Believe it or not, some stores sympathise with you. They might actually be run by people like you, people who read your story.
They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.
But that's as far as it goes. They don't follow you out the store, let alone into your bedroom. They don't match anything with third-party data, let alone your mobile phone number. The store just wants to know where to put the eggs.
Unfortunately, your bouncers have simply been told to "hurt them if you have to, I’ve really had enough of it". So last time they came in, they smashed the CCTV cameras. The store-owner remonstrated with them a bit but the whole debate around bouncers has become so polarised that there was really no point arguing.
---
And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.
I find it interesting that a lot of content producers have feel entitled to users' participation in analytics at all.
Sure, it may be frustrating when a user blocks tracking tools (especially self hosted ones) but that's the their choice.
We got by for decades without analysing user habits (even in a local only context, without correlation with third party data). There are so few examples of cases where analysing user behaviour was a make or break factor in a store's survival. Sure, it can be useful to know what a user looked at and, as you suggest, how difficult it is to find the eggs. But there are better ways.
Physical stores at one point (and still now, in many cases) respect that user choice. Want to participate? Get a loyalty card. We'll watch how you spend, but we'll give a little something back to participants.
On the web, the solution is simple. Do it on your application servers back end. Have your request handler (which should probably know a lot more about your user in the context of your application than any third party tool) log user requests and actions. You'll be able to tie data gathered to a logged in user and their local purchase or browsing history.
You'll get to know your user better and you'll avoid third party tools that creep out a growing proportion of your users.
You're not entitled to participation in analytics.
Believe it or not, people have been optimizing the eggs location long before the Internet, using the simple art of [anonymous] sampling and statistics. There is absolutely no technical need to track everyone's every move, the ad / surveillance industry is overreaching by a huge margin. See http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/about-us/nielsen-families.html for an example of sampling in action.
Furthermore, the eggs are hidden on purpose, such that people have to walk a long way along aisles filled with high margin impulse buy crap. As a customer, this "optimization" is actively trying to exploit my atavic weaknesses and damage my health. Thank you very much, I don't sense a whole lot of sympathy for me here, just a race for the quick and dirty buck.
> it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik
First, a precision: EasyPrivacy blocks Piwik. uBlock Origin enables EasyPrivacy by default. If you think it's wrong for Piwik to be blocked, bring the issue to EasyPrivacy maintainers.
Now, why is it "irresponsible" for Piwik to be blocked?
Some of us just do not like to have all our movements scrutinized, even by 1st parties -- I personally consider this a healthy stance, I just do not like to be treated as a product.
Also, what guarantee there is that all the data collected by one 1st party through Piwik is not sold to any number of 3rd parties? There is no guarantee -- thus all tracking deserve to be blocked as much as it can. It's for the same reason I choose to not disclose my phone number or postal code at the cash register when they ask in brick-and-mortar stores.
The advertising industry and tracking has gone too far. The amount of websites with local analytics is small. I suspect that nearly all US based shops with local analytics is breaking (EU) data protection law. Why should I assist them in breaking the law when it harms my privacy?
Unfortunately, the reason the eggs are hidden is that they are a low-margin item and people looking for them will pass more high-margin items on the way and be possibly tempted to buy.
> And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.
Honestly, we only need a statistically significant sample for a few buckets...so unless uBlock and chums hit ~85% none of this effects me. The same is true for virtually every "good actor" in the space.
You just need to be able to run an A/B test that is statistically accurate + analytics + RUM.
Ad blocking is a reasonable proxy for tracking blocking since they usually go hand in hand. [e.g. uBlock]
Real world, I see ~35% block rates at $DayJob. I don't care about that at all and I'm amazed any "good actor" would given 65% of the population is more than enough for as many statistically accurate samples as you'd need.
So when you say "you are doing the right thing", what isn't included in the above?
Once, a shop had hired an assistant called "Cookie" to do the job and another one even had hired a specialized clerk (named W.B. Alizer, for the record) and I was totally fine with this. But then, stores started to hire some guys from the Tracker bunch, but said it would be ok, since they had strict orders to stay indoors.
