[f1refly]

> Marketing wants to track all clicks and user inputs and get heat maps to improve the conversion based on their findings. They want to know where their users come from, where they go to see if their campaigns work. They also want google maps integration to find retail stores. They want users who come back 2 days later to retain their shopping cart and their preferences even without a login in case they checkout without an account. They want dynamic A/B testing based on user behaviour and they don’t want to/can’t reinvent all these solutions so they go buy them and the devs get to integrate them - whether they like it or not and some things simply make it so that you need to store some data on the client and communicate it on the client in some way while not being completely anonymous.

Speaking a as user, I don't want your company to know or do any of those things. I'm very glad these practices are getting outlawed and I'd like your marketing team to know they can get hit by a bus for all I care, the world would be a better place without their cancerous doings. Psychological warfare against the general public is despicable.

[Escapado]

I’m with you. In fact I have had more meetings with these people arguing against these practices than I can count. However every single customer facing project I have worked on so far that tries to sell something uses practices like these. Sometimes even worse. I guess it’s a result of being profit oriented before anything else and it works apparently, otherwise it would not be done. So the change you advocate for is one I would like to see too but it challenges structures which are so pervasive I’m not sure they can be easily reversed. If this company got fined for using Google analytics their answer would not be to re-evaluate tracking, they would make their legal department lay out just how far they can stretch it while still getting away with it and the do that.