Who wants to be tracked?

https://www.quantable.com/analytics/who-wants-to-be-tracked/

by jhpacker • 3 years ago

189 262 3 years ago

So you can accidentally click them.

Because in a society that is optimized for profit, it's not about people, it's about what you can get away with for money.

eru• 3 years ago

Alas, our society ain't optimised for profit.

comprev• 3 years ago

They exist because they’re required to through applicable laws. The companies want tracking for additional business data and very rarely actually are about the users.

gitgud• 3 years ago

“We value your privacy” is a very hollow statement, when the website is asking to track you…

mjhagen• 3 years ago

“But, not as much as our bottom line.”

MaxikCZ3• 3 years ago

They value it, in exact amount of money.

etiam• 3 years ago

"... at about 20¢" is how I usually read the implied part.

devoutsalsa• 3 years ago

We value your privacy because we can sell it!

quickthrower27• 3 years ago

Followed by

[Accept all tracking] [Ritual Hazing]

s1k3s2• 3 years ago

I don't know how the experience is in US, but in EU it's because GDPR is a complete failure of a law which doesn't actually solve any problem.

hbossy• 3 years ago

It solved my problems with exporting data from proprietary webapps such as spotify.

newswasboring2• 3 years ago

GDPR is the law which at least gave us these prompts. Before that there was no rules for consent, they would just track you.

eska3• 3 years ago

There was a law just for cookies before. And no, companies don’t need to put up these prompts, IF they don’t do any UNNECESSARY tracking.

eska3• 3 years ago

What makes you think so? I’ve seen a lot of good come from it.

s1k3s2• 3 years ago

IMO the only good thing is it made people aware of what's happening with their data online. But then we are still tracked, the web experience is much worse, SMEs got another "screw you" from the regulator by increasing their operating costs to comply with this and big companies who were to blame for this in the first place found ways to bypass it because they have access to strong legal expertise.

kuschku2• 3 years ago

GDPR takes quite a while to get results, but even Google now has a "deny all tracking" button.

Freak_NL• 3 years ago

The GDPR is on the whole a very successful law which has improved the way companies handle personal data a great deal.

What you are objecting to is specifically the part of that law which mandates consent for gathering personal data, and which resulted in these cookie banners. That's annoying (mostly because a lot of media companies rather continue hovering up data instead of critically assessing the need to do so), but it doesn't invalidate the better parts of the GDPR. Calling it a complete failure is unnecessarily hyperbolic.

Ciantic• 3 years ago

Also the Cookie Banners work, I have installed multiple, and Google Analytics has become completly useless. We now see from stats that only ~20% people accept Google Analytics tracking. This has lead to new market of trackers that doesn't require banners, for instance based on User agent and IP hashing from logs.

What is unfortunate that law puts the onus on implementing the dialog for individual sites, it should be feature of browsers. This way users could enforce from browser settings that they don't want to be tracked.

jruohonen2• 3 years ago

Consent is only one way for obtaining a legal basis under the GDPR.

And the consent banners are industry's own inventions. They could have honored do-not-track and be done with it. Instead, they opted for these dark patterns.

avgcorrection3• 3 years ago

That law is at least an attempt to fix an existing problem. So this is like blaming someone who made a subpar raft for the flood that required the raft.

barbs• 3 years ago

Is there a browser extension to turn these off?

kuratkull2• 3 years ago

One of the best ones (as in actually working) is the browser addon: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/

kuschku2• 3 years ago

That doesn't turn them off, that just consents to everything, including types of tracking that cookie blockers can't get rid of.

Please use consent-o-matic instead.

rightbyte• 3 years ago

Note that that is a pro-tracking extension.

MaxikCZ3• 3 years ago

uBlock origin with appropriate filter turner on.

BoxOfRain• 3 years ago

This is what I do, it's pretty effective.

kruuuder• 3 years ago

You still have to find filter lists that work though. I use uBlock origin and frequently run into problems where cookie popups are half-blocked - the dialog is no longer visible, but I still cannot interact with or scroll the website. To work around that, I have to deactivate uBlock's cosmetic filters so that I can see the dialog again, then deny cookies. Pretty annoying, I haven't found a setup that fixes that.

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

Which filter helps with this?

Tknl• 3 years ago

Consent-o-matic can automatically reject consent and legitimate interest prompts.

austinjp3• 3 years ago

Yep, for Firefox, Chrome and Edge:

https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

94% don't want tracking... and the remainder 6% of responses can be attributed to the lizardman constant

https://gwern.net/note/lizardman

quickthrower27• 3 years ago

Heard this called flatlining. I.e. answer all "mostly agree" or whatever.

gwern• 3 years ago

'acquiescence bias' is real but a different thing. Mischievous responders will flip their answer as necessary to screw with you, they don't just 'go down the line', so you can't simply reverse-code or use other such tricks.

brookst• 3 years ago

I wonder what percentages you'd get if you asked "do you want to eat for free at every restaurant?"

My guess is about the same 94% / 6%. But I'm not sure it's the 6% that represents lizardman.

lawn• 3 years ago

Because companies prefer to track them?

ajsnigrutin4• 3 years ago

Better question here is, why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it.

Block third party cookies by default, delete other cookies on the last tab or window closed and prompt user to save cookies on a form submit ("do not delete cookies for this domain when leaving" type of prompt, for pages with logins, settings, etc).

