Trackers

http://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers

by henrik_w • 10 years ago

874 209 10 years ago

jacquesmattheij.com

tux3• 10 years ago

It's funny how much more relatable the whole privacy debate becomes when transposed to the physical world.

Some will disagree, but I think the comparison was spot on.

raldu• 10 years ago

Exactly. I am using the same analogy to explain non-technical people about tracking, ads, surveillance etc. so that they can relate. Otherwise the abstract technical concepts seem like coming out of a science fiction story to them.

S4M2• 10 years ago

Thank you Jacques for writing how something that would be completely unacceptable in the physical world is deemed perfectly fine online. It has always bothered me.

Take for example how the FBI wants to have automatic access to the data in all iphones through a backdoor. Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?

Of course that would cause an uproar, but the general public being so uneducated with technology, I guess they don't see how the two are related.

JorgeGT• 10 years ago

Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key

Didn't TSA do exactly this, only to have CAD designs of the master keys reverse-engineered from a photo and posted in GitHub? https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys

timr3• 10 years ago

"Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?"

I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and landlord to help them do that. For that matter, the landlord could even be compelled to surrender his master key for the entire apartment complex.

All of those things could happen out here in the big blue room, and nobody would blink an eye. Funny how these metaphors to the physical world clear things up, isn't it?

mschulze• 10 years ago

But when the FBI gets the key or picks the lock it does not make any other door more insecure, or enables other parties to get into other doors.

What if the FBI would ask all landlords to install a special door to every apartment, but only the FBI has the key to this special door? What if someone successfully copies that key? Now they have access to all apartments.

makeitsuckless• 10 years ago

It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing.

However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.

icebraining• 10 years ago

I agree that there is plenty of whining by American companies about EU privacy protection laws, but the cookie law was still worthy of ridicule, even for an European like me who quite appreciates the Data Protection Directive. The intention was good, but the implementation was flawed, and predictably so.

watty• 10 years ago

It's already possible, any physical lock or home or safe can be opened with a warrant. The fact that we're almost at a point where we can hide something from the government (even with a warrant) is groundbreaking.

S4M2• 10 years ago

It's perfectly fine that the FBI or the police can open a physical lock with a warrant. The warrant is supposed to be delivered by someone representing the Justice department, which is (theoretically) independent from the police. What would be unacceptable is that they could just bypass that authority and enter to anybody's home on a whim.

Which is what they are trying to achieve when they asked Apple to put a backdoor in their Iphones.

cm21872• 10 years ago

and all communications being recorded is like having every phone line tapped by default. And USPS / Royal Mail opening everyone's mail.

austinjp• 10 years ago

Add the part where one of the bouncers starts their own targeting company and does deals with some of the other targeters.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

Good one, will do.

pjuu• 10 years ago

WOW! This is a great way to put it. Well done.

t0mislav• 10 years ago

I didn't quite understand bouncers. Those are some tools for private browsing?

glward• 10 years ago

Ad/tracker blockers, I assume.

raverbashing• 10 years ago

I think that better than an ad-blocking solution would be to feed all those trackers with fake information

Oh you want location data here it is, this morning I've been all over the planet. Want to know all the websites I'm visiting, sure, here's a million of them.

Just based on the fact that they keep trying to sell you the thermometer after you already don't care kind of points out that they're being had, and I'm all for helping it happen

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

feed all those trackers with fake information

If you're going to war, sure. But that's a lot of wasted resources.

One would hope that we can find a peaceful solution. But war is always an option.

chinathrow• 10 years ago

It's already a war - not only according to the article.

zelos• 10 years ago

Would that be feasible to automate as a browser extension? Something like Ghostery, except that tracking scripts are run in a sandbox that returns random but feasible data for API calls?

Kenji• 10 years ago

Wow, that is genius. If there was such a thing, something like uMatrix, but that automatically feeds trackers with complete garbage, I'd install it in a heartbeat. The problem is that you will always reveal your real IP when you establish a TCP connection, unless you are using a proxy.

Kristine19753• 10 years ago

I think (but I'm far from an expert) that it would be easy to filter out this fake information. Especially if it's obviously fake like "I've been all over the planet." A bit like spam vs "real" emails.

Baghard• 10 years ago

The marketing industry is moving beyond trackers and cookies. Hastened by the mobile/tablet revolution (users switch devices way more often) and the stricter privacy laws in Europe (anti-cookie laws).

Now they either require you to login to get the "mobile" experience, like Facebook or Twitter, or they use probabilistic statistics to identify you without cookies.

That guy reading a newspaper in the park with a paper bag over his head and 4 goons on the lookout, feeding us uninformative/unlikely data, that guy is with 90% certainty Jacques Mattheij.

(When cookie-tracking was more common we set up a cookie-swap program. Stopped after a few months out of security concerns.)

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

This is - unfortunately - spot on, and there is much worse to come.

It's funny how a law that actually confirms a right that is solidly anchored in the declaration of human rights would result in technological circumvention rather than - the expected outcome - compliance.

cottonseed• 10 years ago

There are some plugins that do that. Adnauseam clicks on every ad: http://adnauseam.io/, and TrackMeNot continually makes random search engine quieries: http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/.

atirip• 10 years ago

I have blocked as much trackers as i can. Having said that, i know why they exists. See, when John produces shampoo, he needs to sell it. The only way is to advertise, one way or another, because without advertising, public knowledge, the shampoo does not sell. Now John does want to spend as less to ads as possible, that makes sense, since we, the customers, end up paying about that too. To spend less, John needs to show ads only to core group of buyers, for that he needs to know, who you are. Tracker does that. Shampoo costs 5 bucks. How much you agree to pay for that with advertising costs included? 6? 16? Really, are you ready to eat up 200% advertising markup? I have no idea, frankly.

buro92• 10 years ago

Really well put.

