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Devil's advocate but it's disingenuous to say "when you click x it sends your click to Google" Sure, it's sending that info to Google's servers, in the same wa

Devil's advocate but it's disingenuous to say "when you click x it sends your click to Google" Sure, it's sending that info to Google's servers, in the same way it's sending your click to your ISP. But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking. Businesses -- and governments -- install these tools on their websites so they can better understand how people use them.

calrain 2y ago
>> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking. ... and Google... and the people they sell aggregated traffic data to... CloudFlare (e.g. NSA [joke!]) also gets a truckload of data from each web call, and your ISP, and the hosts of any <script> tags, and the image hosts, and all the engagement tracking plugins in your site... The list is endless
- deleted 2y ago
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- notpushkin 2y ago
  Yeah, it’s not like Google spins up a separate DB for you when you sign up for Analytics – everything’s in one pile, ready to be mined for that sweet sweet user data. (That’s the reason there’s such a generous free tier for website owners, of course.)
Lammy 2y ago
> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking No way — the network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes I bet it's possible to map every single human's social connections given enough time to correlate their network activity, e.g. a message-send on your phone that causes a notification to be delivered to your friend's phone. No need to break TLS or do anything other than encourage people to make as many network connections as possible all the time, record the fact that a given IP address has sent or received data, and wait days/weeks/years for enough correlations to filter out from the unbelievable volume of noise. TLS-all-the-things actually makes this problem worse because now every single connection has to leave my network to hit some “““trusted””” origin/Cloudflare/whatever server instead of just being cached at my gateway.

calrain 2y ago

>> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking. ... and Google... and the people they sell aggregated traffic data to... CloudFlare (e.g. NSA [joke!]) also gets a truckload of data from each web call, and your ISP, and the hosts of any <script> tags, and the image hosts, and all the engagement tracking plugins in your site... The list is endless

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
notpushkin 2y ago
Yeah, it’s not like Google spins up a separate DB for you when you sign up for Analytics – everything’s in one pile, ready to be mined for that sweet sweet user data. (That’s the reason there’s such a generous free tier for website owners, of course.)

Lammy 2y ago

> But that data is reasonably only accessible by the people who instrumented that tracking No way — the network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes I bet it's possible to map every single human's social connections given enough time to correlate their network activity, e.g. a message-send on your phone that causes a notification to be delivered to your friend's phone. No need to break TLS or do anything other than encourage people to make as many network connections as possible all the time, record the fact that a given IP address has sent or received data, and wait days/weeks/years for enough correlations to filter out from the unbelievable volume of noise. TLS-all-the-things actually makes this problem worse because now every single connection has to leave my network to hit some “““trusted””” origin/Cloudflare/whatever server instead of just being cached at my gateway.