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

Re: We should never expect or accept tracking

[BarbaraHudson]

Because you've chosen to give up your privacy doesn't give you the right to make that decision for the rest of us.

Are you nuts? I am not that awesome that I can make the decision for anyone else, and never claimed otherwise. Also, you have incognito mode for your browser if you're that paranoid that someone's stealing your browser history.

Also, if you want to keep your interests private, DON'T USE THE INTERNET. Every http request you send to a server has to know where to send the response to. From the beginning that has shown up in the server logs. That's the way the web works. Everything else is a natural evolution of that simple fact. You already should assume that the NSA is hoovering up everything, including not just your net history but your phone calls. Since you're on the net, you've already accepted that you don't have privacy; you're just not willing to say it.

Re:We should never expect or accept tracking

[KGIII]

And every tracker is also a potential malware delivery system if they get themselves hacked.

I like my pseudo-privacy as much as the next person but no, not every tracker is a potential malware delivery vessel. You're not going to get malware from a beacon - it's an image and just an image. You're not going to get malware from a cookie, it's just a cookie. Hyperbole and misinformation does us no good.

If you want to advocate for privacy and/or security please do so from an informed position. Nobody is going to listen to us if we're caught lying and spreading misinformation. A web beacon is not malware nor is a cookie. Both are methods of tracking. Both are very common methods of tracking. No beacon or cookie is going to harm your computer, they're non-executable files. No matter who hacks who, neither of those (and a few other things) is capable of being malware.