I've been operating browser separation (Google in Chrome, social in Chrome incognito, and everything else in a locked-down privacy mode only Firefox - all with uBlock) for a while, and also use anonymising VPNs for anything I really don't trust, and my own VPN with streisand and Dnsmasq (with a hosts very similar to https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/ ).

On my mobile every link I click in any app I open in Dolphin Zero (still on that DNS blocking VPN - which blocks all trackers in apps too), and I only keep apps I actually use and trust the publishers of on my device.

It feels like a chore (manually copying links from one browser to another depending on trust level), I wonder whether it's worth it sometimes... but then I occasionally get to see someone else's experience of the web and it's so incredibly and perniciously been invaded by advertisers that I am glad I do all of this.

It's become so bad that I even had to change my uBlock origin rules for my online bank ( https://banking.smile.co.uk/SmileWeb/start.do ) to block even first-party scripts... because they use Adobe, Omniture and Tealium tools to measure stuff and for A/B testing of their online banking features.

I now block absolutely everything and tell others to do so too, but unfortunately there is collateral damage.

The very sites I care about may not require advertising revenue, but do value tracking data that helps them spot errors, debug things, find out what screen resolutions they should cater for. Their analytics, client-side debugging, this is all now rendered useless to them.

PS: If you happen to work on Firefox for Android, please enable browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to be configured via about:config. I would love to default enable private browsing in a UA capable of running uBlock on my mobile.

phillc73• 10 years ago

I don't know enough about how uBlock works, but I'm mostly concerned about blocking trackers, and dislike invasive advertising. I use Ghostery with everything blocked.

I also bank with smile.

I've just confirmed that Ghostery is blocking Adobe, Omniture and Tealium trackers, but I was able to log into my account no problem. I also transferred some funds to a linked account.

What aren't you able to do with smile? And is it something specifically with the way uBlock blocks?

buro92• 10 years ago

I noticed with Smile that when I first went to the login page it would fail to login the first time... they have some server-side code to track sessions linearly and force log-out if it detects background operations.

Their use of one of their trackers meant that the first time I ever arrived at their site (every time, because private browsing) it would set things up that touched their server and triggered Smile's security thing.

It was a minor inconvenience... but then I looked into it and noticed how much tracking they were doing.

My view on bank websites is that the only party that I should be speaking to is the bank, securely. No other party, ever.

I now block absolutely everything on my banking website, but I was very surprised this had to be done. A bank, of all sites, should never ever use a third party anything.

Doctor_Fegg2• 10 years ago

Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story.

They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.

But that's as far as it goes. They don't follow you out the store, let alone into your bedroom. They don't match anything with third-party data, let alone your mobile phone number. The store just wants to know where to put the eggs.

Unfortunately, your bouncers have simply been told to "hurt them if you have to, I’ve really had enough of it". So last time they came in, they smashed the CCTV cameras. The store-owner remonstrated with them a bit but the whole debate around bouncers has become so polarised that there was really no point arguing.

---

And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

They don't follow you out the store

This is actually factually incorrect.

Some hints here:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...

And it goes even deeper than that.

Doctor_Fegg2• 10 years ago

Self-hosted, same-domain Piwik doesn't track you on other sites, and doesn't pull in any external data sources.

adsche• 10 years ago

A little obscure? :)

hurt them if you have to
they smashed the CCTV cameras

What? Nope. Not at all. You can still track everybody without a blocker, can you not? Or what harm do you incur that translates into harm or property damage in your metaphor?

dhimes6• 10 years ago

They cry that they are hurt when you block ads. Forbes.com may be the worst of them, but even if I allow ads they block content if I don't allow the trackers. I was going to email them to voice my concern about this, but there wasn't a contact page easily accessible (they really blocked their pages!).

Kliment• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, the reason the eggs are hidden is that they are a low-margin item and people looking for them will pass more high-margin items on the way and be possibly tempted to buy.

gglitch3• 10 years ago

What is meant by "populist" in this critique?

matt4077• 10 years ago

It means roughly the same as when the term is applied to politicians when they promise lower taxes: A popular measure that actually has detrimental effects in the long term (with the possible connotation that the politician should/does know this and is just exploiting some base emotions).

rmc2• 10 years ago

It's a way make "popular" sound like a bad thing.

davb3• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that a lot of content producers have feel entitled to users' participation in analytics at all.

Sure, it may be frustrating when a user blocks tracking tools (especially self hosted ones) but that's the their choice.

We got by for decades without analysing user habits (even in a local only context, without correlation with third party data). There are so few examples of cases where analysing user behaviour was a make or break factor in a store's survival. Sure, it can be useful to know what a user looked at and, as you suggest, how difficult it is to find the eggs. But there are better ways.

Physical stores at one point (and still now, in many cases) respect that user choice. Want to participate? Get a loyalty card. We'll watch how you spend, but we'll give a little something back to participants.

On the web, the solution is simple. Do it on your application servers back end. Have your request handler (which should probably know a lot more about your user in the context of your application than any third party tool) log user requests and actions. You'll be able to tie data gathered to a logged in user and their local purchase or browsing history.

You'll get to know your user better and you'll avoid third party tools that creep out a growing proportion of your users.

You're not entitled to participation in analytics.

dhimes6• 10 years ago

We got by for decades without analysing user habits

Depends when you start counting the decades. Since Netscape and the 'coming out' of the www, we've always paid attention to where people go on our own web pages.

sdoering• 10 years ago

In the "good ol' days" (TM the shop-owners in a community knew quite a lot about their customers.

Oh Mary just gave birth, Henry is currently sick, Walter likes his coffee a little stronger, James a little weaker (something with his stomach). Danielle drinks only tee, has two kids and the marriage is not really happy. And so on. A lot bordered on gossip, a lot was very valid and relevant information. People talked.