Now, this became a little distracting. Every now and then I had to wait for the guy to catch up, who was crawling along with me trying to measure the width of my foot steps with an inch rule, and then there was this guy, who insisted to peek into my pockets and to keep track of its contents in a quart book he had attached to the lining of my coat. (Over time, my coat became that heavy, I had to stop and rip out the lining in order to proceed.) Yay, it was all to my best ...
Then, something funny happened as stores began to engage in something they called "optimizing". Had the super market around the corner once sold 5 different sorts of cheese, it was now just 3 with the 2 best selling ones missing (they didn't have much potential for future optimization as they were sold out constantly). Some months later, they started to hide the bread behind a fake wall as soon as I entered and pushed whole piles of umbrellas in my way (since I had once bought one on a stormy afternoon a year ago – I would have understood, if it had been bagels, because I started to buy these as I was searching for the bread in vain.) That is, until last Halloween, when I discovered that there was still bread to buy, when I entered the shop in disguise.
Last month, I bumped into a girl that looked rather familiar, just as I was preparing my wig and false mustache for getting some bread at the super market. Remember Cookie? She is still working at a store, inside the server room. We chatted a while, and now I'm a habitual to her work place again. The store is a bit farther away than the fancy super market, but it really outweighs the inconveniences of the other place.
What? Nope. Not at all. You can still track everybody without a blocker, can you not? Or what harm do you incur that translates into harm or property damage in your metaphor?
Integrate analytics and tracking server-side. Duh. (And if you so need window size and other easy-to-get-via-client-side-JS information, render the script into the page instead of putting it into a .js file.)
And maybe make all this optional for those that don't want to be tracked. (I mean allow them to register and opt-out of server-side tracking too.) I think they might even start to like you and become sort of loyal.
You are missing some basic facts about how marketing works. Let's start here to demonstrate.
...when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.
You think that stores are in business to sell you eggs, and are slightly puzzled that eggs aren't easy to find. But you confidently continue proceed despite direct evidence that stores don't act like you think they should.
The answer to your question is that stores are in business to sell you as much as they can, and the eggs are just there to get you to see everything they have to offer. If they made it easy to buy eggs then your life would become easier and they make less money.
Stores know this because they hire consultants who tell them what to do. And the ones who refused, made less money then got out-competed or bought out by the ones who followed the advice. Now they all know to bury eggs, and the big ones make each store's layout different so that they can maximize how much consumers wander.
You know what else those consultants told them? Candy bars are high profit items, but nobody is going into your stores to buy junk food. Those are impulse buys. So put them right where everyone is forced to stand and wait for the cash register to make it as hard as possible to avoid the impulse.
Look down the cereal aisle. They put cereals with healthy branding at eye level for moms, and the obviously exciting cereals at eye level for kids. Note that branding and reality are unrelated. Take a look at the serving size and sugar per serving on all the boxes. No matter what the branding, most of the cereals work out to be about the same.
It goes on and on. Marketers have fine-tuned their art to a science. No matter where you look, they have mastered details you wouldn't have thought of. And while they aim to hit your emotional buttons, they do NOT fundamentally aim to please YOU. You're not the client. The store is their client, and your being unable to stop opening your wallet is the product that the store is buying.
Hmmm.I have seen more evidence of supermarkets shifting the position of everything every few months, so that you have to hunt more to find your eggs, then see lots more other stuff you will need to buy while searching around.
I think even if we were to accept that some places use tracking responsibly, it's the capacity which could so easily be abused, and so lacking in benefit for the individual, which warrants the blanket use of privacy blocking.
Given this, a little more difficulty in "finding the eggs" is a good trade-off, especially since it's not like designers are naive and consigned to random interface choices, and you can actually still do A/B-type testing without user tracking.
Otherwise, users have to trust that site owners, out of empathy, will do the right thing with data, and that a broader network of tracking won't occur -- despite that it's totally rational from the site owner's perspective to broadly track users. That strategy is beyond brittle; it's unbelievable.
Some of us find even that level of tracking to be creepy and invasive, and would rather opt out. You never asked us if we wanted to be "helped" around your store, but we have now answered that question anyway.
Your second paragraph... that does not apply to grocery stores here in the US.
They fill the center with junk and the fresh food, eggs & milk along the sides. Often eggs & milk (commonly used together) are on OPPOSITE halves of the store!
