Privacy Machiavellis

Chris Jay Hoofnagle has a piece up at SFGate.com on what he calls the "privacy Machiavellis," which are exemplified by Google and Facebook. (The article is adapted from a longer treatment published last year, called "Beyond Google and Evil.") Hoofnagle heads the privacy foundation set up with money collected from settlements of privacy lawsuits against Facebook. From SFGate: "... you have no way to ask Google to stop this tracking. Instead, you can merely opt out of the targeted advertising — the product recommendations. Exercising your privacy options creates a worst-case-scenario outcome: If you opt out, you are still tracked, but you do not receive the putative benefit of targeted ads. An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world. Consider Facebook's privacy options. ... Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers ... more than 100 [choices]. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all. Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice. Reader Kilrah_il sends word that Google has just released a tool that could alleviate some of the above worries: it stops tracking by Google Analytics for users of IE7+, Firefox 3.5+, and Chrome 4+. Perhaps Hoofnagle will comment on it here or elsewhere.

Comments

Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Noscript stopped Google Analytics a long time ago!

Machiavellian == unjust slander

[handy_vandal]

The term "machiavellian" is a cruel and unjust slander.

Niccolò Machiavelli was a profoundly moral man, well acquainted with -- and appalled by -- the amoral power politics of his age. When he wrote that a Prince should prefer to be feared, rather than loved, Machiavelli was not advancing a personal ideal: he was simply reporting how Princes actually behave in the real world.

host blocking

[ya really]

I've been adding the following to my desktop computer host files for over a year to block google's tracking:

127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 video-stats.video.google.com
127.0.0.1 wintricksbanner.googlepages.com
127.0.0.1 www-google-analytics.l.google.com

I trust that solution more than I do google's opt-out bs. If you want to get fancy, you can direct a lightweight web server like lighttpd to 404 the adservers to load your pages a bit faster (instead of letting them time out) and to keep logs of what adservers are trying to load.

Re:Machiavellis indeed

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Of course, you can exercise the one opt-out system that works - don't use their services.

Then you might as well not use most of the web. Do you know how many websites embed the google-analytics code? Hundreds of thousands of them. Basically any website that can't afford to role their own or contract out for a paid service will use google-analytics for user-traffic tracking.

So your answer is completely unfeasible in the real world.