So it was totally normal in a smallish community for the store owners to have an extensive profile on every customer. All in their head for sure, but non the less. And guess what - everybody benefitted. The clerk could recommend based on what he knew. People would be directed to relevant produce.

By the way this works even today. If I buy at my normal place I get personalized recommendations for cheese from the lady behind the counter. We talk, she knows a little bit about my tastes and I get to try new things.

ssharp2• 10 years ago

To be fair, you're not entitled to free content free of tracking either.

empressplay• 10 years ago

Sysops of BBSes used to watch their users while they were online. When the BBS only had one line this was easy (and often you couldn't do anything else BUT watch them.)

So, to say that analysing user behaviour is new is probably an overstatement, at least in the BBS example.

akavel• 10 years ago

You write "Do it on your application servers back end", but then the parent comment actually argues specifically for "self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools". So, I'm now confused: do you actually agree with it? or disagree? or what? was there something edited in the parent comment in the meantime? did I miss something?

rmc2• 10 years ago

Tough.

The advertising industry and tracking has gone too far. The amount of websites with local analytics is small. I suspect that nearly all US based shops with local analytics is breaking (EU) data protection law. Why should I assist them in breaking the law when it harms my privacy?

burkaman2• 10 years ago

Why can't you just ask people for permission first?

pacala2• 10 years ago

Believe it or not, people have been optimizing the eggs location long before the Internet, using the simple art of [anonymous] sampling and statistics. There is absolutely no technical need to track everyone's every move, the ad / surveillance industry is overreaching by a huge margin. See http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/about-us/nielsen-families.html for an example of sampling in action.

Furthermore, the eggs are hidden on purpose, such that people have to walk a long way along aisles filled with high margin impulse buy crap. As a customer, this "optimization" is actively trying to exploit my atavic weaknesses and damage my health. Thank you very much, I don't sense a whole lot of sympathy for me here, just a race for the quick and dirty buck.

marincounty• 10 years ago

They have been doing it for a long time, but we know the game now. Most people haven't figured out they are being digitally tracked, but when that happens, I have a feeling consumers will get proactive, and really begin to withhold, or make it difficult for entities to track buying habits.

As to eggs in the back of the store, yes milk and eggs are always in the back of every store I can recall. We all know the game. Why piss off your loyal customers? Too many MBA's? I don't know, but it's obviously not working. I don't like shopping anymore. I don't think I'm alone.

I can't think of any brink and morter store that's doing well. And they always blame the Internet?

Whole foods was doing great for years. Now with uniformed security guards roaming around, tired workers, sneaky product placement; their quarterlies are the chits. They blame competition. It's not competition. Your stores became like everyone else. By the way, the CEO did promise to make staples affordable and he delivered. Milk, eggs, butter, and bread are cheaper than Safeway, along with their brand of product. There 365 products are reasonably priced.

I am very respectful to pretty much every store I shop in.

By respectful, I treat the store like I live there. I put away items of I didn't need. I don't just leave the item in the cart, or in another area of the store. I don't mess up shelved items, like books, etc. I treat the employees with respect, and try to make their horrid jobs easier.

That said, when I walk into a store like Home Depot. A store that is tracking my movements throughout the store with CCTV, and takes a picture of my mug at every isle, checkout, bathroom entrance, point of sale, etc.; I could care less about how I treat the store. Do I care that every one of my transactions is transferred to some server in Richmond Virginia--yes!

It's funny, I used to like the company. I was glad when they opened up near me. The employees seemed like they liked/respected their employer. I used to go to their stores just to browse. I usually ended up buying something.

Jump foreward to today. I only shop there if I absolutely have to. I walk into that chit box, and can't get out quick enough. If I don't need a product in my hand it goes anywhere except where it was located. My mood changes once I walk through those doors and look into those cameras. I don't think I'm the only one who dislikes being monitored, tracked, and manipulation with product placement.

Their employees seem like they are working in a correctional facility. literally every employee seems misserable.

Home Depot is a perfect example of too much tracking(I don't know all their digital tracking tools--I just feel like I'm being watched. I don't like showing my ID when returning an item with a receipt.), bad security, and general useless advice from MBA's who should have at least one year of grunt level retail work before being promoted to screwing up a store.

I have a feeling tides will turn eventually.

collyw• 10 years ago

Hmmm.I have seen more evidence of supermarkets shifting the position of everything every few months, so that you have to hunt more to find your eggs, then see lots more other stuff you will need to buy while searching around.

roymurdock2• 10 years ago

Grocery Store Tactics: Easter Simulator Edition.

pas• 10 years ago

Integrate analytics and tracking server-side. Duh. (And if you so need window size and other easy-to-get-via-client-side-JS information, render the script into the page instead of putting it into a .js file.)

And maybe make all this optional for those that don't want to be tracked. (I mean allow them to register and opt-out of server-side tracking too.) I think they might even start to like you and become sort of loyal.

gorhill• 10 years ago

it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik

First, a precision: EasyPrivacy blocks Piwik. uBlock Origin enables EasyPrivacy by default. If you think it's wrong for Piwik to be blocked, bring the issue to EasyPrivacy maintainers.

Now, why is it "irresponsible" for Piwik to be blocked?

Some of us just do not like to have all our movements scrutinized, even by 1st parties -- I personally consider this a healthy stance, I just do not like to be treated as a product.

Also, what guarantee there is that all the data collected by one 1st party through Piwik is not sold to any number of 3rd parties? There is no guarantee -- thus all tracking deserve to be blocked as much as it can. It's for the same reason I choose to not disclose my phone number or postal code at the cash register when they ask in brick-and-mortar stores.

pc862• 10 years ago

I can understand phone number, but what possible reason is there to refuse to give zip code? The only thing I can think of using that information for is to determine the optimal location to open another store.

joshmanders7• 10 years ago

Some of us just do not like to have all our movements scrutinized, even by 1st parties -- I personally consider this a healthy stance, I just do not like to be treated as a product.

