Tags: tracking

131

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Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

Counting Ghosts

Analytics serves as a proxy for understanding people, a crutch we lean into. Until eventually, instead of solving problems, we are just sitting at our computer counting ghosts.

This article is spot-on!

Tuesday, September 19th, 2023

I don’t want your data – Manu

I don’t run analytics on this website. I don’t care which articles you read, I don’t care if you read them. I don’t care about which post is the most read or the most clicked. I don’t A/B test, I don’t try to overthink my content.

Same!

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023

Opportunity

You can split the web in many ways. Lionel Dricot wrote about one of those ways in a blog post called Splitting the Web. In it, he outlines an ever-increasing divide he sees on the web.

On the one hand you’ve got people experiencing the advertising-driven, tracking-addicted big players who provide a bloated and buggy user experience.

On the hand, you’ve got the more tech-savvy users with tracking blockers (misleadingly called ad blockers) using browsers and search engines that value privacy and performance.

It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

This reminded me of a post by Chris. No, not The Great Divide, although that’s obviously relevant here. Chris wrote a post just yesterday called Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity:

One way to look at it is opportunity. If you make software that does work reliably, you’ve got a leg up. Even if your customers don’t tell you “I like your software because it always works”, they’ll feel it and make choices around knowing it.

I like that optimistic take. If the majority seems to be doubling down on more tracking, more JavaScript, and more enshittification, then there’s a potential opportunity there (acknowledging that you’ve still got to battle against inertia and sunk cost).

This reminds of a fantastic talk that Stuart gave a few years ago called Privacy could be the next big thing:

How do you end up shaping the world? By inventing a thing that the current incumbents can’t compete against. By making privacy your core goal. Because companies who have built their whole business model on monetising your personal information cannot compete against that. They’d have to give up on everything that they are, which they can’t do. Facebook altering itself to ensure privacy for its users… wouldn’t exist. Can’t exist. That’s how you win.

Splitting the Web

This rings true to me.

Tuesday, May 30th, 2023

Our Maps Don’t Know Where You Are – The Markup

I wish more publishers and services took this approach to evaluating technology:

We scrutinize third-party services before including them in our articles or elsewhere on our site. Many include trackers or analytics that would collect data on our readers. These may be standard across much of the web, but we don’t use them.

Wednesday, March 29th, 2023

Podcast Standards Project | Advocating for open podcasting

A new organisation with the stated goal of keeping podcasting open.

Their first specification is a consolidation of what already exists. That’s good. We don’t want a 927 situation.

My only worry is that many of the companies behind this initiative are focused on metrics and monetization—I hope they don’t attempt to standardise tracking and surveillance in podcasts.

The Podcast Standards Project, a grassroots coalition working to establish modern, open standards, to enable innovation in the podcast industry.

Define “innovation”.

Tuesday, March 21st, 2023

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog

How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).

Tuesday, January 24th, 2023

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Friday, November 25th, 2022

No To Spy Pixels

Almost no-one has given informed constent to being tracked through spy pixels in emails, and yet the practice is endemic. This is wrong. It needs to change.

Tuesday, October 11th, 2022

Bunny Fonts | Explore Faster & GDPR friendly Fonts

A drop-in replacement for Google Fonts without the tracking …but really, you should be self-hosting your font files.

Thursday, July 14th, 2022

Lou Montulli and the invention of cookie | Hidden Heroes

Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:

Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.

Wednesday, July 13th, 2022

How normal am I?

A fascinating interactive journey through biometrics using your face.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2022

Ban Online Behavioral Advertising | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Targeted advertising based on online behavior doesn’t just hurt privacy. It also contributes to a range of other harms.

I very much agree with this call to action from the EFF.

Maybe we can finally get away from the ludicrious idea that behavioural advertising is the only possible form of effective advertising. It’s simply not true.

Saturday, February 5th, 2022

Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? – The Markup

I really hope that Betteridge’s Law doesn’t apply to this headline.

Thursday, February 3rd, 2022

‘Like an atomic bomb’: So what now for the IAB’s GDPR fix after regulator snafu? - Digiday

Simply put, the popups asking people for consent whenever they land on a site are illegal.

Daring Fireball: Robin Berjon on ‘Topics’, Google’s Proposed Replacement for FLoC

Google Topics is the successor to Google FLoC. It seems to require collusion from your “user agent”:

I can’t see why any other browser would consider supporting Topics. Google wants to keep tracking users across the entire web in a world where users realize they don’t want to be tracked. Why help Google?

Google sees Chrome as a way to embed the entire web into an iframe on Google.com.

Saturday, January 8th, 2022

Ban embed codes

Prompted by my article on third-party code, here’s a recommendation to ditch any embeds on your website.

Monday, January 3rd, 2022

Kagi Search

A new search engine (and browser!) that will have a paid business model.

Between this and Duck Duck Go, there’s evidence of an increasing appetite for alternatives to Google’s increasingly-more-rubbish search engine.

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021