6 ms·

The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'

53 points by xvirk 12y ago

seren 12y ago
Interesting, I had never made the relation between referer and advertising, which seems pretty obvious in retrospect. This parts makes me a bit uneasy. > The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content. I am not sure I would be interested in a "tailored" news experienced. (Or "relevant content" is a weasel word for "relevant ads")
- ninjaplease 12y ago
  You get it anyway. Are you kidding me? Were you born yesterday?
randunel 12y ago
I built my personal extension which blocks all the traffic from Dan Pollock's list [1], then blocks all the traffic from major service providers (google analytics, etc) and social networks (fb, tw, google, etc) when not on their website. Referral and user agent headers removed, I haven't found the need to remove other headers. Currently working on preventing (and manually allowing) all xhr/script/image requests 2 seconds after the main frame has loaded. The internet is a lot faster for me, and the battery appears to last longer. So far, I've only had problems logging into instagram, but once the cookie is set, I can re-enable blocking ads and tracking. I guess I am one of those 'dark traffickers' :P [1] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
- viraptor 12y ago
  Do you do anything about plugins sharing your fonts list? I found it to be the least known / most creepy way to identify a big number of users. Unfortunately i don't know of any extensions that would block that information.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Noscript will do that for you. To access the available fonts list you need to run a bit of js. So blocking javascript will take care of this.
- troels 12y ago
  Sounds interesting - care to share?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- cantlin 12y ago
  Looks like that list hasn't been updated since our domain switch. If you really want to block our internal analytics (which are in practice fairly harmless) replace "hits.guardian.co.uk" with "hits.theguardian.com".
  - stashpro 12y ago
    nice
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Nominated for the most classy comment of the month. That the product manager of The Guardian would take the time out from his (no doubt) busy day to help a user to block tracking is an amazing display of trust in that the user knows best what is good for them. Thank you.
    - pmoriarty 12y ago
      It's more like he knows that helping one single user like this isn't going to make a dent in the tracking they do on virtually all other users. Now, if they voluntarily stopped tracking all or a significant portion of their users, I would be shocked. Of course, that isn't going to happen.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Of course there is always a way to put a negative slant on just about anything.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    I admire the fact that you offer this kind of info :-) thanks mate, always admired the Guardian for his articles, authors & general stance towards privacy.
    - aw3c2 12y ago
      Considering them telling almost 20 other domains about your visit, I would not call that stance on privacy a strong one: 2o7.net, ajax.googleapis.com, chartbeat.com, chartbeat.net, dqwufkbc3sdtr.cloudfront.net, facebook-web-clients.appspot.com, google.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, imrworldwide.com, mathtag.com, ophan.co.uk, optimizely.com, outbrain.com, scorecardresearch.com, twitter.com, wunderloop.net, www.googleapis.com
- mw6621 12y ago
  Very interesting. Please do consider putting the extension up somewhere!
- eksith 12y ago
  This list is updated more frequently and is what I use : http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm There are a few things to take out to make certain services I like work (E.G. Hulu), so I usually try it in sections to see which services break and comment those.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I really wonder how this 10KLines is handled by the network subsystem. Is it compiled into a big regexp ? or another form of compacted runnable logic ? or at which point does it slow local name lookup.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    At a guess, by doing a match first on a substring using a hashtable. That way if something is a 'candidate' you can hit a more expensive datastructure to figure out if you really have a hit without burning a lot of cycles.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      This kind of long blacklists seems so fitting for Tries. I should grep *nix kernels (I wish I had windows >Xp source too) I guess. Linux (well, glibc, from http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81979/how-does-etc-hosts-match-work http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81979/how-does-etc-h...): http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/blob/HEAD:/nss/nss_files/files-hosts.c http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/blob/HEAD:/nss/nss_files/files... Windows : #tbd
anewhnaccount 12y ago
"""The Atlantic first identified "dark social" traffic back in 2012 to describe traffic coming messaging apps that had been stripped of referrer data because messaging and email use the secure "HTTPS" system rather than the open "HTTP" system used by web pages. Excuse me?! How does this trash get published?
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  How does any BusinessInsider trash get on the front page of HN would be the more relevant question.
- 37prime 12y ago
  It is BSinsider, so it is BS as usual.
- Mithaldu 12y ago
  Fun thing: I went on twitter to tell him his editor missed fact checking on that completely. Turns out the author of the piece is "Founding editor of Business Insider U.K.". Update: He has replied and said he would look into it and correct it. Being that he's aware of the discussion here, i suspect other things might get corrected too. :) https://twitter.com/Jim_Edwards/status/529588985690337280 https://twitter.com/Jim_Edwards/status/529588985690337280
- aikah 12y ago
  How can one trust anything that website says after this kind of statement? because clearly,these guys dont know what they are talking about. pretty sure they dont know what HTTP is and what a header is. How many factual errors in other articles that dont deal with the web?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
troels 12y ago
Funny how the tone suggests that this is something malicious being done to the guardian.
- throwaway900 12y ago
  It kind of is. The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story. As the article points out, the main beneficiary of this is Google - who are essentially competing with the Guardian for ad sales. I don't always agree with the Graun, but I believe in plurality rather than a Google-dominated world. Throwaway because of inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
    > The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story ... inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd. The privacy crowd are right; and so are you. This is a huge internal conflict the web today - how do you make it pay, keep it free and not have it track users?
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      This presumes that 'keep it free' is actually desirable. Free journalism means the person reading it is the product. Perhaps the less of that, the better.
      - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