And that is your choice and I can respect that, but please, don't be one of those entitled people who complain about a website completely blocking you for blocking their stuff.

And for the record, I love uBlock and your work. I use it myself, but I use it in blacklist mode only. Which I feel is the best way to do it. Block the shady sites, don't hurt the ones who just want to get a little analytics.

kelseydh6• 10 years ago

If you're really this worried then you should probably be spoofing your request headers and hiding your IP behind a VPN, because those will reveal a lot more about you than what most 1st party trackers will.

BobTheCoder• 10 years ago

I think the 'ethical' choice is some kind of a middle ground approach. It's true if everyone blocked all tracking and analytics the web could not exist as the largely free service that it does today. Websites also would struggle to improve their quality without the analytical data.

That's why I think the orbital strike option of block everything all the time is ultimately selfish. I think individuals should make some attempt to block ads/tracking that they think is itself immoral but not block what they consider fine.

For example, I don't block ads in google search results since they are unobtrusive and clearly marked as ads.

threatofrain• 10 years ago

I think even if we were to accept that some places use tracking responsibly, it's the capacity which could so easily be abused, and so lacking in benefit for the individual, which warrants the blanket use of privacy blocking.

Given this, a little more difficulty in "finding the eggs" is a good trade-off, especially since it's not like designers are naive and consigned to random interface choices, and you can actually still do A/B-type testing without user tracking.

Otherwise, users have to trust that site owners, out of empathy, will do the right thing with data, and that a broader network of tracking won't occur -- despite that it's totally rational from the site owner's perspective to broadly track users. That strategy is beyond brittle; it's unbelievable.

quantumpotato_• 10 years ago

Your second paragraph... that does not apply to grocery stores here in the US.

They fill the center with junk and the fresh food, eggs & milk along the sides. Often eggs & milk (commonly used together) are on OPPOSITE halves of the store!

http://www.grocery411.com/grocery-store-layout.html

helper• 10 years ago

If you want to read a good book on studying in-store shopper behavior, you should checkout "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill. He runs a firm that studies shoppers by secretly following people around in a store and writing down everything they do.

intrasight• 10 years ago

I assume that if you change the file names of those internal analytics tools then they will stop being blocked.

fweespee_ch• 10 years ago

And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.

Honestly, we only need a statistically significant sample for a few buckets...so unless uBlock and chums hit ~85% none of this effects me. The same is true for virtually every "good actor" in the space.

You just need to be able to run an A/B test that is statistically accurate + analytics + RUM.

https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/

~37%

Ad blocking is a reasonable proxy for tracking blocking since they usually go hand in hand. [e.g. uBlock]

Real world, I see ~35% block rates at $DayJob. I don't care about that at all and I'm amazed any "good actor" would given 65% of the population is more than enough for as many statistically accurate samples as you'd need.

So when you say "you are doing the right thing", what isn't included in the above?

masswerk• 10 years ago

Once, a shop had hired an assistant called "Cookie" to do the job and another one even had hired a specialized clerk (named W.B. Alizer, for the record) and I was totally fine with this. But then, stores started to hire some guys from the Tracker bunch, but said it would be ok, since they had strict orders to stay indoors.

Now, this became a little distracting. Every now and then I had to wait for the guy to catch up, who was crawling along with me trying to measure the width of my foot steps with an inch rule, and then there was this guy, who insisted to peek into my pockets and to keep track of its contents in a quart book he had attached to the lining of my coat. (Over time, my coat became that heavy, I had to stop and rip out the lining in order to proceed.) Yay, it was all to my best ...

Then, something funny happened as stores began to engage in something they called "optimizing". Had the super market around the corner once sold 5 different sorts of cheese, it was now just 3 with the 2 best selling ones missing (they didn't have much potential for future optimization as they were sold out constantly). Some months later, they started to hide the bread behind a fake wall as soon as I entered and pushed whole piles of umbrellas in my way (since I had once bought one on a stormy afternoon a year ago – I would have understood, if it had been bagels, because I started to buy these as I was searching for the bread in vain.) That is, until last Halloween, when I discovered that there was still bread to buy, when I entered the shop in disguise.

Last month, I bumped into a girl that looked rather familiar, just as I was preparing my wig and false mustache for getting some bread at the super market. Remember Cookie? She is still working at a store, inside the server room. We chatted a while, and now I'm a habitual to her work place again. The store is a bit farther away than the fancy super market, but it really outweighs the inconveniences of the other place.

monochromatic3• 10 years ago

Some of us find even that level of tracking to be creepy and invasive, and would rather opt out. You never asked us if we wanted to be "helped" around your store, but we have now answered that question anyway.

Lawtonfogle• 10 years ago

And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools.

uBlock didn't block it. I blocked it, by using uBlock, which I picked because of its stance on trackers. So its more like I found a cloak of invisibility so I don't show up on your cameras. You can't blame the store selling the cloaks, because I and every user like me chooses to wear them. You have to blame the user for using the cloak... but to what point? You are blaming me for not letting your code run on my machine.

btilly• 10 years ago

You are missing some basic facts about how marketing works. Let's start here to demonstrate.

...when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.

You think that stores are in business to sell you eggs, and are slightly puzzled that eggs aren't easy to find. But you confidently continue proceed despite direct evidence that stores don't act like you think they should.

The answer to your question is that stores are in business to sell you as much as they can, and the eggs are just there to get you to see everything they have to offer. If they made it easy to buy eggs then your life would become easier and they make less money.

Stores know this because they hire consultants who tell them what to do. And the ones who refused, made less money then got out-competed or bought out by the ones who followed the advice. Now they all know to bury eggs, and the big ones make each store's layout different so that they can maximize how much consumers wander.