Also remove features that make easy fingerprinting possible, the site doesn't need to know every font I have installed, just have a "standard set" included with the browser, and use web fonts or whatever for other fonts.

quickthrower27• 3 years ago

The last thing a browser wants to do is break experience for older sites. If a site relies on 3rd party cookies for log in, it will no longer work on your browser. It makes your browser look shit. Same reason we allow unclosed tags, crossed tags, etc.

pavlov• 3 years ago

Browsers already detect login forms to offer autocompletion and password storage. Surely it wouldn’t be insurmountable to detect cookies being set after a login flow, and let users confirm that they want this login to persist.

ajsnigrutin4• 3 years ago

We also had shockwave flash, blink tags, keygen tags for cert generation, etc., so yeah, we can change stuff if we need it. But since the biggest browser is owned by an ad company that earns money by tracking us, this will probably never happen.

An alternative would be to have a cookie jar per domain.

ssdspoimdsjvv• 3 years ago

Is this really different from disabling JavaScript, which will also break the majority of sites?

lloeki2• 3 years ago

Safari and Firefox block 3rd party cookies by default.

sauercrowd• 3 years ago

I've been thinking about the same thing - this feels like it deserves a native API, so we can get rid of all these dark patterns currently being employed.

sergiomattei• 3 years ago

It’s there. It’s “Do-Not-Track” and it sadly was never respected by the big platforms (and any developers, really). I’ve never seen a single case where setting the DNT header made a difference — which is dumb considering how infested the web is with privacy prompts…

Server owners can track you with the data they collect, client side can have little control of that. I wonder if there’s a better way possible in the current iteration of the web platform, or if a substantial overhaul is necessary for privacy respecting services.

Perhaps DNT would’ve been more effective if it was written in law? To gather user information for marketing purposes, you must respect this header. But then, how’d you enforce that… other problems: if browsers always set DNT to true by default, then the whole effort is pointless, because nobody will opt-in. This is ideal, but marketers will definitely not like that idea. Thinking out loud here.

EDIT: found an interesting HN thread from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14377877

davedx• 3 years ago

Because the most popular browser is made by an AdTech company

arendtio5• 3 years ago

To be fair, I think it was Microsoft who killed the DNT header by enabling it by default.

WesolyKubeczek2• 3 years ago

Better question here is, why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it.

We had Do-Not-Track header once. Id did not play out very well.

angio• 3 years ago

Sometimes I wish GDPR included a clause stating that presence of the Do-Not-Track header equals to the user not giving consent.

yason• 3 years ago

I might be wrong but I think the EU regulation that forced these cookie acceptance forms―I can't remember if it was GDPR or some earlier directive―specifically required that the consent submission may not be automated so that the browser can be configured to accept everything.

It may have had good intentions as entities such as Microsoft would just set their browsers to default to accept all cookies anyway and a marginal group of people would know how to turn it off and even they couldn't still be sure if a proprietary browser still accepts and sends cookies without just telling the user.

So as usual the good intentions have turned into a cat-and-mouse game in the technical, grassroot realm. There are browser extensions that will just kill these consent dialogs automatically and websites try (luckily, not very hard so far), to work around the kill scripts. Everybody suffers.

ajsnigrutin4• 3 years ago

I think the EU regulation that forced these cookie acceptance forms

Yep, i'm just not sure if it was general incompetence or just plain lobbying by third parties to do so.

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

the EU regulation that forced these cookie acceptance forms

No such regulation has ever existed in the EU.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

why is this not handled through the browser instead of relying on individual web apps to do it.

Websites want you to explicitly reject consent for using your data. There are many untrustworthy places on the internet, so trustworthy places want to explicitly ask because they don't want the user to reject consent to them just because they are being lumped with the other sites.

Now if you had a browser setting that gave consent by default and allowed users to deny consent that is something that would reduce the need of sites constantly asking you for consent. But any attempt to automatically reject consent is just going to result in sites asking for consent via another channel. See what happened to the do not track header when you try and lump all sites together.

pantulis• 3 years ago

I think it makes sense to roll your own analytics stack using first party cookies, but OP went a little bit overboard by removing all tracking cookies altogether.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

The problem is that pool is getting increasingly poisoned. Websites are increasingly hosting third-party analytics and advertising tracker scripts on their own sites in order to evade people who are trying to avoid them.

This is making it much less acceptable to allow first-party cookies and scripts.

skylurk• 3 years ago

On mobile safari, private tabs isolate cookies from each other. Also, once you are in private mode, all links open in new private tabs. Close the tab, and the cookies are gone.

I never turn private mode off. I wish firefox and chrome also worked this way.

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

My default browser on Android is Firefox Focus. No history, no tracking, cookies removed on close.

TheCoelacanth• 3 years ago

GDPR is not about cookies, it's about tracking.

Browsers can (and do in the case of Firefox and other privacy respecting browsers) try to make it harder to track you, but it's not something they can just unilaterally turn on or off.

Consent dialogs are about what sites do with the information they get about you, not just about what information they get.

justsomehnguy• 3 years ago

why is this not handled through the browser

Did you forgot what happened the last time 'the browser was handling it'? I would remind you: Internet Explorer, Do Not Track.

eimrine• 3 years ago

If the law has some stack overflows, can we really blame M$ for exploiting them? Dogs are never being controlled by their tales.

pornel• 3 years ago

We had P3P spec for it 20 years ago, even implemented in IE! And Google has been sending intentionally malformed P3P header to bypass it. Their trillion dollar business relies on users having difficulty stopping tracking.

eternalban• 3 years ago

TIL. Here is the relevant summary from the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/P3P/#goals_and_capabs

(for amusement, google P3P and see what comes up first.)

jefftk3• 3 years ago

1. Your proposal is not enough for EU privacy law, so you'd still see banners. First-party tracking is still tracking and you still need a banner if you're going to store any data on the client that is not "strictly necessary" for the user's request.