        the existing model has been to subsidize newspaper sales with advertising for a very long time. This same model carried forward through radio and television. The alternative is a pay-per-view service, or subscribing to wires. I haven't done any research into the viability of that type of service, but it is a paradigm shift.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      Pick two.
gojomo 12y ago
Much could also be fake traffic, intended to defraud advertisers or others measuring audiences. Even assuming The Guardian itself is not a knowing participant in such schemes, its sites could receive such traffic when fraudsters try to make the full behavior of their sources look more legitimate.
zecg 12y ago
That's what you get from forcing your app on facebook. P.S. remember this: http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-guardian-facebook-app/ http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-gua... This is backlash, enjoy it.
- Ntrails 12y ago
  I will never forget it, and I still don't click on links to the guardian.
- ninjaplease 12y ago
  Ugh, you dolts are like Stallman, other than never having produced anything of value that is.
spindritf 12y ago
It's pretty crazy that browsers send referral in the first place. Getting rid of it, accidentally or not, is not a bug. I use refcontrol[1] to spoof the referral. I'm always visiting from the front page of the website even though I'm almost never visiting from the front page. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
- mahouse 12y ago
  Exactly. On Chrome, I use Referer Control [1], which I guess does the same. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hnkcfpcejkafcihlgbojoidoihckciin https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn... It's also very good to avoid those annoying image hostings that serve you a .html page with ads when they detect you click a .png file from another web page or those that just show you a image asking you not to hotlink content.
- ninjaplease 12y ago
  Not that crazy. It has valid use detecting/preventing hotlinking/bandwidth leeching. Plus otherwise how would you find out what search terms were driving traffic?
stuartmemo 12y ago
"executives at the company cannot figure out where it is coming from" Maybe get the engineers to have a look instead.
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
This is another reason why a lot of links to certain pages have the referral or campaign information hardcoded into their URLs, which removes the need for a referral header. I guess if the Guardian really wants that information they can make a deal with app publishers or Reddit or whoever to add a header like that. But on the other hand, given how it was the Guardian that published all of the original Snowden articles and information, they of all newspapers should applaud this rapid increase in increased privacy from their readers. I can't actually read the dates on the charts, but I assume the increase started shortly after the Snowden revelations, when more sites were enabling https by default and people became more privacy-aware. So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!"
- DanBC 12y ago
  > So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!" Like spam it's only bad when other people are doing it.
- ig1 12y ago
  It's the difference between the person you're phoning recording the phone call and the telco doing it.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  The funny thing is that there are scores of people here who are actively trying to get the Guardian out of business, because they regard anything related to advertising as evil. Will we be more or less free without the Guardian and similar independent sources of information?
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    You could of course simply pay for your online news(paper), the same way you used to pay for your paper based one. Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'. I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.
zecg 12y ago
Also relevant: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/2066.jpg http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/2066.jpg
underlines 12y ago
For me as a Web Analytic Consultant this sounds so wrong: We track campaigns through campaign-parameters but apps are a blind spot of course, that's nothing new. Relying on the referrer is stupid, most apps don't provide a referrer because they are Apps and not websites! Browsers provide a referrer if you are coming from another site. An App isn't a website, so there's no referrer. Of course there's no referrer, it's a new browser window! Campaign-Parameters here would also not be very helpful. If the Visitor copies the link not from a guardian.com visit, but after coming to the story through a campaign-URL, he would copy the URL with the campaign parameters and paste it into the app. This would be even more wrong, but happens daily! We Web Analysts should get used to it: People are becoming aware of privacy more than in the past and we can't always measure everything and everyone. Get over it!
- blumkvist 12y ago
  For me as a Web Analytics Consultant this sounds very wrong: A fellow Web Analytic Consultant doesn't know how to remove URL string parameters. Oh wait! That makes me look better in front of clients. Nevermind, carry on.
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  Bot traffic is more likely a bigger culprit for "dark traffic" than people becoming aware of privacy tools. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25346235 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25346235
ishener 12y ago
I think it's clear that almost all of the dark traffic is simply https sites. It's no necessarily apps, it can just be gmail... Someone really should make it a default to pass the referrer even for https.
- toothbrush 12y ago
  Haha, wat? edit (less obtuse): there should be less passing of referral headers, not more. Browsing is already such a leaky experience privacy-wise, we shouldn't be clamouring for it to become worse...
aw3c2 12y ago
I saw this illustration yesterday and it perfectly illustrates why I won't ever be a "normal" visitor to spying websites. Dear journalists, please consider your integrity to a better society. If you can't publish your thoughts without selling your readers to tracking and other evil, then I won't be crying after you. :\ http://i.imgur.com/AqL7C28.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AqL7C28.jpg
ig1 12y ago
They could just randomly survey a sample of the dark traffic user to find out where they're coming from.
kbart 12y ago
"<...>not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content." Actually one of the main reasons why I use various anonymizers is that I don't want relevant content for the same reason I don't want to see Facebooks's "top stories" -- most often it turns out to be totally irrelevant, clickbait or complete bullshit. Leave me the choice to what's interesting for me and what I want to see.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  But how are they (FB, Google, guardian) going to make money if you wont let them tell you what to think????
ChuckMcM 12y ago
"The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content." I think they meant to say 'relevant advertising' there not 'relevant content' as the content should, in theory, be the same regardless of how you got there. The interesting bit is that I've seen advertising contracts where you can't advertise with unapproved networks on a referred link from a Google SERP. Only on the second click can you do that pop-under or egregious flying frisbee ad. So if you are trying to be 'safe' you don't do any of that nonsense if you can't tell the difference, and I'm guessing that cuts into revenue.