You, the store owner, may know that; but how do I, the customer, know it? How do I know you aren't selling data from that CCTV camera to others, who don't own your store and don't have the use for the data that you do? Even if you aren't doing that today, how do I know you won't tomorrow, when someone shows up with an offer you simply can't refuse? And so on and so on.
You're right that this is a sad situation, when people's desire for privacy means cutting off access to data even for the (few, I suspect, but still...) store owners who actually want to do something with it that might benefit the customer. But it's what we have. If you want to know where to put the eggs, you'll have to figure it out some other way.
>And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools.
uBlock didn't block it. I blocked it, by using uBlock, which I picked because of its stance on trackers. So its more like I found a cloak of invisibility so I don't show up on your cameras. You can't blame the store selling the cloaks, because I and every user like me chooses to wear them. You have to blame the user for using the cloak... but to what point? You are blaming me for not letting your code run on my machine.
If you want to read a good book on studying in-store shopper behavior, you should checkout "Why We Buy" by Paco Underhill. He runs a firm that studies shoppers by secretly following people around in a store and writing down everything they do.
bad analogy; no one is smashing your cctv cameras; they're just donning an invisibility cloak on the way in. as is their right, even if nethack would like to claim otherwise :).
Thank you Jacques for writing how something that would be completely unacceptable in the physical world is deemed perfectly fine online. It has always bothered me.
Take for example how the FBI wants to have automatic access to the data in all iphones through a backdoor. Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?
Of course that would cause an uproar, but the general public being so uneducated with technology, I guess they don't see how the two are related.
"Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?"
I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and landlord to help them do that. For that matter, the landlord could even be compelled to surrender his master key for the entire apartment complex.
All of those things could happen out here in the big blue room, and nobody would blink an eye. Funny how these metaphors to the physical world clear things up, isn't it?
It's already possible, any physical lock or home or safe can be opened with a warrant. The fact that we're almost at a point where we can hide something from the government (even with a warrant) is groundbreaking.
It's not "perfectly fine online". In fact, much of it is already illegal in most civilized countries, and has been long before internet was a big thing.
However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.
I find it interesting that for most people the problem with ads is the tracking part. For me it's the ads themselves - I don't like seeing them, because I don't really want to buy stuff and think that a large part of the first world's problems (obesity, depression) are caused in part by ads.
In the world of ads, I'm constantly reminded that I don't have the perfect body and that my blender does not look as good as the latest model - I really don't want that, because my blender works fine and looks ok.
So yeah, I block ads and I don't really see why I should feel bad about that, the non-tracking feature is a nice bonus.
So the web will go back to sites that either require payment to enter or are run by people who post stuff out of enthusiasm. Sounds like a nice place to me.
Your nice place will probably never happen. There are alternatives.
On the internet, you are actually better off allowing sites to make money with these old fashioned banner style ads. The alternative on the web is baking this predatory persuasion into the content itself.
By blocking ads, you are pushing your enemy deeper into the medium. Deeper into the story selection process, deeper into the layout decisions, deeper into an app's data harvesting, deeper into the entire editorial philosophy of a publication.
Did you start visiting shops and places you didn't like just to mislead them? So you have more and more of them tracking you until they run out energy and money because their targeting is just wrong?
One can make a very long list of things that would look really really creepy in the physical world.
For instance I can draw a little cat in my agenda to remind myself to call a particular friend that day. The police will tell me: "what? you have not written that in plain english? You must tell me what it means and if you don't you will go to prison". (In the UK one can go to jail for refusing to decrypt one's own data)
I go buy the Telegraph at my local newsstand and the guy will tell me: "can I see your papers please?" "But I just want to buy a newspaper" "yes but I must report to the police every day who reads what, by the way I must also know which pages you intend to read" (the UK is passing a law that would force all ISP to record what websites their customers view)
Where this analogy breaks down is that the people sent to track you are invisible and can't be seen without the aid of special technology. So what you end up telling people is that they are being followed everywhere by invisible ghosts, who's only desire is to change what ads appear in their newspaper. And it appears that the reaction of most people is about what you'd expect.
If a store has policy of "If you come into our store, we'll have employees follow you home" and you don't like that policy, then don't go to that store. That simple. It doesn't make sense to go into the store and have your goons beat up their employees. That might mean that you can't go to the stores you want to go to, but that's how it goes. It seems as clear online as it does in the physical world.