2. Your proposal gives a pretty crummy experience in cases where users do expect the site to store data on the client longer. For logins you're popping up a confusing banner, and for client-side only storage (shopping carts, preferences, work in progress) you're silently discarding people's work.

jeremyjh2• 3 years ago

No consent is required to store cookies required for the site to function. Login cookies, shopping carts etc are fine. The only reason websites display these banners is because they want to track you, and they rely upon misunderstandings like you are propagating to whitewash the request.

mazlix• 3 years ago

Lynx browser does this, for every website I choose which Set-Cookie headers I want to respect and which to ignore.

godelski3• 3 years ago

Also remove features that make easy fingerprinting possible

Is this (reasonably) possible? If you ever do a graphics project you'll find that it is pretty difficult to get a pixel perfect render. Hence canvas fingerprinting[0]. (same happens for text rendering)

The problem can come down to the silicon lottery as well as the browser[1]. If you render the same code on two different machines, with the same compiler and libraries, you won't get pixel perfect difference. And GPUs don't match CPUs, though can if you edit the FMA instructions. Usually the best way to ensure images are exactly the same is to compare between Macs because the hardware is very similar and similarly binned. So Macs tend to have lower fingerprints in general (to the best of my knowledge) Current canvas blockers tend to just return a value, but that can obviously be a fingerprint itself.

So my question is if this is reasonably solved? I don't see it by being just the browser unless they can specifically just block a lot of that tracking. Which may require a big actor like Google or Apple to make a stand.

(Note: not an expert, but have done a decent amount of visualization work)

[0] https://privacycheck.sec.lrz.de/active/fp_c/fp_canvas.html

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47696956/display-pixel-p...

Animats• 3 years ago

Firefox lets you set "strict tracking protection". The settings page warns you that "some sites may break". Some sites whine about this, usually using "Admiral" to check for cookie blocking. Most of those aren't worth visiting anyway.

There's also Privacy Badger, from the EFF. This turned up that the "Who wants to be tracked" site is using "plausible.io" to track visitors.

TekMol2• 3 years ago

I have switched one of my sites to cookieless analytics and it is bad for everybody.

I can't even say how many users this site has now. It could be the same user coming back over and over. Or many users. How would I know.

Yes, I could track a ton of stats about every pageview like user agent, screen resolution etc and then try to stitch it back together. Trying to figure out how many different users there are. But this type of "stitching together" would probably also count as PII.

I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.

I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware, software, language. Because I wouldn't see if users affected come back less often.

I can't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps users discover important features. Because I can't make the connection between showing the text early on in the user journey and usage of features later on. Because I can't see a user journey.

This is a site I run for the enjoyment of me and the other users. Probably a few thousand a month. And I can say the site was much easier to develop with a normal cookie approach to tracking. I have gone the cookieless way for about a year now. And I can say with certainty that it would be a better site now if I kept the cookie approach. When the developer flies blind, that's bad for everybody.

I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10% in user experience can tank the business, there is no way around cookie tracking to figure out what works for users and what doesn't.

This is another reason, why European internet companies do not stand a snowball's chance in hell to compete with their US competitors.

European companies need to bug all users and beg for cookies. While US companies only need to do that with their European users.

pelorat• 3 years ago

Why would you need to know anything but hits/month and ad-revenue/month?

Why don't you just hash the IP-address and count unique users that way?

kmlx2• 3 years ago

that's easy: to improve the service.

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

He gave several valid examples in the comment you're replying to.

seri4l2• 3 years ago

hash the IP-address

How would that work? I can't think of any approach where getting the original IP back from the hash isn't trivial.

quickthrower27• 3 years ago

My violin is probably small-medium sized for this problem.

You can talk to your users in person and ask them, or poll them via email. Do usability tests etc. I guess it just costs more.

Other industries have to do this, they can't just default-spy on their customers.

kmlx2• 3 years ago

You can talk to your users in person and ask them

doesn't scale.

poll them via email

doesn't work.

default-spy on their customers

analytics is not spying.

xboxnolifes• 3 years ago

Have you ever actually responded to an email poll and not just unsubscribe/block the emails?

alex-moon2• 3 years ago

Yeah so I run/build/maintain a platform in the public survey space and we have a feedback box for users at the end. This box is a really good source for feedback, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the feedback is "When I hit the button, nothing happens" or "Totally broken, completely unusable" both of which are useless to us. These users clearly want us to fix something, but we have no visibility on what that is.

unmole• 3 years ago

or poll them via email

Marketing survey emails are infinitely more annoying than cookies.

SanderNL4• 3 years ago

This is similar to law enforcement saying: "You mean we cannot track everything you say and do. How in the world are we supposed to do our jobs safely and efficiently?" Answer is, you basically can't. Not safely and not (as) efficiently. Because the world will turn dystopian and will destroy the very thing we are trying to create/maintain. (Happiness, etc)

It's nice to be able to A/B test your blog or product. It's cool and efficient, but it also hurts and to me that hurt outweighs your company's marginal benefits although it is a nuanced and difficult discussion to be fair. I'm being simplistic here to make the point clear. I hope.

TekMol2• 3 years ago

The difference is that keeping cookies is a user choice.