53 points by xvirk 12y ago

seren 12y ago

Interesting, I had never made the relation between referer and advertising, which seems pretty obvious in retrospect. This parts makes me a bit uneasy. > The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content. I am not sure I would be interested in a "tailored" news experienced. (Or "relevant content" is a weasel word for "relevant ads")

ninjaplease 12y ago
You get it anyway. Are you kidding me? Were you born yesterday?

randunel 12y ago

I built my personal extension which blocks all the traffic from Dan Pollock's list [1], then blocks all the traffic from major service providers (google analytics, etc) and social networks (fb, tw, google, etc) when not on their website. Referral and user agent headers removed, I haven't found the need to remove other headers. Currently working on preventing (and manually allowing) all xhr/script/image requests 2 seconds after the main frame has loaded. The internet is a lot faster for me, and the battery appears to last longer. So far, I've only had problems logging into instagram, but once the cookie is set, I can re-enable blocking ads and tracking. I guess I am one of those 'dark traffickers' :P [1] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

viraptor 12y ago
Do you do anything about plugins sharing your fonts list? I found it to be the least known / most creepy way to identify a big number of users. Unfortunately i don't know of any extensions that would block that information.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Noscript will do that for you. To access the available fonts list you need to run a bit of js. So blocking javascript will take care of this.
troels 12y ago
Sounds interesting - care to share?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
cantlin 12y ago
Looks like that list hasn't been updated since our domain switch. If you really want to block our internal analytics (which are in practice fairly harmless) replace "hits.guardian.co.uk" with "hits.theguardian.com".
- stashpro 12y ago
  nice
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Nominated for the most classy comment of the month. That the product manager of The Guardian would take the time out from his (no doubt) busy day to help a user to block tracking is an amazing display of trust in that the user knows best what is good for them. Thank you.
  - pmoriarty 12y ago
    It's more like he knows that helping one single user like this isn't going to make a dent in the tracking they do on virtually all other users. Now, if they voluntarily stopped tracking all or a significant portion of their users, I would be shocked. Of course, that isn't going to happen.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Of course there is always a way to put a negative slant on just about anything.
- atmosx 12y ago
  I admire the fact that you offer this kind of info :-) thanks mate, always admired the Guardian for his articles, authors & general stance towards privacy.
  - aw3c2 12y ago
    Considering them telling almost 20 other domains about your visit, I would not call that stance on privacy a strong one: 2o7.net, ajax.googleapis.com, chartbeat.com, chartbeat.net, dqwufkbc3sdtr.cloudfront.net, facebook-web-clients.appspot.com, google.com, googleadservices.com, googletagservices.com, imrworldwide.com, mathtag.com, ophan.co.uk, optimizely.com, outbrain.com, scorecardresearch.com, twitter.com, wunderloop.net, www.googleapis.com
mw6621 12y ago
Very interesting. Please do consider putting the extension up somewhere!
eksith 12y ago
This list is updated more frequently and is what I use : http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm There are a few things to take out to make certain services I like work (E.G. Hulu), so I usually try it in sections to see which services break and comment those.
agumonkey 12y ago
I really wonder how this 10KLines is handled by the network subsystem. Is it compiled into a big regexp ? or another form of compacted runnable logic ? or at which point does it slow local name lookup.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  At a guess, by doing a match first on a substring using a hashtable. That way if something is a 'candidate' you can hit a more expensive datastructure to figure out if you really have a hit without burning a lot of cycles.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    This kind of long blacklists seems so fitting for Tries. I should grep *nix kernels (I wish I had windows >Xp source too) I guess. Linux (well, glibc, from http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81979/how-does-etc-hosts-match-work http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/81979/how-does-etc-h...): http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/blob/HEAD:/nss/nss_files/files-hosts.c http://repo.or.cz/w/glibc.git/blob/HEAD:/nss/nss_files/files... Windows : #tbd