(tldr without the analogy: The overwhelming majority of people don't care about being tracked online because there are no obvious ill effects. The problem with ad blockers is that it makes more sense to just avoid sites that show ads, but most people don't want to do this because it would exclude their favorite sites.)
I got tired of seeing a drill show up on a bunch of sites after I just searched for it on Home Depot... I block ads on my workstation, but with tablets I just could not find an easy way to block trackers for my whole family.
So Metiix Blockade was born out of this frustration... Now I have "bouncers" protecting my whole network for every one of my devices.
I hate when a web page decides what ads and trackers it wants to pull down from the Internet. With Blockade, I have taken back control of that process and I get to dictate when and where I want to provide my information.
I love feeling like I have the real internet back. No more of these ads and trackers taking over every place I go.
It is funny how things change when you use the physical world metaphor. There was a campaign recently by the Dutch regulatory agency that made people aware of the implications of allowing permissions in "free" apps.
They made an (anecdotal) video by promising a free cup of coffee in exchange for your contact list on your phone:
I've been operating browser separation (Google in Chrome, social in Chrome incognito, and everything else in a locked-down privacy mode only Firefox - all with uBlock) for a while, and also use anonymising VPNs for anything I really don't trust, and my own VPN with streisand and Dnsmasq (with a hosts very similar to https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/ ).
On my mobile every link I click in any app I open in Dolphin Zero (still on that DNS blocking VPN - which blocks all trackers in apps too), and I only keep apps I actually use and trust the publishers of on my device.
It feels like a chore (manually copying links from one browser to another depending on trust level), I wonder whether it's worth it sometimes... but then I occasionally get to see someone else's experience of the web and it's so incredibly and perniciously been invaded by advertisers that I am glad I do all of this.
It's become so bad that I even had to change my uBlock origin rules for my online bank ( https://banking.smile.co.uk/SmileWeb/start.do ) to block even first-party scripts... because they use Adobe, Omniture and Tealium tools to measure stuff and for A/B testing of their online banking features.
I now block absolutely everything and tell others to do so too, but unfortunately there is collateral damage.
The very sites I care about may not require advertising revenue, but do value tracking data that helps them spot errors, debug things, find out what screen resolutions they should cater for. Their analytics, client-side debugging, this is all now rendered useless to them.
PS: If you happen to work on Firefox for Android, please enable browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to be configured via about:config. I would love to default enable private browsing in a UA capable of running uBlock on my mobile.
I think that better than an ad-blocking solution would be to feed all those trackers with fake information
Oh you want location data here it is, this morning I've been all over the planet. Want to know all the websites I'm visiting, sure, here's a million of them.
Just based on the fact that they keep trying to sell you the thermometer after you already don't care kind of points out that they're being had, and I'm all for helping it happen
The solution would be a decentralization. Tracking is a real threat when we only have 1 search engine, 2 social networks, 1 retailer and a single ad network. The web has created global-scale monopolies faster than before , and it seems like the centralization of VC capital and IT talent is permanent. Tracking becomes less of a problem when they are unable to follow you everywhere.
Once upon a time I used to work for a multinational company that did retail audit. They had developed a program which adjusted the ads a selected group of people were watching on their TVs. Then they provided them with special debit cards and monitored the relevance between viewed ads and purchases of goods in super markets. All that around 1999. And that was just once of a multitude of technologies they used. They also had a technology where a camera was tracing face movement to identify which items on the shelves attracted more attention by gender and age. I can’t even fathom what they’ll be using these days. Profiling is the holy grail of the marketing world. At least online we have the option of ad blocking. Offline we’re helpless.
I have blocked as much trackers as i can. Having said that, i know why they exists. See, when John produces shampoo, he needs to sell it. The only way is to advertise, one way or another, because without advertising, public knowledge, the shampoo does not sell. Now John does want to spend as less to ads as possible, that makes sense, since we, the customers, end up paying about that too. To spend less, John needs to show ads only to core group of buyers, for that he needs to know, who you are. Tracker does that. Shampoo costs 5 bucks. How much you agree to pay for that with advertising costs included? 6? 16? Really, are you ready to eat up 200% advertising markup? I have no idea, frankly.
