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by isodev 825 days ago
"Number of visitors" does not constitute tracking. The tracking in question here is to discover who you are specifically and the absurd amount of detail about your online activities collected and shared with data brokers for aggregation and resale.

A few of these cookie prompts during the day and they'd be able to tell everything from where your kids go to school to the kind of prn you prefer to watch on weekdays and everything in between.

3 comments

I used to work at an online video advertisement company, you'd be horrified how much information we tracked across all the ads, especially since the ad was played with a special media player "plugin" loaded inside the other media player.

This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on.

There's no such thing as server-side "private browsing".

> This is how ad companies can sell premium views, don't show cosmetics to men, increase car related ads to people who has watched other car related ads and so on.

It's really not. They already could do all that before cyberstalking was normalized. It's called content-based profiling, and it doesn't require any GDPR consent.

The ad companies wanted to aggregate information across multiple channels.

The example about "show more car ads to someone who watched other car ads"? It's not about showing car ad on a site whose content is about cars (or where the site owner decided they like that kind of thing).

It's about knowing you have wandered over to car comparison site recently so they can show you car advertisements when you look up sports news, show car-related merchandise when you're browsing some shopping site, show you insurance ads, etc.

> where your kids go to school

Is this something that's kept secret in European society?

If someone told me they knew where my kids went to school I wouldn't be surprised, it's sort of dependent on our address which is in the phone book.

Honestly I don't mind them collecting this data, what is really infuriating is the fact they won't share it with me. I would love to know what kind of porn I prefer on weekdays. I think they shouldn't be allowed to track anything with consent or without it unless they share all the data with the subject of spying.

And aside from that, I think it should be much more expensive to say sorry than ask for permission. In my world a firm like facebook should not have any right to exist, they earned it. Fine them to oblivion just like I would get a long time behind bars if I wouldn't do my taxes right.

I call BS. Give me your email password and your browser history and I'll share everything I learn about you with you. I'll also keep it and share it with whomever else I want to, but I'll definitely share it with you, too.