. User kijin commented on a story." -- all these events can be sent from the server to Mixpanel, then you can build ad-hoc reports on things like "how many users that read a story last week came back and read a different story this week". You can't block that kind of tracking, it's not happening in your browser, but it's just as specific to you. Mixpanel has APIs for server-side tracking in all the popular languages and all the mobile platforms. Every website you log in to, every Facebook app you interact with, every game you launch on your phone could be sending all the event data to Mixpanel and you wouldn't know.
- kijin 15y ago
  Yeah, that was probably an exaggeration. Server-side third-party tracking is scary. I use AdBlock and Ghostery to block pretty much every client-side tracking and analytics tool (including everything from facebook), so the best that I can say is that no data goes directly from me to an analytics service. But I honestly have no control over same-domain server-side scripts that pass my data to third parties behind my back. At least they'll have to go through a lot of hassle to track me across different sites.
Silhouette 15y ago
> How does one resolve this apparent moral dilemma? I can't speak for anyone else, but we have three key points. Hopefully it goes without saying that this should all be clearly and transparently described in the site's privacy policy. 1. We collect data from our server logs and run custom analyses in order to see things like which parts of our site (which features, operating on which data) are most popular and which methods of attracting traffic in the first place are working. 2. We use a little JavaScript to phone home with certain non-personal technical data that isn't provided in HTTP requests by default, such as screen size/device orientation. These help us to steer future development of our own site towards what our own users seem to want, both in terms of the content we invest in and the ways we present it, and it helps to better attract the kind of people who enjoy using our site. I see no moral conflict with either of these kinds of "surveillance": they are genuinely in the interests of all concerned, and the data doesn't get used for shady purposes. 3. We are sceptical about using external analytics tools, anything we don't host ourselves and that shares data about our visitors with third parties for whatever reason. In the early days, something like Google Analytics might be better than nothing for legitimate purposes, but it comes with "moral baggage", and it's not very accurate anyway since as you point out it can easily be blocked. We don't see this kind of tool as the way forward. In any case, anyone in Europe needs to consider whether using such third party services is even legal any more if they use tracking cookies or similar technologies. There may be a temporary moratorium on going after anyone for violating the new rules introduced last year, but the rules are there all the same for exactly the kinds of reason you mentioned, and the moratorium is only temporary.
endlessvoid94 15y ago
Companies that use analytics don't care about individual users behavior - they care about behavior of users en masse. They want to segment their users to figure out how to market and how to evolve -- are their users males between the ages of 18 and 35 from the UK? Do the users spend their time on the front page of HN or the comments? What's the ratio? That's the kind of analysis these companies do. They don't care about what kijin does on the site -- if they do, the fact that it's YOU versus anyone else is 100% inconsequential.
- kijin 15y ago
  True, but people who worry about surveillance aren't necessarily concerned about their individual behavior being tracked. They object to being part of the "users en masse" dataset in the first place, for various reasons.
  - endlessvoid94 15y ago
    What reasons?
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      Maybe conern that "anonymized" large data sets have turned out not to be so anonymous after all on quite a few occasions? Even if a particular disclosure seems to be impersonal today, better understanding of the data or better pattern detection algorithms might be developed tomorrow.

by kijin 15y ago

dangrossman 15y ago

> 4 billion actions but none of those are mine Some of them almost definitely are. Half the benefit of Mixpanel is tracking how people use your web and mobile apps. HN could be using it. "User kijin logged in. User kijin viewed a story. User kijin commented on a story." -- all these events can be sent from the server to Mixpanel, then you can build ad-hoc reports on things like "how many users that read a story last week came back and read a different story this week". You can't block that kind of tracking, it's not happening in your browser, but it's just as specific to you. Mixpanel has APIs for server-side tracking in all the popular languages and all the mobile platforms. Every website you log in to, every Facebook app you interact with, every game you launch on your phone could be sending all the event data to Mixpanel and you wouldn't know.

kijin 15y ago
Yeah, that was probably an exaggeration. Server-side third-party tracking is scary. I use AdBlock and Ghostery to block pretty much every client-side tracking and analytics tool (including everything from facebook), so the best that I can say is that no data goes directly from me to an analytics service. But I honestly have no control over same-domain server-side scripts that pass my data to third parties behind my back. At least they'll have to go through a lot of hassle to track me across different sites.

Silhouette 15y ago

> How does one resolve this apparent moral dilemma? I can't speak for anyone else, but we have three key points. Hopefully it goes without saying that this should all be clearly and transparently described in the site's privacy policy. 1. We collect data from our server logs and run custom analyses in order to see things like which parts of our site (which features, operating on which data) are most popular and which methods of attracting traffic in the first place are working. 2. We use a little JavaScript to phone home with certain non-personal technical data that isn't provided in HTTP requests by default, such as screen size/device orientation. These help us to steer future development of our own site towards what our own users seem to want, both in terms of the content we invest in and the ways we present it, and it helps to better attract the kind of people who enjoy using our site. I see no moral conflict with either of these kinds of "surveillance": they are genuinely in the interests of all concerned, and the data doesn't get used for shady purposes. 3. We are sceptical about using external analytics tools, anything we don't host ourselves and that shares data about our visitors with third parties for whatever reason. In the early days, something like Google Analytics might be better than nothing for legitimate purposes, but it comes with "moral baggage", and it's not very accurate anyway since as you point out it can easily be blocked. We don't see this kind of tool as the way forward. In any case, anyone in Europe needs to consider whether using such third party services is even legal any more if they use tracking cookies or similar technologies. There may be a temporary moratorium on going after anyone for violating the new rules introduced last year, but the rules are there all the same for exactly the kinds of reason you mentioned, and the moratorium is only temporary.

endlessvoid94 15y ago

Companies that use analytics don't care about individual users behavior - they care about behavior of users en masse. They want to segment their users to figure out how to market and how to evolve -- are their users males between the ages of 18 and 35 from the UK? Do the users spend their time on the front page of HN or the comments? What's the ratio? That's the kind of analysis these companies do. They don't care about what kijin does on the site -- if they do, the fact that it's YOU versus anyone else is 100% inconsequential.

kijin 15y ago
True, but people who worry about surveillance aren't necessarily concerned about their individual behavior being tracked. They object to being part of the "users en masse" dataset in the first place, for various reasons.
- endlessvoid94 15y ago
  What reasons?
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    Maybe conern that "anonymized" large data sets have turned out not to be so anonymous after all on quite a few occasions? Even if a particular disclosure seems to be impersonal today, better understanding of the data or better pattern detection algorithms might be developed tomorrow.