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kanobi

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Whenever I needed to do a pivot in postgres, I used this approach that is described in this stackoverflow anwser:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20618323/create-a-pivot-...

So for example when you have a table like described (column_name, meta_key, value), you would create a query like this:

  SELECT
    column_name,
    MAX(CASE WHEN meta_key='total_rows' THEN value ELSE NULL END) AS total_rows,
    MAX(CASE WHEN meta_key='not_null_count' THEN value ELSE NULL END) AS not_null_count,
    -- for all other metrics....
  FROM tall_table
  GROUP BY 1
(edit: formatting)

But the problem is how can consumers really know if the company is selling this data and to who, without some kind of legislation? Being a premium product is just an indicator, but it's not definitive.

I think even CCPA in California should be able to prevent abuses like that. At least you should know what data is being sold and you should be able to opt-out. If that's really the case, only time will tell.

I mean the point of the article still stands, it was just an observation of how funny it seems.

I have ublock installed, so this can be at least prevented with news websites. Which can't be said for unseen tracking in chat-bots. Collecting and storing this data without consent obviously sidesteps GDPR, so I'm not even sure about legality of these practices in EU.

It's always ironic to find these kinds of articles on sites that have hundreds of background trackers. Even though I "rejected all" unnecessary cookies I still see around 16 of them coming through. Like adsafeprotected, adlightning, google-analytics.

I think in practice, what ends up happening, is that small businesses don't really bother to comply while they fly under the radar. Or they just end up buying an e-commerce plugin that handles the minimum. We had one for GDPR and then they just added support for CCPA when that was a thing.