What you probably missed is if I am a big enough retailer, I can pay off your bouncers to still follow you from a distance and still show up on your newspaper on one side since I have more than you and can pay off your bouncers to work for me while they still pretend they are protecting you. Just an example:
I'm all for blocking ads, tracking or non-tracking, analytics, etc. and wish swift bankruptcy on the propaganda-advertising industrial complex but this is silly. The analogy between physical world and the Internet is not valid or insightful, just like it isn't in case of piracy/stealing. Collecting info on what you read online is nothing like breaking into your house.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|10 years ago|reply
They still want to know how you proceed round the store, because that helps them optimise shelf layout, identify hard-to-find items, and so on. So yes, they might use the standard in-store CCTV to observe your journeys, and when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.
But that's as far as it goes. They don't follow you out the store, let alone into your bedroom. They don't match anything with third-party data, let alone your mobile phone number. The store just wants to know where to put the eggs.
Unfortunately, your bouncers have simply been told to "hurt them if you have to, I’ve really had enough of it". So last time they came in, they smashed the CCTV cameras. The store-owner remonstrated with them a bit but the whole debate around bouncers has become so polarised that there was really no point arguing.
---
And if this metaphor seems a little obscure, this is why it is irresponsible, populist and ultimately self-defeating for uBlock and chums to block self-hosted Piwik and other such internal analytics tools. Because some of us are trying to do the right thing and your bouncers are still beating us up.
[+] [-] davb|10 years ago|reply
Sure, it may be frustrating when a user blocks tracking tools (especially self hosted ones) but that's the their choice.
We got by for decades without analysing user habits (even in a local only context, without correlation with third party data). There are so few examples of cases where analysing user behaviour was a make or break factor in a store's survival. Sure, it can be useful to know what a user looked at and, as you suggest, how difficult it is to find the eggs. But there are better ways.
Physical stores at one point (and still now, in many cases) respect that user choice. Want to participate? Get a loyalty card. We'll watch how you spend, but we'll give a little something back to participants.
On the web, the solution is simple. Do it on your application servers back end. Have your request handler (which should probably know a lot more about your user in the context of your application than any third party tool) log user requests and actions. You'll be able to tie data gathered to a logged in user and their local purchase or browsing history.
You'll get to know your user better and you'll avoid third party tools that creep out a growing proportion of your users.
You're not entitled to participation in analytics.
[+] [-] pacala|10 years ago|reply
Furthermore, the eggs are hidden on purpose, such that people have to walk a long way along aisles filled with high margin impulse buy crap. As a customer, this "optimization" is actively trying to exploit my atavic weaknesses and damage my health. Thank you very much, I don't sense a whole lot of sympathy for me here, just a race for the quick and dirty buck.
[+] [-] gorhill|10 years ago|reply
First, a precision: EasyPrivacy blocks Piwik. uBlock Origin enables EasyPrivacy by default. If you think it's wrong for Piwik to be blocked, bring the issue to EasyPrivacy maintainers.
Now, why is it "irresponsible" for Piwik to be blocked?
Some of us just do not like to have all our movements scrutinized, even by 1st parties -- I personally consider this a healthy stance, I just do not like to be treated as a product.
Also, what guarantee there is that all the data collected by one 1st party through Piwik is not sold to any number of 3rd parties? There is no guarantee -- thus all tracking deserve to be blocked as much as it can. It's for the same reason I choose to not disclose my phone number or postal code at the cash register when they ask in brick-and-mortar stores.
[+] [-] rmc|10 years ago|reply
The advertising industry and tracking has gone too far. The amount of websites with local analytics is small. I suspect that nearly all US based shops with local analytics is breaking (EU) data protection law. Why should I assist them in breaking the law when it harms my privacy?
[+] [-] Kliment|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fweespee_ch|10 years ago|reply
Honestly, we only need a statistically significant sample for a few buckets...so unless uBlock and chums hit ~85% none of this effects me. The same is true for virtually every "good actor" in the space.
