Ask Slashdot: Should I Expect Tracking When Subscribing To News Sites?

Long-time Slashdot reader robot5x writes: I'm a fan of online privacy and, where possible, don't automatically permit cookies and tend to set Ghostery to block all trackers in my browser. This rarely causes a problem -- I have lots of subscriptions to various sites which require me to login and have only rarely encountered minor issues. Recently I had a present of a Slate Plus membership. I really like their content and was keen on supporting it financially. Activating it from the email they sent required me to first register as a user. I clicked on the icon, and nothing happened. Ghostery picked up 7 trackers which I had blocked.

Assuming that one of these was the cause, I activated each in turn and reloaded. None of them made any difference, except a single tracker from JanRain. Accepting this tracker let everything work perfectly. Reading more about JanRain though -- and particularly its interaction with Adobe analytics (which it also tries to load) -- I discovered that they wanted to "create a holistic view of your business by collecting, analyzing and reporting all customer interactions. To derive the most actionable insights, you must link your customers' actions with who they are and what their interests are. Janrain bridges the gap by connecting demographic and psychographic data, collected through traditional and social login, with Adobe's behavioral data, so you understand the whole customer journey".

I do not want them to do any of this, and don't think I should have to. Interactions with Slate's 'support' were excruciating and -- while they at least didn't ask me to restart my computer -- they actually ended up saying that allowing these trackers is tied to their login process and I have to either accept or get a refund.
Robot 5x asks: Is it unacceptable to have to accept being tracked as a paying customer for new sites? "Or am I just being a big baby?"

Comments

We should never expect or accept tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, subscribing should be a way to avoid tracking. Preferably, we shouldn't be tracked at all and subscribing should eliminate animated GIF banner ads and text ads. How can I be confident that the tracking scripts aren't also installing malware? Speaking of which, I also seem to remember that Slashdot serves up scripts from Janrain. Why is Slashdot participating in the tracking? Posting stories critical of tracking while serving up ads that track us is hypocrisy. I block those scripts and frequently change IPs to try to defeat that nonsense.

Re: We should never expect or accept tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a really short-sighted view. Let's say that can be linked to a name and address in the real world, perhaps through your billing information or from social media. It's entirely possible that insurance companies might use that data to assess risk and raise rates. Or perhaps that information could be used in background checks by employers. It's really short-sighted to assume that information will never be used against you in the real world.

Re: We should never expect or accept tracking

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming what you say is true, there is a special place in hell for you and others in your field. I really don't know how you can live with yourself knowing that you actively seek opportunities to ruin peoples lives for your own, hollow, financial gain.
Congrats on making your living preying on the struggles of others.

Please tell, what joy do you derive from ruining the lives of so many? What makes you wake up in the morning and feel like ripping families apart, devastating innocent children as their parents are thrown in jail or die from their addiction?
Does your sports car or rolex help you ignore the gut wrenching mass of human despair and destruction that you leave in your wake?

Addiction is a living hell. It can take every last white knuckled breath for an addict to make the right decision every day, every hour, sometimes every minute.
I really can't fathom the emptiness of soul it would require for someone to be willing to pursue wealth in such a manner.

Once upon a time ...

[Calydor]

Once upon a time the idea was that you 'paid' for the content you consumed by looking at the ads.

Once upon a time the idea was also that if you paid a subscription you got the whole package, not a bunch of cherry-on-top paid DLCs for games etc., but like the above idea about ads those days are gone and will never be coming back.

Businesses will keep pushing and pushing for every last fraction of a cent they can get - and when they reach their absolute maximum possible earnings they start firing people because earnings aren't increasing. Just look at the abject terror a week ago when Apple's earnings weren't increasing like they had. Not that they were losing money, they just weren't earning MORE money than they used to.

It is insanity.

Re:Once upon a time ...

[jimbrooking]

It's not insanity, it's baked-in corporate DNA. Anyone who attributes human values like "fairness", "honesty", "decency" and "evil" to corporations is delusional. Corporations have only one value: maximize profits. Any actions that maximize profits will be taken. If the action is deemed in human terms to be "wrong", or even "illegal", the only question is "if we do this, will it make us more money, even if there are consequences like fines?" If the answer is affirmative, it is, to the corporation, a "moral", if not compulsory act.

We humans, with our quaint and bothersome notions of "right" and "wrong", serve the corporations by giving them money. They will do whatever it takes to maximize the money we give them. Get over it.

Tracking, they will sell your foolishnes

[EmperorOfCanada]

They will sell the fact that you are a paying subscriber to all the other publications that are in their family. You will be traded around like a two dollar whore. By paying for one publication they will try to squeeze every damn cent out of you.

The few times that I have subscribed to a magazine, I can't even begin to count how much crap they sent me to upgrade, give their publication as a gift, to buy addons, to buy similar magazines, and then as my subscriptions ran out, the near non-stop torrent to hold onto me as a customer were making up a sizeable chunk of my weekly paper mail.

Even consumer reports which is supposed to be above the commercial fray was only a hair from sending missionaries to my door to convert me back to their flock of subscribers. One science publication kept sending me letters of ever growing desperation saying that these letters were killing them and that it would be better if I renewed my subscription earlier than cost them so much sending these out.

For you tracking will be so last year, it will be stalking, hunting, and all around sharks who smell blood behaviour.

Re:They are free to choose, as are you

[robot5x]

Yep agree. Lots of comments here go along the lines of "this is a free market, just take your business elsewhere". Fine - I can do that (and in this case I certainly will). But what proportion of the general internet using population do you think are even aware they are being tracked? This faith in the rational decision-making power of consumers relies on them having information about the relative pros and cons of accessing a particular service. I guess what I'm suggesting is that this 'expectation' to be tracked has just sneaked up on us, and there is no transparency from individual web sites, or these tracking services, about what is really happening with people's data. I don't believe any of us have made a rational decision that being tracked is 'OK' - it's just the way things are now, so we all just have to kind of accept it. It's pretty sad.