anewhnaccount 12y ago

"""The Atlantic first identified "dark social" traffic back in 2012 to describe traffic coming messaging apps that had been stripped of referrer data because messaging and email use the secure "HTTPS" system rather than the open "HTTP" system used by web pages. Excuse me?! How does this trash get published?

higherpurpose 12y ago
How does any BusinessInsider trash get on the front page of HN would be the more relevant question.
37prime 12y ago
It is BSinsider, so it is BS as usual.
Mithaldu 12y ago
Fun thing: I went on twitter to tell him his editor missed fact checking on that completely. Turns out the author of the piece is "Founding editor of Business Insider U.K.". Update: He has replied and said he would look into it and correct it. Being that he's aware of the discussion here, i suspect other things might get corrected too. :) https://twitter.com/Jim_Edwards/status/529588985690337280 https://twitter.com/Jim_Edwards/status/529588985690337280
aikah 12y ago
How can one trust anything that website says after this kind of statement? because clearly,these guys dont know what they are talking about. pretty sure they dont know what HTTP is and what a header is. How many factual errors in other articles that dont deal with the web?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

troels 12y ago

Funny how the tone suggests that this is something malicious being done to the guardian.

throwaway900 12y ago
It kind of is. The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story. As the article points out, the main beneficiary of this is Google - who are essentially competing with the Guardian for ad sales. I don't always agree with the Graun, but I believe in plurality rather than a Google-dominated world. Throwaway because of inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.
- SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story ... inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd. The privacy crowd are right; and so are you. This is a huge internal conflict the web today - how do you make it pay, keep it free and not have it track users?
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    This presumes that 'keep it free' is actually desirable. Free journalism means the person reading it is the product. Perhaps the less of that, the better.
    - thisGuysAccount 12y ago
      the existing model has been to subsidize newspaper sales with advertising for a very long time. This same model carried forward through radio and television. The alternative is a pay-per-view service, or subscribing to wires. I haven't done any research into the viability of that type of service, but it is a paradigm shift.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Pick two.

gojomo 12y ago

Much could also be fake traffic, intended to defraud advertisers or others measuring audiences. Even assuming The Guardian itself is not a knowing participant in such schemes, its sites could receive such traffic when fraudsters try to make the full behavior of their sources look more legitimate.

zecg 12y ago

That's what you get from forcing your app on facebook. P.S. remember this: http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-guardian-facebook-app/ http://rational.pdimension.net/2011/10/11/do-not-use-the-gua... This is backlash, enjoy it.

Ntrails 12y ago
I will never forget it, and I still don't click on links to the guardian.
ninjaplease 12y ago
Ugh, you dolts are like Stallman, other than never having produced anything of value that is.

spindritf 12y ago

It's pretty crazy that browsers send referral in the first place. Getting rid of it, accidentally or not, is not a bug. I use refcontrol[1] to spoof the referral. I'm always visiting from the front page of the website even though I'm almost never visiting from the front page. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

mahouse 12y ago
Exactly. On Chrome, I use Referer Control [1], which I guess does the same. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hnkcfpcejkafcihlgbojoidoihckciin https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn... It's also very good to avoid those annoying image hostings that serve you a .html page with ads when they detect you click a .png file from another web page or those that just show you a image asking you not to hotlink content.
ninjaplease 12y ago
Not that crazy. It has valid use detecting/preventing hotlinking/bandwidth leeching. Plus otherwise how would you find out what search terms were driving traffic?

