
Even Privacy Advocates Are Tracking You Online - Eurongreyjoy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-07/even-privacy-advocates-are-tracking-you-online
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new299
The article is about an organization called Californians for Consumer Privacy.
They use Google and Facebook trackers. The key quote is this:

“The irony of criticizing Facebook and Google whilst using their services is
not lost on us, but this gets back to our rationale for the initiative:
Californians should be able to use these services and be secure that their
personal information is not being sold. Right now this is not possible,...We
end up with this Faustian bargain,”

Which doesn't really ring true. To me it sounds like the founder doesn't have
a technical background, probably contracted out development of the site, and
just went with "whatever they normally do". Because... come on... it's not
that hard to get stats on users without passing the info over to
Google/Facebook. Certainly not hard to get enough stats to run an effective
campaign.

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emodendroket
The stats from Google are pretty sophisticated. But let's assume you're right.
So what? Should only engineers be able to weigh in? Do I need to get a degree
in chemistry before I can object to things getting dumped into drinking water?

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new299
No, but I'd expect you not to dump chemicals in drinking water yourself?

Personally, I feel it would be better to have people with more technical
competence involved in the campaign, because it looks a bit sloppy aside from
anything else.

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emodendroket
I suppose I see this as more akin to driving a car while arguing for more
restrictions on carbon emissions.

I'm not sure what the case is with these advocates, but in the nonprofit world
a lot of times Google Analytics is used to determine what appeals are most
effective or what pages people spend time on and it would be difficult to
duplicate the sophistication of the tool. To me this is a little different
than selling your data to advertisers.

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new299
You proposed the initial analogy, so I was responding to that.

Determining which appeals/email/campaigns are most effective is pretty trivial
with open source tools, you don't need Google for this. Honestly part of the
reason Google analytics is so successful is not because it's much better than
anything else, it's because it's the de facto standard, and free, and people
don't see an advantage to using anything else. The advantage to using
something else (ideally self hosted, or at least that you're paying for)
should be clear to a privacy advocate.

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emodendroket
So what would you recommend instead?

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lakechfoma
Is content based advertising such an ineffective thing that we _need_
individually targeted advertising powered by trackers?

Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers.
Anyone going to Gizmodo gets the same ads for tech gadgets, maybe even refined
by article. Etc, like the pre-internet days.

Maybe you think the ads are irrelevant and want the "better experience" that
Google and FB profess, then you get to opt-in to tracking for refined ads.
Maybe we can even have fine grained controls over the data/advertising such
that we can control our privacy or that one weird search we did doesn't stalk
us for months/years later.

edit: I would be so ok with this business model that as long as the content
based ads of a given website respect my attention and security I would
actually whitelist that website.

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nitrogen
_Anyone that does a search for shoes on Google gets ads for shoe retailers._

I can see a case where tracking might be useful: if my previous search was for
"drums", and "leaf springs" before that, maybe I'm looking for brakes for an
old truck, not sneakers.

But I'd much rather have the organic results than an ad anyway, modulo SEO
spam.

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donohoe
Isn't it the same as complaining about groups, that are against private
funding of politicians election campaigns, giving money to politicians in
order to change that system? It rings a bit hollow.

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drchiu
The nature of the internet makes online tracking and the minimization of user
privacy a natural progression of where things inevitably head. We do, for the
most part, live in a capitalistic world. The irony of a privacy advocacy group
using the exact tech they’re supposed to advocate against reminds me of the
argument for transparency: “Works, but only for the other guy please.”

