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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 figur
by 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 agoTrue, 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 agoWhat reasons?
- Silhouette 15y agoMaybe 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.