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0 pointshn_throwaway_994y ago0 comments

Totally agree. I really don't have any objections to analytics that are run solely by the website provider, as long as those analytics are only used to investigate usage and issues on that website. I don't have any problem with coffeegrinders.com knowing all about how I use their site to find good coffee grinders, but I DON'T want that correlated with my choice of mildly NSFW Tumbler videos. It's pretty inherent to the way the web works in any case, where you're not just being broadcasted to but are having a back-and-forth conversation with the website.

The primary problem with surveillance capitalism is when your movement across the entire Internet is gobbled up, sliced, and aggregated for the largest bidder.

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whimsicalism4y ago· 1 in thread

What about a social media service recommending you advertisements solely based off of analytics derived from your actions on that website?

hn_throwaway_99OP4y ago

I don't have objections to that, similar to how I don't have objections to a search engine showing me ads solely based on what I've typed in to the search engine.

Indeed, I really feel that Google and Facebook turned "evil" (whatever that means) when the huge amount of customer data available to them from their own sites was no longer enough, but they demanded on vacuuming up your actions on every single corner of the Internet to add to their already gargantuan piles of dough.

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