You know what else those consultants told them? Candy bars are high profit items, but nobody is going into your stores to buy junk food. Those are impulse buys. So put them right where everyone is forced to stand and wait for the cash register to make it as hard as possible to avoid the impulse.

Look down the cereal aisle. They put cereals with healthy branding at eye level for moms, and the obviously exciting cereals at eye level for kids. Note that branding and reality are unrelated. Take a look at the serving size and sugar per serving on all the boxes. No matter what the branding, most of the cereals work out to be about the same.

It goes on and on. Marketers have fine-tuned their art to a science. No matter where you look, they have mastered details you wouldn't have thought of. And while they aim to hit your emotional buttons, they do NOT fundamentally aim to please YOU. You're not the client. The store is their client, and your being unable to stop opening your wallet is the product that the store is buying.

zem• 10 years ago

bad analogy; no one is smashing your cctv cameras; they're just donning an invisibility cloak on the way in. as is their right, even if nethack would like to claim otherwise :).

pdonis• 10 years ago

But that's as far as it goes.

You, the store owner, may know that; but how do I, the customer, know it? How do I know you aren't selling data from that CCTV camera to others, who don't own your store and don't have the use for the data that you do? Even if you aren't doing that today, how do I know you won't tomorrow, when someone shows up with an offer you simply can't refuse? And so on and so on.

You're right that this is a sad situation, when people's desire for privacy means cutting off access to data even for the (few, I suspect, but still...) store owners who actually want to do something with it that might benefit the customer. But it's what we have. If you want to know where to put the eggs, you'll have to figure it out some other way.

jalk• 10 years ago

Are there any publicly know examples of hackers that have used tracking data for malicious stuff. As nasty as it is to have a large amount of your web history stored in a profile, I don't see a clear path to crime (perhaps extortion). Or didn't I get the burglar metaphor?

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

Burglar => malware or phishing through ad networks.

Sorry for being unclear, I'll see if I can tidy that up.

blfr• 10 years ago

I'm all for blocking ads, tracking or non-tracking, analytics, etc. and wish swift bankruptcy on the propaganda-advertising industrial complex but this is silly. The analogy between physical world and the Internet is not valid or insightful, just like it isn't in case of piracy/stealing. Collecting info on what you read online is nothing like breaking into your house.

xuhu• 10 years ago

Picture your insurer scrolling through your browser history when you're renewing your health plan.

akerro• 10 years ago

Did you start visiting shops and places you didn't like just to mislead them? So you have more and more of them tracking you until they run out energy and money because their targeting is just wrong?

http://adnauseam.io

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/adnauseam

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/trackmenot

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

That takes the confrontation to a wholly different level and I'm definitely not yet so far that I'd do this but I can see why some would and who knows, maybe one of these days I'll join the ranks. For now, I think that simply blocking what I don't want and being strict in what I send out is my best bet at reaching some kind of stable long term solution. Retaliation is - for now - for me one step too far.

deanclatworthy• 10 years ago

Fascinating. Is there anything similar for other browsers?

karmacondon3• 10 years ago

Where this analogy breaks down is that the people sent to track you are invisible and can't be seen without the aid of special technology. So what you end up telling people is that they are being followed everywhere by invisible ghosts, who's only desire is to change what ads appear in their newspaper. And it appears that the reaction of most people is about what you'd expect.

If a store has policy of "If you come into our store, we'll have employees follow you home" and you don't like that policy, then don't go to that store. That simple. It doesn't make sense to go into the store and have your goons beat up their employees. That might mean that you can't go to the stores you want to go to, but that's how it goes. It seems as clear online as it does in the physical world.

(tldr without the analogy: The overwhelming majority of people don't care about being tracked online because there are no obvious ill effects. The problem with ad blockers is that it makes more sense to just avoid sites that show ads, but most people don't want to do this because it would exclude their favorite sites.)

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

If that's all you got from it then I should really do my best to write better. One of the key parts - to me - is that the data silos start trading your data as if it is theirs to whoever pays for it, and that goes a lot further than a real time bidding on ad space, even if that was the initial drive to collect that data.

WA2• 10 years ago

The sad part is: It doesn't even matter what I do about privacy. I'm obviously in someone's address book. That someone wants to play some stupid game that asks for all contacts. Maybe that someone used an app like Cobook, which pulls data from their social network sites (and I'm friends with them there).

In the end, they get my data, along with a picture and whatnot and I personally wasn't even involved. Heck, I could even use a dumb phone and my phone number would be all over the place.

Recently, Facebook asked me once again to add a phone number "to protect my account". One time, my real phone number was prefilled in the box! They pretend that they don't have it, but since some of my friends use messenger, they surely have it somewhere in my shadow profile (a download of "all my data" obviously didn't contain it).

dhimes6• 10 years ago

Maybe an allegory about how, based on the tracking data, the price you pay for something (say airline tickets) changes. Or the availability of health insurance for your kids? I don't have any facts on which to base the latter, however, but I suspect it's either happening or only a matter of time.

karmacondon3• 10 years ago

It is their data. What they sell is essentially their http access logs, the ip address and time of every page request. While that information may pertain to you, it's not yours. They own it and can do what they want with it, including selling it to the highest bidder. That's true for any website that keeps access logs.

If the idea that some websites sell their access logs really disturbs you, don't request pages from websites that do that. Just like someone who is afraid of heights can't go to high places, people averse to ad tracking won't be able to go to most websites. Most people don't want to give up their favorite websites, so ad tracking persists.

