[onlyrealcuzzo]

Engineer here: I used to be completely anti-tracking.

Then, I started needing analytics for my own business. Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business. Granted, the anti-consumerist in me thinks maybe as a society we shouldn't be so concerned with our efficiency to sell. But, we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

The way I see it now, I'm less concerned about tracking than I am about how big some businesses are -- especially in this space.

At every start up I know, they use analytics, and no one is doing anything spooky. But, I'm sure there's plenty of spooky stuff going on at the FAANGAMUs.

[BLKNSLVR]

"Sell with efficiency" sounds a bit vampiric to me; a bit growth-at-all-costs or refusing to accept the normal costs of doing business (although I can sympathise with that mindset).

Where do you draw the line? This is parallel to the discussion around government surveillance. Just be cause they / you can, doesn't mean they / you should.

If Internet tracking had no potential use to governments then they'd be regulating the shit out of it. The problem is that governments want their own noses in the same trough, and so all these privacy-invasive technologies continue to be developed. The fact that it's not illegal means that anyone with the ability to implement it can, as long as they can sleep at night.

As to solutions that could help with "selling efficiency", maybe some kind of agreed tiers of analytics from benign to spooky that users can opt-in / opt-out of when visiting a website or using an app. Which GDPR is a bit of a kludgy solution for. The problem is that it only takes one bad advertiser to break agreed rules and the trust is gone again for all advertisers.

One bad apple.

Analytics are unquestionably useful. Collecting the data without user consent is what potentially should be regulated.

[8ytecoder]

I'd be completely ok with intent based advertising - I search for $X you show ads that are related to $X. And I'm ok with measuring what percentage of those who click the ad that converts as well. However, that's not where we are today. The appetite for marketing and advertisement has grown to such a level that companies like Facebook want to know every aspect of your life so they can satisfy that appetite. Clearly a) there's a demand from companies big and small and b) it's working. Companies can still be ethical about it - like why should Facebook track every URL I visit (via the Like button)? Or, why not provide an option to opt-out of targeted ads - I don't like them and I do have friends who like them. I get it but provide an option to opt out.

The general retort I hear is what do you have to hide? Like the only thing that people want to hide are the bad and evil stuff.

[mtnGoat]

and those companies arent just selling that gathered data to online marketers, they are pairing it with offline data and selling it anyone with enough money.

[TeMPOraL]

How extensive analytics did you need? Do you believe it's possible to make enough money with respectful and privacy-friendly attitude?

[yurishimo]

> FAANGAMU

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, AirBnb, Microsoft, Uber

?

Edit: M for Microsoft, derp

[zaphirplane]

The FAANGAMUs acronym doesn’t have a lot of hits, what did you add Microsoft Uber and Airbnb?

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Microsoft owns Bing, one of the most important search engines and advertising platforms on the Internet...

Uber had that secret API access granted directly from Apple so it could see which apps you had open at all times (in case you opened Lyft) so it could charge you different rates.

AirBNB is similarly large, so I thought they were worth mentioning.

[eveningcoffee]

TL;DR version: I like tracking now because it now makes money for me.

[al_chemist]

As in "I was against child labour, but then I've inherited textile factory in China and paying adult wages is not efficient".

[drusepth]

Or, "I was against child labour, until I lived in a country where it was culturally acceptable and I couldn't buy food / compete without it."

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The point I was trying to make is: before I worked in the growth team at several mid-sized startups, I had this naive assumption that tracking data was basically the food for an evil monster.

I had this idea of an evil group of people getting together everyday and looking at this data and somehow using it to puppet my entire online-life.

Sure, this group of people exists at every decent sized online company, and sure they're trying to get you to spend more time and money on their site/app/whatever, and sure this tracking data helps them.

Sure, SOME of these websites are peddling fake news or selling scams or preying on the poor/unfortunate/uneducated/etc. But I think that's the exception, not the norm.

Most successful companies make a product people genuinely like. There are millions of people that would buy and enjoy this product if they knew about it. Most companies are just trying to use this tracking data to get their product in front of as many of those people as they can, and as few people that don't want their product. They're trying to fine-tune their messaging to make sure it appeals to the people that actually like their product. They're trying to use it to figure out how to BETTER make a product people actually want!

Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.

Like everyone says, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except all the others we've tried.

[teaneedz]

> Again, if you're saying that increasing our efficiency in sales is a bad thing, you're saying that capitalism is bad. But I've just come to see this data as something that enables product evolution to occur much faster. I see this data as something that's helping the world, mostly, get more of what it wants.

Unfortunately, I've seen too many product decisions catering to the manipulative aspects of adtech. UX often suffers, not improves with ads. Online platforms all seem to follow the same game ad monetization plan these days which results in messes like Frankensteinish apps--see official Twitter app.

As for actual hands on manufactured products or services, I'd like to know how ads improved the UX.

[amelius]

> Without analytics, I wouldn't be able to sell with efficiency, and therefore, I wouldn't have a business.

I guess your summary is about right.

> we live in a capitalist world, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

We were living in a capitalist world two decades ago, and we didn't have a significant amount of tracking back then. If you are concerned about your competition using tracking, then just try to make a better product.

[citrablue]

If you are concerned with making a better product, you are going to need quite a bit of tracking and instrumentation to understand how to make a better product.

[guntars]

Using analytics to understand what users are thinking is like using tea leaves to divine the future. Just ask them.

[citrablue]

Users will give you the preferences that they think are important. Or are important at the point of that interview.

Analytics can give you a decent glimpse of revealed preferences, which may or may not be what you're after.

Whether or not this is a good thing, depends on a lot of subjectivity, sure. But suppose you run a porn site - if you asked most users what they wanted in porn (before they had seen any), they would probably say one thing. If you examine what kinds of videos people look at, you'll see another. (This theme, with actual data from pornhub, is explored at length in the book "Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.)

Both routes (asking and instrumenting) have their uses.

[guntars]

Glad you brought up porn because I believe that if you optimized any site's features just based on engagement analytics, you'd end up with a porn site with elements of gambling!

I'm kidding of course, but the idea is that analytics tell you a part off the user story, but doesn't answer the deeper "why" questions. It certainly has a place in tech, but it's less than what it's currently afforded.

[yuhong]

I mentioned before that "Thinking about it, I imagine that one instance of Google Analytics would be fine, but tying two instances of it in order to track a user would probably be ridiculous, right?".