You can set your browser to not store cookies at all.

Or to discard cookies when you close it.

Or you can delete cookies whenever you feel like.

arp2424• 3 years ago

it also hurts

How is simple analytics or A/B testing that's NOT internet-wide tracking (that is, only for the website you're on) or sold (which would be outright illegal without explicit consent) hurting you? Genuine question, because I don't see it. Internet-wide tracking across many sites: sure. But that's a very different thing – it's the difference between "I'm home Darling, I saw Sander at the mall today" vs. "Hello everyone, here is everything Sander did this week".

avgcorrection3• 3 years ago

Oh no. But that’s how all desktop programs without telemetry work.

arendtio5• 3 years ago

How about tracking the users pulse while he reads your website via his smartwatch. Wouldn't that give you even more insights into the emotional journey?

My point is: You have to draw the line somewhere (and I think the GDPR line is very reasonable). If you are a business relying on having a perfect website, you can use other means like UX labs.

MrVandemar• 3 years ago

For some reason my empathy-o-meter isn't really registering your plight. Look, the needle isn't budging, not even a bit.

akomtu• 3 years ago

IP address + User-Agent gives you enough data to track "user journeys" whatever this is. I'm curious, what is your favorite example of improving your website based on cookies that you couldn't do with basic IP+UA tracking?

phh• 3 years ago

Not really cookie-less and it can be considered a regression compared to cookies because of JS, but something that can work is doing stats + anonymization client-side.

You can store information client-side, without sending them over network, but randomly send digests back to your server.

For instance you can store a counter of the times the user went to visit the website, and randomly with a 1% probability send that counter to your server. (It's better to make it random, because if you send every +=1 you would end up being able to track users).

At my work, I do a lot of statistics of user usage, but I always work to do my best not to leak PII. I'm not a security or privacy researcher, so my work is probably not great but still, the way I do it I believe is largely private:

- No unique ID sent, but a daily digest (some people send every single event to their statistics server, and thus need a unique ID to know how many time one person did one action. With a digest that already counts the actions there is no need)

- bucketized persistent data: for example the available storage size of the device the app is running on. Sending precise value would make it easier to track digests from one day to the other and track users

- For booleans, add some white noise (because 20 booleans is enough to identify someone)

- For open-ended information (for instance the list of countries contacted by your SMS app), booleanize it (one boolean per country, cf previous line), and maybe keep a counter to know how many you didn't take into account to know whether you're still missing a lot.

Yes overall doing it with no PII requires much more work, but then Big Tech (and smaller techs like Clearview) clearly showed that any PII can and WILL be used against their users. The best way to never leak user's data remains to never have them in the first place.

danielrpa• 3 years ago

UIs were developed in the pre-web world without tracking or analytics. If you clearly explain that the cookie is for improving the UI and the user doesn't want it, it's because they don't care about it as much as you do.

manicennui3• 3 years ago

This is all bullshit. We literally did this sort of thing for years on the Internet before all of this tracking was common.

Every company claims that they are doing this stuff to make things better for users, and it never is.

jobs_throwaway2• 3 years ago

We literally did this sort of thing for years on the Internet before all of this tracking was common.

You mean back when your average website was hot garbage? The yearning for the days of static HTML pages is childish atavism

jacobsimon• 3 years ago

Genuinely asking - what is the easiest method for doing this other than cookie tracking? I’m inclined to agree with the commenter above and it feels like a community of developers would sympathize with this but it seems like everyone is acting like it’s not a big deal.

mtkhaos• 3 years ago

Local Storage?

Cookies are just a Dumb Implementation and only persist due to advertising.

Veuxdo• 3 years ago

You can't use LS or anything like that to get around GDPR.

Rygian2• 3 years ago

GDPR is about tracking, not about cookies.

dingledork692• 3 years ago

Sure you can. Just stop crying because you can't share data about your users with 3rd parties without asking them first and get over it.

reportgunner2• 3 years ago

I can't even say how many users this site has now.
I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.
I cannot see if the site has issues on some hardware, software, language. Because I wouldn't see if users affected come back less often.
I can't test if an introduction text at the beginning helps users discover important features. Because I can't make the connection between showing the text early on in the user journey and usage of features later on. Because I can't see a user journey.

Why don't you just ask your users about these things ?

layer84• 3 years ago

I cannot test new features and see if it makes users happy so they come back more often.

Users coming back more often does not imply that they are happy. There’s no substitute for actual user studies.

ff3172• 3 years ago

I'm not saying it's easy or perfect, but Wikipedia does tracker-less analytics, and yet still produces https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects .

We do use cookies for part of the analysis, but they're not unique user-tracking cookies. Instead there's one that simply tracks a self-reported datestamp on when the user last visited, which looks something like:

WMF-Last-Access=2023-01-01,Expires=Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:00:00 GMT

(we send a Set-Cookie for this with the current datestamp only to the 1-day accuracy, which expires ~32 days after it's set (but rounded to 12-hour accuracy), and is replaced constantly).

There's another more-recent one we use that's explicitly about differential privacy, which send back info on the hashes of the 10 most recent URLs you've visited on the site, IIRC. None of them are unique tracker hashes for a given user, though.

snthd• 3 years ago

which send back info on the hashes of the 10 most recent URLs you've visited on the site, IIRC. None of them are unique tracker hashes for a given user, though.

That seems highly unlikely to never be unique for some users.