Many companies that produce or aggregate content do so with the expectation that their efforts will be rewarded with money from ads. When you use an ad blocker, you reap the benefits of their work while knowingly depriving them of what they expected to earn in return. It would be better if you just didn't read their content, effectively voting against their behavior with your feet. Blocking the ads is having your cake and eating theirs too. It's rather benign, there are much worse things, but it isn't really right either.

robbiemitchell3• 10 years ago

There is a giant difference between a site-specific tracker that helps a site owner understand her own visitors and ad networks that share cookie data. analytics != ads.

msellout2• 10 years ago

This concept of "your data as if it is theirs" is strange to me. Deciding who owns what information is difficult and not so obvious. I once heard a man on the radio saying that he "owned his face" meaning his likeness. Celebrities own their likenesses in that they can block people from using their likenesses to imply endorsement, but they can't block photographers from publishing a photo taken in a public area.

Ownership is much more nuanced than you're making it seem. It depends on where and how the data was collected and further, how the data is used.

Take car ownership. The department of motor vehicles tracks who owns what car, including non-dealership title transfers. That information gets sold to companies like Experian. Anyone can buy it (https://www.autocount.com/). So a company like Yelp, who knows where you live (you do like restaurant reviews from "current location", right?) can cross-reference that with AutoCount data to figure out what car you own. Is that weird? Sure. Is that wrong? Maybe. But it's been going on from before the internet, so I don't understand what's so different now.

Kristine19753• 10 years ago

If a store has policy of "If you come into our store, we'll have employees follow you home" and you don't like that policy, then don't go to that store ... That might mean that you can't go to the stores you want to go to, but that's how it goes.

Actually that depends on the laws of the country the store is in.

spobin2• 10 years ago

I agree. This analogy is good up to the point where you consider that these trackers don't really know or care who you are. To them you're an anonymous hashed id.

Yes, they 'follow' you around, but they are essentially invisible and mostly aim to improve the targeting of ads/information.

It's easy to forget that a lot of this technology is very new and for a while there will be cases where it's seen as intrusive. Things will only get better over time.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

To them you're an anonymous hashed id.

You wish.

gglitch3• 10 years ago

If ad-supported sites posted terms of use that precisely defined what info is to be collected, how long it's to be retained, and who will be able to access it, consumers would be able to make an informed decision about what sites to visit. As it is now, without defensive software, one is asked to just blindly trust the sites one visits.

hrbrtglm• 10 years ago

Great. You just inspired another european privacy law where website will be forced to ask you to read the terms before processing reading. What it will achieve is users will be annoyed and install a termblock extension to their browser, I mean kind of defensive software.

TravisLS• 10 years ago

In the analogy (and online), the newspaper with blank spaces (aka the ad-supported site) is a small and insignificant data player. It's mostly advertisers that are collecting and retaining the data, and not just on websites but in all kinds of ways. The profiles are kept by advertisers, and sold on data exchanges, completely out of the reach and control of the ad-supported site. So unfortunately, ad-supported sites that offer up their ad inventory via real-time bidding can't provide the information you'd want. You would really need to opt-in at every point where data is collected, which is everywhere.

dhimes6• 10 years ago

The problem is that people still don't understand what it is they are trading for a "free" web. It really takes a story like Jacques wrote to drive it home. It has to touch them emotionally, because what we are asking them to be wary of touches them with very strong emotions (facebook, for example).

kelseydh6• 10 years ago

But tracking is more pernicious than this.

I hope you realize that major political parties now buy this data and use it to target their campaign pitches to people in close elections. Do you buy diapers? You're probably interested in family issues. Do you buy gun parts? Let's classify you as leaning republican...

It goes way beyond uses that you would imagine. (PS: this is why if you ever sign up for a membership card at a retailer you should just use a fake name / address...)

wouterinho• 10 years ago

It is funny how things change when you use the physical world metaphor. There was a campaign recently by the Dutch regulatory agency that made people aware of the implications of allowing permissions in "free" apps.

They made an (anecdotal) video by promising a free cup of coffee in exchange for your contact list on your phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXM56YJWSo (Dutch unfortunately)

WA2• 10 years ago

Nice video.

My wife has an Android phone, I have an iPhone. Recently, I wanted to install some app on her phone and it is still beyond my understanding, why Google still doesn't allow to deny certain permissions. It's all or nothing.

And no, a fucking video editor shouldn't require access to my contacts, my browsing history and the accounts on my phone.

Android imho is unusable until they let me deny certain permissions, because often, the "best" apps ask for basically everything.

mike-cardwell• 10 years ago

Install Cyanogenmod, or buy a phone with it pre-installed like a OnePlus, then you get "Privacy Guard" in the settings which lets you specify exactly what data apps can access.

Android isn't the problem. Google is the problem.

[edit] As in, you can restrict access to things like location, contacts, calendar etc.

WillKirkby• 10 years ago

As of 6.0 Marshmallow, you can disable any permission you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZqDdvhTZj0

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

That video is brilliant. Thank you.

'Please plug in your phone here, we need to get some data from it'

'Huh?'

Borating3• 10 years ago

See this one [1] from mozilla

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LcUOEP7Brc

kelseydh6• 10 years ago

That reminds me a lot of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I

Would be great to make one similar combining the two concepts in regards to sharing phone data.

Borating3• 10 years ago

Check the Mozilla campain "The Hidden Business of the Internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LcUOEP7Brc

return0• 10 years ago

The solution would be a decentralization. Tracking is a real threat when we only have 1 search engine, 2 social networks, 1 retailer and a single ad network. The web has created global-scale monopolies faster than before , and it seems like the centralization of VC capital and IT talent is permanent. Tracking becomes less of a problem when they are unable to follow you everywhere.

cm21872• 10 years ago

One can make a very long list of things that would look really really creepy in the physical world.

