Comment by willsmith72
Comment by willsmith72 5 days ago
It's the email/username harvesting that you mean right? Or do people also have something against anonymised product analytics?
Comment by willsmith72 5 days ago
It's the email/username harvesting that you mean right? Or do people also have something against anonymised product analytics?
> anonymised product analytics?
They're not anonymous, they're just pseudo-anonymous. It's incredibly easy to collect pieces of data A thru Z that, on their own, are anonymous but, all together, are not. It's also incredibly easy to collect data that you think is generic but is actually not.
Do you query the screen size? I have bad news for you. But, all of this is besides the point: when that data is exfiltrated to a third-party service, you have no idea how it's being used. You have a piece of paper, if you're lucky, telling you the privacy policy, which is usually "you have no privacy dumbass".
Even if data appears completely anonymous to humans, it can be ingested by machine learning algorithms that can spot patterns and de-anonymize the data.
I mean, we have companies who's entire business model is "how do we string together bits of data and tie it to real-world identity?": namely Google. Turns out it's remarkably easy when you have your hands in a lot of different pots. Collect a little anonymous data here, a little there, and boom: now you know that Billy Joe who lives on First Street loves to go to Walmart at 1 AM and buy Ben and Jerry's ice cream in a moment of weakness.
Ad agencies are using the contact tracing algorithms made for covid to track people.
how do you build a product without analytics? how do you measure the success and failure of every change?
Many users tend to be pretty vocal when changes break things they like, you don't need to spy on them for that. Mail readers > analytics frameworks.
"not breaking things they like" is a very low bar for building a great product
To be honest building things this way seems like such a competitive disadvantage I don't see how it could ever work at scale. Certainly all the big players are using them. If we shake our heads at the little players doing the same, we're just going to widen the moat
I have something against opt-out analytics over TCP/IP or UDP/IP period, because they aren't anonymized, they include an IP address by virtue of the protocol.
But I definitely only posted that original complaint of the email/username (not the person you responded to initially).