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

and it is bad for everybody

Hang on, it's not bad for me. If I visit your site, it's not because I want to participate in some kind of A/B testing (whose results you'll never tell me about). And if your site only works if I happen to have hardware X installed, you don't need analytics to tell you that your site is broken.

European companies need to bug all users and beg for cookies.

That's nonsense. If cookies are needed for the correct operation of the site, then there's no need to beg or bug.

So your banner should be saying: "Can I please set tracking cookies that make no difference at all to the correct operation of the site? [Accept] [Reject]". Then count the number that say Accept, note that the number is approximately zero, and then scrap the banner.

ApolloFortyNine3• 3 years ago

If you paid for said site, sure.

If you didn't pay, I'm not sure why you feel entitled to anything.

pie_flavor• 3 years ago

If I visit your site, it's not because I want to participate in some kind of A/B testing

Nobody wants to be part of the A/B testing; everyone wants the polished product that's the result of A/B testing.

And if your site only works if I happen to have hardware X installed, you don't need analytics to tell you that your site is broken.

What? Yes you do, or something similar.

If cookies are needed for the correct operation of the site, then there's no need to beg or bug.

Strictly needed. Suppose I have a dark theme slider, or a language selector, for users who don't want me to follow their OS's settings (or can't or don't know how to change their OS's settings). That's a nonessential cookie which requires the banner.

And if you disagree, your opinion is not worth a lawsuit; the only way to be sure that your use of cookies is limited to those strictly necessary is hire a very expensive european consultant.

operator-name3• 3 years ago

But it's not a question of PII, it's about processing for legitimate interests[0]. If you follow the guidelines then collecting and processing specific anonamised stories is not a problem, cookies or not.

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

jodrellblank2• 3 years ago

You could ask people! There is hardly a site I use day to day that I couldn't send a ten paragraph rant about poor usability to the company, if that was socially permissible and felt like they'd care. There's hardly a site I use where I think the developers have ever used it themselves, or ever seen someone trying to use it, for that matter.

"Because I can't see a user journey."

Today's worst offender was trying to follow an invite and register an account within a company account, it took me two goes through the signup form, two attempts to edit my profile, trying to login to three different subdomains, one useless search of their documentation site, three error messages, two rounds of asking my coworker to check their admin side, before I saw the right thing to do. "You" (big silicon valley company) don't need tracking cookies to "see a user journey" or to tell you that "I really love your site because I keep coming back to it and looking around", you need to grab someone in a hallway and push them through the workflow and watch them fall on their face over and over.

"I think for a commercial site, where a degradation of 10% in user experience can tank the business"

Imagine how amazing websites would be if that were at all true. Have you seen the user experience of Amazon? or eBay? or Facebook? or 'new' GMail or new Reddit or non-websites like Teams or WebEx?

Gys2• 3 years ago

Because they also want everything for free.

hourago• 3 years ago

Because they also want everything for free.

Maybe people just goes to the cheaper option available because increasing inequality has left millions with no disposable income.

This is the same logic by which people prefers cheap furniture instead of high quality one. It is not a preference for cheap but it is just what they can afford, if they had more money most people will get the higher quality version and pay the price.

Gys2• 3 years ago

Maybe people just goes to the cheaper option available because increasing inequality has left millions with no disposable income.

No disposable income would mean not being able to spend money, meaning never buy anything. If this was true the ad industry would very quickly run bankrupt. And yet the revenues of Google and Facebook indicate otherwise.

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

94% of people want me to be president. Caveat: I did not define what it means for them to want me to be president.

In other words, what does it mean to be "tracked"? How was the question worded? You can change this value from 1% all the way up to 99% depending on how you ask the question, because "being tracked" is open to interpretation.

Truly a useless poll.

jhpacker5• 3 years ago

Hi, the exact wording on the poll was "If given the option, I would prefer not to be tracked online."

The reason why I didn't define "tracked" for the people taking the poll is that I think that's the most representative way to replicate the question that consent boxes are theoretical asking, but in an abstract way out of the context of a specific website. When a user sees that consent box, they have little to no idea of what tracking is actually happening.

phendrenad22• 3 years ago

Hmm, I guess that's a good rationale, but unfortunately it's still useless. I believe that websites adopted the simplistic "don't track me" language because they want to appear to be embracing the law. I've asked a lot of people (> 100) what it means to them to be "tracked" and they have no idea what it means, but they're afraid of whatever it means.

sundvor• 3 years ago

Related: 99.999% of users don't read T&C's, so why do consent checkboxes exist?

(I made the number up, but I'd be very surprised if I am off by magnitudes).

gsatic• 3 years ago

Cause the prob being solved by search rankings, newsfeeds, maps etc is info overload. People forget that all the time.

There is too much info out there. Context about the user shrinks the ever growing info sphere.

arendtio5• 3 years ago

Does someone know why it is legal that in some countries websites are allowed to offer layers that offer a paid version and a tracking enabled version (very popular among newspapers)?

As far as I understand the GDPR, there should be no downside to rejecting the tracking technologies. And Websites relying on advertising, could do so with unpersonalized ads (granted with very different metrics).

Nevertheless, to me it feels, like these paid vs tracked offers are not what the authors of the GDPR intended.

tpxl2• 3 years ago

You mustn't reject service based on refusal of non-legitimate-reason data processing consent. Allowing paying to not have ads is orthogonal to the service being provided - in both cases the user gets the news, it's just flanked by ads in one case.

arendtio5• 3 years ago

Well, I don't have a problem with the paid version. What I have have a problem with, is the refusal of service if I don't consent to being tracked. So if there would be three versions, like 'personalized ads with tracking', 'tracking-free/unpersonalized ads' and 'paid ad-free', that would be fine with me.