For instance I can draw a little cat in my agenda to remind myself to call a particular friend that day. The police will tell me: "what? you have not written that in plain english? You must tell me what it means and if you don't you will go to prison". (In the UK one can go to jail for refusing to decrypt one's own data)

I go buy the Telegraph at my local newsstand and the guy will tell me: "can I see your papers please?" "But I just want to buy a newspaper" "yes but I must report to the police every day who reads what, by the way I must also know which pages you intend to read" (the UK is passing a law that would force all ISP to record what websites their customers view)

Etc etc

kp25• 10 years ago

For the first few seconds, i thought you're talking about real people who're tracking you. Later i realized.. Great writeup. So, true.

hoopsho• 10 years ago

I got tired of seeing a drill show up on a bunch of sites after I just searched for it on Home Depot... I block ads on my workstation, but with tablets I just could not find an easy way to block trackers for my whole family.

So Metiix Blockade was born out of this frustration... Now I have "bouncers" protecting my whole network for every one of my devices.

I hate when a web page decides what ads and trackers it wants to pull down from the Internet. With Blockade, I have taken back control of that process and I get to dictate when and where I want to provide my information.

I love feeling like I have the real internet back. No more of these ads and trackers taking over every place I go.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

Added a link at the end of the article, it looks like your project is free and clean as far as I can see.

Borating3• 10 years ago

Also consider pi-hole [1], notrack [2], uMatrix [3], dnsgate [4] and hostsblock [5]

[1] https://pi-hole.net/ [2] https://github.com/quidsup/notrack [3] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix [4] https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate [5] https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/

brlewis• 10 years ago

I just disabled third-party cookies on my phone and computer. I'll see if it causes me any problems.

I already have adblock plus on my computer.

harryf• 10 years ago

This reminds me of the surveillance camera man - http://youtu.be/jzysxHGZCAU

ap22213• 10 years ago

Reminds me of Surveillance Camera Man:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SurveillantCameraMan

9248• 10 years ago

I find it infuriating how much traction this whole anti ad/tracking war is getting.

People mention there's no choice anymore. Wrong! It's still there, just like it was 10 or 15 years ago. Stop sharing your personal information online and the whole tracking thing doesn't matter anymore.

This analogy seems completely flawed imho. Nobody can get inside my home, or force my door or any of that nonsense, unless I specifically allow them when they ask!

I fail to understand how all these trackers can read my browsing history without me installing <popular plugin> and allowing it access to my browser? Or how are they going to read my contact list from my Android phone, or the one from my Thunderbird? Through thin air?

Nobody took the choice from us, we just happened to open wide our front and back doors, and then complain that random people come in and look through our stuff.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

That you don't understand how it works even in the abstract is maybe an explanation for why you think it is infuriating that others are more concerned than you.

Being online is no longer optional, giving merchants and authorities your information is in many cases also no longer optional.

If you stop sharing your personal information online you will not be able to participate in a very large chunk of society's functions, some of which are mandatory. Heck I can't even the local tax office website without receiving a bunch of stuff that tracks me.

terryf2• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that for most people the problem with ads is the tracking part. For me it's the ads themselves - I don't like seeing them, because I don't really want to buy stuff and think that a large part of the first world's problems (obesity, depression) are caused in part by ads.

In the world of ads, I'm constantly reminded that I don't have the perfect body and that my blender does not look as good as the latest model - I really don't want that, because my blender works fine and looks ok.

So yeah, I block ads and I don't really see why I should feel bad about that, the non-tracking feature is a nice bonus.

So the web will go back to sites that either require payment to enter or are run by people who post stuff out of enthusiasm. Sounds like a nice place to me.

flycaliguy• 10 years ago

Your nice place will probably never happen. There are alternatives.

On the internet, you are actually better off allowing sites to make money with these old fashioned banner style ads. The alternative on the web is baking this predatory persuasion into the content itself.

By blocking ads, you are pushing your enemy deeper into the medium. Deeper into the story selection process, deeper into the layout decisions, deeper into an app's data harvesting, deeper into the entire editorial philosophy of a publication.

terryf2• 10 years ago

Sure, but that has already happened. It is ridiculously easy to get almost any newspaper to print a commercial article and already now it is hard to tell the difference between for-pay articles and genuine ones.

If you have a instagram account with ~30k or so followers, you start getting offers to promote products for example. If you have less, you can still get deals, but then you have to hunt for them.

But this will happen regardless of ad blocking, because it is profitable. I certainly don't know how to avoid it, except to generally assume that all content is commercial content in for-profit sites. And also on some others.

superuser2• 10 years ago

In small towns and pre-industrialization, stores had a tracking regime that puts Silicon Valley to shame: the shopkeepers knew you.

They didn't need credit cards or scores because they could identify your store credit account by your face, and your creditworthiness by your family's reputation.

If you were buying something out of the ordinary, you better believe your parents/spouse/church/friends/entire town would hear about it from the shopkeeper, who knew them all as well as he knew you.

A juicy conversation on a party line telephone shared with neighbors, interesting metadata on the postal mail also handled by people who know you and your business, a sighting in public with someone not your spouse, a visitor at an odd time of night, a strange car in your driveway - all these things could quickly become a public affair.

Technology is not bringing us a particularly new invasion, but it is helping at least that side of the "tight-knit communities" of old scale to modern population size and density. I think this is a horrific development, and it's certainly quantitatively unprecedented, but not qualitatively.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

A large enough degree of quantity difference has it's own qualitative difference. This has been observed many times in other fields.

elorant• 10 years ago

Once upon a time I used to work for a multinational company that did retail audit. They had developed a program which adjusted the ads a selected group of people were watching on their TVs. Then they provided them with special debit cards and monitored the relevance between viewed ads and purchases of goods in super markets. All that around 1999. And that was just once of a multitude of technologies they used. They also had a technology where a camera was tracing face movement to identify which items on the shelves attracted more attention by gender and age. I can’t even fathom what they’ll be using these days. Profiling is the holy grail of the marketing world. At least online we have the option of ad blocking. Offline we’re helpless.

esaym• 10 years ago

This might help getting rid of those that follow you: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate

urbushey• 10 years ago

What's the analogue for "clearing your cookies"?

imglorp• 10 years ago

Go to every business you've ever visited, go to their filing cabinet, and remove every record that you've been there. Go to every library and bookstore and remove every record of things you've read and bought. Etc.

