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One problem I've always seen when debating tracking was the broad scope of the word. Take for instance three examples: 1. A shopkeeper that watches his custome
by mihaic 3y ago
One problem I've always seen when debating tracking was the broad scope of the word.
Take for instance three examples:
1. A shopkeeper that watches his customers for shoplifting and observes their flow in the store to know where to place products.
2. An online store that tracks what products people are looking at and what carts are abandoned the most.
3. A global ad-network that gets fed most of your browsing activity across the internet and creates an advertising profile for you.
Don't you agree that a difference in scale brings on a difference in kind somewhere on this axis?
The way I personally see it is that what a user does on your website is fine to observe, but when data is being shared to third parties is must explicitly have your agreement.
- skybrian 3y agoEven the term “advertising profile” is a very broad statement that leaves much to the imagination. They’re not all the same. You can view and modify the ad profiles Google has for you [1] [2]. I leave it running because I’m vaguely curious what it will find. So far, the ad topics are extremely generic and not anything I worry about. [1] https://myadcenter.google.com/ https://myadcenter.google.com/ [2] chrome://settings/adPrivacy/interests (if using Chrome on desktop)
- chefandy 3y agoI'm not so sure those advertising profiles are "the data" as much as a simplified representation of the data for users to manage. I don't know about Google specifically but there's no way in hell the limit of Facebook's marketing profile is what they show you in their analogous interface.
- skybrian 3y agoYes, lack of transparency and lack of trust are big problems. I'm hopeful that the ad topics code in Chromium will improve this situation somewhat. Maybe someday we will see reproducible builds for Chrome?
- chefandy 3y agoPersonally, I'm hoping the internet business world will discover an entirely different currency to exchange for online services. While I do pay for email, search, news, etc. I don't have a problem with some single-party tracking. If I go to a pharmacy website and search for Q-tips, I see no problem with them banner advertising their generic cotton swabs on subsequent page loads. However, the actual psychological profiles created by today's ad tracking systems have proven to be quite dangerous, a la state actor interference in recent US elections. At its heart, this is not a discussion about advertisements. This is about marketing companies making large-scale tools specifically designed to manipulate the behavior of millions of people. I don't care about what's in product ads-- I do care about bad actors using that data for its intended purpose in another domain.
- skybrian 3y agoYes, that sounds bad, but the ad topics in Chrome look nothing like a psychological profile. It's a list of very generic topics like "Computer & Video Games", "News", and "Real Estate". This is targeted, but only barely.
- troupo 3y agoGDPR explicitly defines the necessary terms
- mihaic 3y agoIn what way? What are the "necessary terms"? I honestly have read some of that legislation and didn't get clarity. GDPR created a lot of burden for small companies and at the same didn't seem to offer that much protection against abuses from the likes of Google/Facebook.
- troupo 3y ago> In what way? What are the "necessary terms"? Much like tech standards/specs laws have a section defining the terms used in the law. So, GDPR defines these things. In the context of GDPR tracking probably doesn't even exist as a term. There's personal data that you can't pass on to third parties without user's consent and similar things.
- jampekka 3y ago1. and 2. are likely implementable without needing a consent.
- mihaic 3y agoIf they are, in that case isn't data sharing the problem and not the tracking itself?
- jampekka 3y agoIf you aren't tracking with identifiable data there's no problem. Tracking contents of a cart is not a problem, nor is how often a product page is hit. Keeping log of when some space is occupied by a person is not a problem, at least if you don't anything else about the person.
- mihaic 3y agoYeah, but how can you know if some specific IP isn't ruining your aggregated data?
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThe subject is the difference. If a person is the subject of your tracking, then you need that person's consent. If an inanimate object is the subject of your tracking, then you likely in the clear. The caveat is that if you track a person via your tracking of inanimate objects, then you better have that person's consent.
- mihaic 3y agoWhen is an inanimate object the subject of the tracking? In all my examples it was a person being observed.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoThe space a person inhabits is an inanimate object. Whether a space is occupied or not is an observation of the space. What an inhabited space looks like is an observation of both the space and its occupants.
- mihaic 3y agoSo is my analytics engine merely observing inanimate electrons that have been launched apriori by an occupant, but which do not constitute the actions of the occupant-in-itself or the tracking-in-itself. Sorry, but I can't find any other response to what you said there.