What I don't understand, is that it is okay to refuse the service if you don't consent for the ad-supported tracking version. I mean, not giving your consent, means you have to pay if you want to use the service. Doesn't feel like you have a free choice (pun intended).

kasperni• 3 years ago

My main problem is cross website tracking. I don't really have a problem with a website keeping track of all my visits to that particular website.

I think it works similar in real life as well. You don't mind if a store clerk recognises you coming back to a shop. But you would be kind of creeped out if he also knew where and when you last visited your dentist.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

I'm fine with them keeping my purchase history for example. And then maybe even sending me offers based on that. Now tracking what I viewed or browsed on their site get bit harder.

And sharing with anyone else is right out.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

This is a misleading statistic. Most people will not care if I implemented a view counter on my website that uses a cookie to prevent the same user as counting as multiple views.

jhpacker5• 3 years ago

I agree that most people would not mind that scenario, the issue is that that scenario requires the same consent box that the most invasive adtech would use and it's far too onerous on the user as things are now to discern the difference.

dalbasal• 3 years ago

The model of regulation-compliance is this. It's not really about the specifics. Consent, privacy, kyc... Those may be initial motives for regulation, but by the time these exist in the world, they are a set of standard, rigid "compliance" protocols.

From formulation stage, it allows two parallel realities. One in which "consent" or whatnot have an intuitive meaning. Politicians and activists live here. One in which "consent" is a specification for a compliant "3rd party solution." Businesses live here.

Once functional, the bank, website or other complying business can claim the rules were made up by the regulator, and the regulator can either claim to be successful or blame businesses for problems. Being unremarkable, by copying or using 3rd party comliance plugins is more important than respecting the regulation's intent.

By the time consumers are affected, "consent" has a technical specification. It no longer has much actual meaning.

Think of the hoops, paperwork, informed consent signatures and such that you deal with at a bank. All those things had some regulatory logic behind them initially. Employees at the bank think this is government-required paperwork. What it is is compliance.

rcgs• 3 years ago

It still feels like these dialogues are really only something lawyers could think is a good solution to companies employing invasive/overbearing uses of customer data.

My gut feel is that most users don't understand what "tracking" really means and simply want to enjoy digital experiences without having to engage with the "what & how" that comes with modern platforms. My partner (and I reckon many other "normal" people) loves the ads on Instagram and enjoys the personalisation on YouTube & Netflix.

The current solution of "be transparent and it's okay" just forces decisions onto consumers that they do not want. The "good" solution outlined in this article (accept/reject) is a big yes or a big no – a green light for everything vs a red light for nothing.

There needs to be further regulation in this space that defines legal vs illegal uses of user data beyond the principals laid out in GDPR. The regulation should aim to define the "what & how", relieving the burden of choice from users and removing this "consent and it's okay" loophole for invasive use of data.

nologic01• 3 years ago

the consent charade is a constant reminder that the modern digital economy is based on large scale deceit and is therefore fundamentally unstable.

yet nothing is done about it, as if it is not important, as if digital tech is not the main, if not only, "driver of future economic growth".

you cannot build a stable economy (well at least not of a democratic, free market kind) relying on complete ignorance and regulatory capture.

anybody who has leverage on the matter and is not doing something about it is complicit in a gigantic, generational level misallocation of resources that will eventually have to be written of.

alex-moon2• 3 years ago

Hi! It me, the hapless nerd who goes, "Sites need this data to use analytics to improve their services."

jhpacker5• 3 years ago

Hey, 3x more people clicked that then "I've reviewed the site's terms and they are acceptable to me." :)

chrismorgan2• 3 years ago

I would assign the probability of them using this data to improve their services at well under 1%.

Zealotux• 3 years ago

I don't understand why we still don't have a standard for a built-in tracking preferences system in browsers. We have that for the microphone, webcam, and location access... why do we let websites control tracking preferences with their own design they can make as obscure and manipulative as they wish?

layer84• 3 years ago

Because there are legitimate uses for cookies etc. that do not require consent, like for example for shopping carts. But you can’t distinguish them from consent-requiring tracking in an automated fashion. In addition, there are finger-printing techniques that are virtually impossible to prevent, so websites would just start to rely more on those. It’s a bit like asking “why don’t we just block spam mails?”

ajuc• 3 years ago

I recently tried to disable the consent to share my data with external companies on one website.

There was "accept all" and "manage" buttons, and under the "manage" button there were 100s (yes, multiple 100s) of sites listed, each with consent on by default, and to disable everything I had to manually scroll through it all and click on each item.

titzer• 3 years ago

FTA:

“We value your privacy…”

There's a special place in hell for the originators of this Orwellian triple-speak. Three meanings overlapped: meant to give users the impression that "we respect your privacy" or "we protect your privacy"--but it doesn't say that. It says they value your privacy, which is literally true; they're happy to put a dollar amount on it and sell or mine it, because it's of value to them. That's two true senses; one inferred and one real. But the second gives rise to the third, Orwellian meaning: these people actually don't value your privacy at all. It's a lie, pure and simple. A special kind of lie that has such a flippant, corporate-speak, technically-accurate dry meaning that is meant for a court of law--it holds up when lawyers start arguing long technicalities before a judge--but just one level deeper it is despairingly careless and dystopian.

When I see this phrase I just know I don't want whatever it is these people are going to do with my data. They benefit and I don't.

aidenn0• 3 years ago

As a rule, the more that marketing language tries to imply something, the less it is likely to be true.

