Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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?"
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.
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
They say it costs twice the amount to win a customer back than to keep and existing one . HOWEVER, the marketing people know their bonuses come from winning a customer back and they get nothing for keeping one. Me, I have ghostery turn up to the max, I also have a large hosts list, I have zero interest in being tracked/spammed/harassed . If I can't get to their site...I go else where....easy choice to make.
The short answer to the original question is "Yes, they can and will track you."
However, you can making tracking very difficult. The following is what I do. This for those who use Firefox or SeaMonkey as their browser on a Windows system. NOTE WELL the exception.
1. Mark the file cookies.sqlite as read-only. For "smooth" Web browsing, I do want some cookies. To set or update them, I terminate my browser, mark cookies read-write, launch my browser to visit ONLY the Web site for which I want cookies, terminate my browser to eliminate session-only cookies, and restore the read-only setting for cookies.sqlite. Web site might act as if they were setting cookies, but those cookies are lost when I terminate my browser.
2. Disable geolocation. For all of my profiles, I insert the following into file user.js:
user_pref("geo.enabled", false);
The semi-colon (;) at the end of the line is mandatory. You can insert an adjacent comment line indicating why you did this; just begin the comment with two virgules (//).
3. Install the Secret Agent extension from https://www.dephormation.org.u.... Each time I request a Web page, my outgoing Internet headers are different. Some sites that try to use those headers to determine my location have me bouncing all over the world. Every time I go to Panopticlick at https://panopticlick.eff.org/, I get a different result. Two NOTES: (1) Because some Web sites require consistent user agents as you navigate through them, I disabled the extension's capability to vary my user agent string. (2) Because Firefox now requires extensions to be signed by Mozilla and the developer of Secret Agent refuses to submit his extension for signature, this cannot be installed in Firefox. Unsigned extensions can still be installed in SeaMonkey.
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.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
It's not a choice to do business with them when I click on a new site in google and 50 trackers start up and steal my info before the site's content even loads.
And if you think users should be required to search for this info about every new aite before clicking a new link to decide if it's worth it to visit, you're absolutely fucking insane.
It's one thing if the site shows a blank page and says "we use xyz trackers for xyz purposes. If you agree to this we will show you content. If not, you cannot enter our website." As much as I hate trackers, I'd have a bit of respect for sites that do that. The reality though, that they load the trackers/malware without your knowledge before you can even access the content, and without giving the user a say in it, means your free market scenario can't work out. In a true free market where users have the ability to make decisions based on what the website does and doesn't track, tracking should be illegal u less it's opt-in.