You just need to be able to run an A/B test that is statistically accurate + analytics + RUM.
https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/
~37%
Ad blocking is a reasonable proxy for tracking blocking since they usually go hand in hand. [e.g. uBlock]
Real world, I see ~35% block rates at $DayJob. I don't care about that at all and I'm amazed any "good actor" would given 65% of the population is more than enough for as many statistically accurate samples as you'd need.
So when you say "you are doing the right thing", what isn't included in the above?
[+] [-] jacquesm|10 years ago|reply
This is actually factually incorrect.
Some hints here:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...
And it goes even deeper than that.
[+] [-] masswerk|10 years ago|reply
Now, this became a little distracting. Every now and then I had to wait for the guy to catch up, who was crawling along with me trying to measure the width of my foot steps with an inch rule, and then there was this guy, who insisted to peek into my pockets and to keep track of its contents in a quart book he had attached to the lining of my coat. (Over time, my coat became that heavy, I had to stop and rip out the lining in order to proceed.) Yay, it was all to my best ...
Then, something funny happened as stores began to engage in something they called "optimizing". Had the super market around the corner once sold 5 different sorts of cheese, it was now just 3 with the 2 best selling ones missing (they didn't have much potential for future optimization as they were sold out constantly). Some months later, they started to hide the bread behind a fake wall as soon as I entered and pushed whole piles of umbrellas in my way (since I had once bought one on a stormy afternoon a year ago – I would have understood, if it had been bagels, because I started to buy these as I was searching for the bread in vain.) That is, until last Halloween, when I discovered that there was still bread to buy, when I entered the shop in disguise.
Last month, I bumped into a girl that looked rather familiar, just as I was preparing my wig and false mustache for getting some bread at the super market. Remember Cookie? She is still working at a store, inside the server room. We chatted a while, and now I'm a habitual to her work place again. The store is a bit farther away than the fancy super market, but it really outweighs the inconveniences of the other place.
[+] [-] adsche|10 years ago|reply
> hurt them if you have to
> they smashed the CCTV cameras
What? Nope. Not at all. You can still track everybody without a blocker, can you not? Or what harm do you incur that translates into harm or property damage in your metaphor?
[+] [-] pas|10 years ago|reply
And maybe make all this optional for those that don't want to be tracked. (I mean allow them to register and opt-out of server-side tracking too.) I think they might even start to like you and become sort of loyal.
[+] [-] btilly|10 years ago|reply
...when they figure that you and people like you always have difficulty finding the eggs (seriously - why is it always so hard to find the eggs?), they'll move the eggs somewhere more prominent, so they can sell more eggs and you can buy what you came to buy.
You think that stores are in business to sell you eggs, and are slightly puzzled that eggs aren't easy to find. But you confidently continue proceed despite direct evidence that stores don't act like you think they should.
The answer to your question is that stores are in business to sell you as much as they can, and the eggs are just there to get you to see everything they have to offer. If they made it easy to buy eggs then your life would become easier and they make less money.
Stores know this because they hire consultants who tell them what to do. And the ones who refused, made less money then got out-competed or bought out by the ones who followed the advice. Now they all know to bury eggs, and the big ones make each store's layout different so that they can maximize how much consumers wander.
You know what else those consultants told them? Candy bars are high profit items, but nobody is going into your stores to buy junk food. Those are impulse buys. So put them right where everyone is forced to stand and wait for the cash register to make it as hard as possible to avoid the impulse.
Look down the cereal aisle. They put cereals with healthy branding at eye level for moms, and the obviously exciting cereals at eye level for kids. Note that branding and reality are unrelated. Take a look at the serving size and sugar per serving on all the boxes. No matter what the branding, most of the cereals work out to be about the same.
It goes on and on. Marketers have fine-tuned their art to a science. No matter where you look, they have mastered details you wouldn't have thought of. And while they aim to hit your emotional buttons, they do NOT fundamentally aim to please YOU. You're not the client. The store is their client, and your being unable to stop opening your wallet is the product that the store is buying.
[+] [-] collyw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|10 years ago|reply
Given this, a little more difficulty in "finding the eggs" is a good trade-off, especially since it's not like designers are naive and consigned to random interface choices, and you can actually still do A/B-type testing without user tracking.
Otherwise, users have to trust that site owners, out of empathy, will do the right thing with data, and that a broader network of tracking won't occur -- despite that it's totally rational from the site owner's perspective to broadly track users. That strategy is beyond brittle; it's unbelievable.