See e.g. "fat free" labels on sugar-candy.

jhpacker5• 3 years ago

This is a great way to unpack that phrase, thank you! I started the article with that phrase because of the insincere absurdity of it exactly as you describe.

glitcher2• 3 years ago

Or said another way, they can't say "we take your privacy seriously" without first saying "we take your privacy"!

yalogin• 3 years ago

Because no one wants to give up the data, and the revenue that comes with it. They just annoy the hell out of the users until they cave in and just accept it. Since it’s a law and every website has to do it, there is no competition to think of. It’s a no brainer

sebastian_z• 3 years ago

As a successor of Do Not Track, there is Global Privacy Control (GPC) [1]. Sites must respect it by law in California. An increasing number of other states ---Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, and hopefully more soon --- also have provisions in their new privacy laws for privacy preference signals like GPC. You can check if a site respects GPC [2]. For example, lego.com and nfl.com are two bigger ones I recently came across.

Disclosure: I am a privacy researcher and co-founder of GPC.

[1] https://globalprivacycontrol.org/ [2] https://gpcsup.com/

api_or_ipa• 3 years ago

Someone should do a talk a la "Birth and Death of Javascript"[0] on the topic of cookies. What started nearly 30 years ago as a crude means of storing state over a stateless protocol spawned an entire industrial ecosystem around systematically tracking and spying on internet users. Take a step back and it's an insane journey.

0 https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

capkutay• 3 years ago

Anecdotal but my wife actually likes that she’s fed such relevant ads on instagram and ends up researching and buying many of the products.

todd85• 3 years ago

My spouse will sometimes mention in conversation with others that I invented the cookie. This always puts me on the spot, and I have to enter into a long explanation of the what and the why of cookies least they believe that I some sort of evil software hacker. (Now for a short explanation so that HN readers don’t think that I’m an evil hacker: I invented them, with the help of a colleague, while at IBM where we were designing a distributed file system. This was before the advent of the World Wide Web.)

AbsoluteCabbage• 3 years ago

There are likely dozens of others out there that can lay claim to the same. What specifically do you define as the innovation behind this “invention”?

todd85• 3 years ago

I'm sure that many can make the same claim. In the 1980's, I was an operating systems architect working at IBM. I thought up many interesting (to me) innovations while working on the first couple of releases of the AIX on the IBM POWER hardware. It was a great job and I learned a lot doing it. I got to work with some really brilliant developers and computer scientists (a number from IBM Research).

One project I was responsible for was the development of a distributed file system for AIX. The goal was a distributed file system that addressed some of the weaknesses found in other distributed file systems at the time. Our chief competitor was Sun's NFS distributed file system. NFS was a really nice design. It was well integrated into the operating system and quite reliable because it utilized a (mostly) stateless server. This had a number of performance and security implications along with some file system semantics over NFS that didn't match local file system semantics. We wanted to introduce state for the server to address these issues and thought of a number of complex protocols to manage it in the presence of unreliable clients. That's when I thought up the idea of making the clients keep their own state to be restored when they reconnected to the server. I protected this state from manipulation by the client by encrypting it. I didn't call them cookies, I called them tokens.

This design was patented by IBM and I was one of the two inventors on the patent. This patent was owned by IBM and years later they gave a special award for this patent because it decided that it was one of IBM's most important patents. (They wouldn't have done this unless the patent had held up to scrutiny or legal challenges). Unfortunately, by that time I had already left IBM to start my own company--I was at the top of my game and had confidence that I could create a software product of some kind that would be successful--so I missed out on the financial award for the patent. By then, I was at my new company and already in competition with IBM.

By now, the patent should be long expired. Interestingly, IBM ended up buying my company around seven years after I and a partner started it.

I was very aware of the academic literature and industrial practice during this time so I do believe that my invention does reflect original work that ended up with a very significant impact.

From a more personal perspective, the invention didn't financially benefit me. The work that I did at my company own was more creative, inventive, technically impactful, and financially important to me. For example, Austin Ventures has indicated that my company was the start of Austin becoming an important high-tech location, but none of that was related to the cookie.

reaperman• 3 years ago

Many of us remember when cookies were purely a utility-add for end users and were restricted only to the domain which set them. Thanks for inventing that.

1vuio0pswjnm75• 3 years ago

Who can take credit for lifting that restriction.

Some popular browsers are supposedly "open source" yet it appears no browser user longing for saner times has ever tried reversed this change and recompiling the browser for their own use. No third party cookies by default.

The most fascinating thing IMO about so-called "modern" browsers is that even when their vendors publish source code, "99.9%" of people will not even attempt to make changes, even something as simple as changing a default from "on" to "off". It's like the software is stamped with "Read Only" or "Do Not Touch" and "99.9%" of people dutifully obey. The "0.1%" appear to be very conservative with the changes they make.

For example, if it was possible to disable auto-loading of resources, I might actually use these "modern" graphical browsers for tasks other than commercially-oriented transactions. Cookies are only one problem with these browsers.

jhpacker5• 3 years ago

Interesting, what kind of cookies? Like I say in the article Lou Montulli from Netscape is generally credited with creating the HTTP cookie, which they named cookie based upon magic cookies in unix, though its obviously quite a bit different.

dylan6044• 3 years ago

Great, so when time travel becomes a thing, I'll add you to the list of people to have a chat with about needing to envision longer term visions for how nefarious people can be. I love that at one point in a not so distant galaxy, er time, that there was a thing of innocence. Now, that innocence can no longer be tolerated and every new thing must have more time invested on how the new thing can be abused rather than just used as intended.

todd85• 3 years ago

Really? I didn't invent it for browsers, I invented it for distributed file systems before the "World Wide Web" had even been invented. You might as well have a talk with William Shockley or Vint Cerf.

cooperadymas• 3 years ago

You may as well start by having that conversation with the inventor of the time travel device you're using, because - whew boy the nefarious things people are going to do with it!