That's not the same as cancelling all your accounts and credit cards; you'd still have them, just not your visit data.

The most extreme thing you could do in the real world is delete your identity and start over from birth.

theshadowmonkey2• 10 years ago

What you probably missed is if I am a big enough retailer, I can pay off your bouncers to still follow you from a distance and still show up on your newspaper on one side since I have more than you and can pay off your bouncers to work for me while they still pretend they are protecting you. Just an example:

https://adblockplus.org/about

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

No, that's in there (near the end).

theshadowmonkey2• 10 years ago

Cool. But, do you think a paid model for consuming content would work given the number of content sources and the frequency with which a user visits a single source? Don't content creators depend on some form of revenue and trackers are used to optimize the revenue.

shostack5• 10 years ago

Disclaimer: I do digital media and online marketing for a living.

I used to help lead the paid search group at a top search agency and had a real birds-eye view of where things were moving in that role.

Everything is moving towards audiences. While keywords and search queries are signals that highlight intent, ultimately the audience piece is what the advertiser cares about--that's just one component of it. This is why FB, Google and everyone else under the sun wants companies to upload their CRM data, and then they use that for retargeting (1st party, or 1P data), or building lookalikes.

Then you have Adobe and other companies trying to get companies to sell this data on a marketplace as 2nd party (2P) audience data for retargeting.

There are also companies like LiveRamp and others that try to get companies with login data to provide cookie matches against hashed email addresses to keep cookies fresh and prevent them from just being deleted once and forever. I've been approached by these companies, and always turned them down because it just felt dirty.

That said, this thread seems to draw the usual crowd of everyone who hates anything related to advertising. I'm not going to try to change your opinions because I know that is not going to happen. However the reason all of this data gets shared is because it allows better targeting which leads to more relevant ads, which leads to more purchases.

Think about that for a second.

People are purchasing more when the content is more relevant to them. Nobody is holding a gun to their head making them take out their wallets and hit "Purchase." They are saying "this product/service is relevant to me and I want to buy it."

In that manner, advertising is helping people who want to purchase said thing. The issue comes in with the fact that because targeting isn't perfect (and I doubt anyone wants the level of tracking needed to make it so), and because a lot of advertising is building awareness (not simply retargeting and reminding you to buy something you initially displayed interest in), it becomes intrusive in a manner people dislike.

Unfortunately, because of the data available, there's still plenty of people who say "hmmm, I didn't know about this, but it seems interesting, I'll check it out" and then they purchase. So from an advertiser's standpoint looking at a spreadsheet of data they see "this audience segment had a conversion rate of X and an ROI of Y" and they keep doing it if it is profitable because that is what they are optimizing for.

I actually enjoyed Jacques piece, and I do think that there is some very questionable stuff going on in the ad space. The example of a random app tracking and selling data totally unrelated to said app is a great example. Companies are finding that they can monetize their data without visibly degrading the user experience by showing ads, and still get paid on a CPM rate for it, so expect to see more of that.

At the end of the day, I say all of this to highlight the fact that often is left out of pieces like this, which is that things are the way they are now because it works. Advertisers wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work, which means consumers are voting with their wallets in large enough numbers to keep fueling this behavior. In Jacques restaurant example, he was put off by the restaurant special promoted on his phone. I'd probably behave the same way because I've developed an aversion to the more invasive aspects of my industry and I'm overly sensitive to it now. But Joe Consumer? They see a relevant deal that will save them money and say "hmm, I like what they are offering, and it is a fair price, I guess that just made my decision easier" and they go eat at the restaurant. So the restaurant sees that of all the Jacques that see the ad and keep walking, for the pittance they pay they get enough Joe's in the door to make it profitable, and they keep doing it.

The positive feedback loop created by more targeting leading to higher profits means that it is working and we'll see more of it until the feedback loop is broken. Ad blockers are one avenue towards attempting to break it, and legislation is another. The question is whether pulling on those two levers will be enough to reduce the efficacy of the feedback loop to the point where advertisers stop doing this.

And a final note to those who might respond to my post. Please note that I'm not trying to paint an overly rosy picture of what advertising does or in any way trying to defend some overreaching aspects of it. I think people should own their data and be entitled to controlling how it is used. That is not the reality of the world we live in though, and so I'm simply making observations about how it impacts the various parties involved beyond just the protagonist of Jacques' story. I think there are more "clean" ways of doing advertising, that rely on a strong creative message, etc. Or viral ads that get shared because they are creating great content. But at the end of the day the media person's job is to take that ad/content and get it in front of the audience they are targeting.

jacquesm37• 10 years ago

Ads and tracking going hand-in-hand is the problem. If the advertising industry had not embraced tracking I think that the backlash against advertising would not be as strong as it is. It should be possible to receive an advert without also giving up a huge chunk of privacy.

shostack5• 10 years ago

That's one stance, but do you think it results in a more relevant experience for most people (emphasis on "most) viewing ads when they see products that are more likely to interest them (because of audience data or retargeting data) vs. a generic ad?

And from an advertiser standpoint, if the targeted approach is vastly more profitable than the untargeted approach of how things worked in the early Mad Men days (and it most definitely is), I have to say I can't really blame them for taking that path.

I'd be curious if there are any companies out there who position themselves as "ethical advertisers" and do what you outlined in terms of advertising without the privacy tradeoff. I'd also be curious how they might fare against competitors who don't take that stance. Again, people are voting with their wallets, and right now they are saying that they are ok giving up their data in exchange for free content, and that they'll continue buying things from companies who leverage said data to communicate with them.

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