stuartmemo 12y ago

"executives at the company cannot figure out where it is coming from" Maybe get the engineers to have a look instead.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago

This is another reason why a lot of links to certain pages have the referral or campaign information hardcoded into their URLs, which removes the need for a referral header. I guess if the Guardian really wants that information they can make a deal with app publishers or Reddit or whoever to add a header like that. But on the other hand, given how it was the Guardian that published all of the original Snowden articles and information, they of all newspapers should applaud this rapid increase in increased privacy from their readers. I can't actually read the dates on the charts, but I assume the increase started shortly after the Snowden revelations, when more sites were enabling https by default and people became more privacy-aware. So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!"

DanBC 12y ago
> So the Guardian's a bit inconsistent here, On the one side they go "Big Brother is watching you!", on the other (in this article) they go "We're Big Brother and we can't see you anymore!" Like spam it's only bad when other people are doing it.
ig1 12y ago
It's the difference between the person you're phoning recording the phone call and the telco doing it.
danmaz74 12y ago
The funny thing is that there are scores of people here who are actively trying to get the Guardian out of business, because they regard anything related to advertising as evil. Will we be more or less free without the Guardian and similar independent sources of information?
- jacquesm 12y ago
  You could of course simply pay for your online news(paper), the same way you used to pay for your paper based one. Online newspaper is a bit strange, something like a 'plastic glass'. I'm all for it, but most business models revolve around advertising somehow.

zecg 12y ago

Also relevant: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/2066.jpg http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/2066.jpg

underlines 12y ago

For me as a Web Analytic Consultant this sounds so wrong: We track campaigns through campaign-parameters but apps are a blind spot of course, that's nothing new. Relying on the referrer is stupid, most apps don't provide a referrer because they are Apps and not websites! Browsers provide a referrer if you are coming from another site. An App isn't a website, so there's no referrer. Of course there's no referrer, it's a new browser window! Campaign-Parameters here would also not be very helpful. If the Visitor copies the link not from a guardian.com visit, but after coming to the story through a campaign-URL, he would copy the URL with the campaign parameters and paste it into the app. This would be even more wrong, but happens daily! We Web Analysts should get used to it: People are becoming aware of privacy more than in the past and we can't always measure everything and everyone. Get over it!

blumkvist 12y ago
For me as a Web Analytics Consultant this sounds very wrong: A fellow Web Analytic Consultant doesn't know how to remove URL string parameters. Oh wait! That makes me look better in front of clients. Nevermind, carry on.
mtbcoder 12y ago
Bot traffic is more likely a bigger culprit for "dark traffic" than people becoming aware of privacy tools. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25346235 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25346235

ishener 12y ago

I think it's clear that almost all of the dark traffic is simply https sites. It's no necessarily apps, it can just be gmail... Someone really should make it a default to pass the referrer even for https.

toothbrush 12y ago
Haha, wat? edit (less obtuse): there should be less passing of referral headers, not more. Browsing is already such a leaky experience privacy-wise, we shouldn't be clamouring for it to become worse...

aw3c2 12y ago

I saw this illustration yesterday and it perfectly illustrates why I won't ever be a "normal" visitor to spying websites. Dear journalists, please consider your integrity to a better society. If you can't publish your thoughts without selling your readers to tracking and other evil, then I won't be crying after you. :\ http://i.imgur.com/AqL7C28.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AqL7C28.jpg

ig1 12y ago

They could just randomly survey a sample of the dark traffic user to find out where they're coming from.

kbart 12y ago

"<...>not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content." Actually one of the main reasons why I use various anonymizers is that I don't want relevant content for the same reason I don't want to see Facebooks's "top stories" -- most often it turns out to be totally irrelevant, clickbait or complete bullshit. Leave me the choice to what's interesting for me and what I want to see.

rasz_pl 12y ago
But how are they (FB, Google, guardian) going to make money if you wont let them tell you what to think????

ChuckMcM 12y ago

"The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content." I think they meant to say 'relevant advertising' there not 'relevant content' as the content should, in theory, be the same regardless of how you got there. The interesting bit is that I've seen advertising contracts where you can't advertise with unapproved networks on a referred link from a Google SERP. Only on the second click can you do that pop-under or egregious flying frisbee ad. So if you are trying to be 'safe' you don't do any of that nonsense if you can't tell the difference, and I'm guessing that cuts into revenue.