JadeNB• 3 years ago

The only way to never make things that could be misused by nefarious people is never to make things.

tracker1• 3 years ago

Yeah, I remember in the mid-late 90's when companies would actually disable cookies altogether. Most non-technical people just don't understand the what/how/why cookies work, or were really needed in the browsers.

In the end, it's definitely been used in excessive and somewhat intrusive ways. I also wish that browsers had better controls over second and third party cookies and tracking (similar for nested iframe) in order to bubble some of it closer to the surface. In the end, pihole, ublock origin and privacy badger goes a long way to limiting this.

eternityforest2• 3 years ago

That's such a cool story! I'm very glad cookies are a thing that exists, regardless of any bad uses they might have.

sfmike• 3 years ago

You're a master baker

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

I have a notion to test cookie banners, to check whether it makes any difference whether you [Accept] or [Reject]. I strongly suspect that for many sites, it doesn't.

Many sites seem to be offering a choice of [Accept] or [Settings]. I've never clicked on [Settings]; it might as well lead to a goatse, as far as I care. I don't want to choose options on a cookie banner at all, so why would I opt to see a complete separate page of options?

anticristi• 3 years ago

We use zero cookies on our website, so we have no consent banner. But people got so used to seeing "cookie consent banners", that we are considering introducing a "no cookies here" banner.

dspillett• 3 years ago

For some cookies, basic session management for instance, you don't need a banner anyway. Many sites want people to believe it is needed for necessary cookies, but that is either because they want the public to be against all the warnings (so they can go back to silently tracking everything) or because they have a very skewed idea of what necessary means in this context.

In most cases sites could just use necessary tracking without permission but seek explicit opt-in for the rest. They won't do it that way of course because most people won't op-in unless nagged or conned into doing so.

(the other reason for consent questions where they are not really needed is people playing safe lest they have to defend the lack of a consent form in legal court or the court of public outrage)

glitcher2• 3 years ago

"We value your privacy" is usually a true statement about the monetary value a company places on exploiting your privacy, masquerading as a moral value statement.

anotheronebytes• 3 years ago

My question would be "who is able to NOT be tracked?"

0xbadcafebee• 3 years ago

Why did nobody tell the GDPR folks to require websites and browsers use one standard interface for the permission updates? It could have been so simple. Just let the browser prompt me so I can tell the browser once and for all what I want. Instead it created a website UX virus.

ApolloFortyNine3• 3 years ago

I'm more curious about the question of 'who wants free content'.

Because that's really the question here. Would I prefer everything in my life was free with no strings attached? Obviously.

But youtube/news/reddit/facebook/literally any website needs to make money somehow, and non tracked ads pay rediculously lower amounts(90+%). So the real question is, would you trade what is essentially anonymous tracking (literally no one at Google gives a damn who you are, it's just a unique id fed into an algorithm) for content, or would you rather pay for each and every site on the internet?

nullc• 3 years ago

Your dichotomy ignores other possibilities. To what extent are we stuck on costly distribution models specifically because those are the ones you can tap for a revenue stream, to what extent are the costs driven by the monetization itself?

I used to help out with the technical infrastructure for wikipedia and even as the 8th most trafficked site on the internet the cost was radically lower than that of some of my dayjob customers with comparable levels of traffic. A non-trivial part of the reason for that was that it didn't need all the surveillance and realtime per-request bespoke generation that advertisement encumbered services require. Part of it was just that there is an awful lot of fat in big commercial operations, since they have enough revenue that it's not a concern. Some is probably because when you're chasing ad dollars the extra spend required to get a 30 ms response instead of a 60ms response might be justified on the basis of the marginal clicks it generates, but those costs shouldn't properly be considered part of the underlying distribution costs.

I think "yes, I'd be happy to pay for all of it" would be significantly more attractive if paying meant just the component of the cost that actually went to the authors of the material -- on the order of a hundredth of a cent per view. Here is $1, that'll cover the authors share of all my household's youtube viewing for the next several years.

neon_electro• 3 years ago

For me, personally, I invest enough time watching YouTube for Premium to be worth it solely to avoid ads.

xigoi2• 3 years ago

Have you noticed that there are many people making cool stuff for free?

alkonaut• 3 years ago

I’m happy to enter any sort of transparent business transaction of information-for—content or money-for-content.

But that’s not what the adtech web is, and that’s why it needs to die.

I’d be absolutely delighted to see 99% of ad funded content and services wiped off the face of the web tomorrow, even if a lot of it is stuff I use and enjoy. Which is why I’m bullish on “nuclear options” for regulation such as binding DNT to GDPR, or making opt out default and not even allowing pop-up opt in, or suing a few large companies into bankruptcy for using consent dark pattens or other slight violations, just to make an example.

Because it’s not that ads would be banned by that. It’s tracking and micro targeted ads. And while ads may be necessary to provide “free” services, we need to get away from the idea that the only ads worth showing are ones with precise targeting and advance led fraud countermeasures.

Who wants to be tracked?

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