[+] [-] monochromatic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gglitch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantumpotato_|10 years ago|reply
They fill the center with junk and the fresh food, eggs & milk along the sides. Often eggs & milk (commonly used together) are on OPPOSITE halves of the store!
http://www.grocery411.com/grocery-store-layout.html
[+] [-] pdonis|10 years ago|reply
You, the store owner, may know that; but how do I, the customer, know it? How do I know you aren't selling data from that CCTV camera to others, who don't own your store and don't have the use for the data that you do? Even if you aren't doing that today, how do I know you won't tomorrow, when someone shows up with an offer you simply can't refuse? And so on and so on.
You're right that this is a sad situation, when people's desire for privacy means cutting off access to data even for the (few, I suspect, but still...) store owners who actually want to do something with it that might benefit the customer. But it's what we have. If you want to know where to put the eggs, you'll have to figure it out some other way.
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
uBlock didn't block it. I blocked it, by using uBlock, which I picked because of its stance on trackers. So its more like I found a cloak of invisibility so I don't show up on your cameras. You can't blame the store selling the cloaks, because I and every user like me chooses to wear them. You have to blame the user for using the cloak... but to what point? You are blaming me for not letting your code run on my machine.
[+] [-] helper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] S4M|10 years ago|reply
Take for example how the FBI wants to have automatic access to the data in all iphones through a backdoor. Would that be considered OK if they asked lockers makers to make their locks accept a master key so they would be able to enter in anybody's house, so they could monitor further people they suspect to be terrorist?
Of course that would cause an uproar, but the general public being so uneducated with technology, I guess they don't see how the two are related.
[+] [-] JorgeGT|10 years ago|reply
Didn't TSA do exactly this, only to have CAD designs of the master keys reverse-engineered from a photo and posted in GitHub? https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys
[+] [-] timr|10 years ago|reply
I don't know. But I know that it would be absolutely normal to pick your lock and/or knock down your door if they had a warrant. It would even be OK for them to ask the lock company, door company, and landlord to help them do that. For that matter, the landlord could even be compelled to surrender his master key for the entire apartment complex.
All of those things could happen out here in the big blue room, and nobody would blink an eye. Funny how these metaphors to the physical world clear things up, isn't it?
[+] [-] watty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitsuckless|10 years ago|reply
However, any attempt to execute and finetune legislation and regulation to explicitly include the online is generally either ridiculed (example: the EU "cookie law", which is actually a "don't track without explicit permission" law) or portrayed as anti-American protectionism on forums like HN.
[+] [-] terryf|10 years ago|reply
In the world of ads, I'm constantly reminded that I don't have the perfect body and that my blender does not look as good as the latest model - I really don't want that, because my blender works fine and looks ok.
So yeah, I block ads and I don't really see why I should feel bad about that, the non-tracking feature is a nice bonus.
So the web will go back to sites that either require payment to enter or are run by people who post stuff out of enthusiasm. Sounds like a nice place to me.
[+] [-] flycaliguy|10 years ago|reply
On the internet, you are actually better off allowing sites to make money with these old fashioned banner style ads. The alternative on the web is baking this predatory persuasion into the content itself.
By blocking ads, you are pushing your enemy deeper into the medium. Deeper into the story selection process, deeper into the layout decisions, deeper into an app's data harvesting, deeper into the entire editorial philosophy of a publication.
[+] [-] akerro|10 years ago|reply
http://adnauseam.io
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/adnauseam
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/trackmenot
[+] [-] cm2187|10 years ago|reply
For instance I can draw a little cat in my agenda to remind myself to call a particular friend that day. The police will tell me: "what? you have not written that in plain english? You must tell me what it means and if you don't you will go to prison". (In the UK one can go to jail for refusing to decrypt one's own data)
I go buy the Telegraph at my local newsstand and the guy will tell me: "can I see your papers please?" "But I just want to buy a newspaper" "yes but I must report to the police every day who reads what, by the way I must also know which pages you intend to read" (the UK is passing a law that would force all ISP to record what websites their customers view)
Etc etc
[+] [-] karmacondon|10 years ago|reply
If a store has policy of "If you come into our store, we'll have employees follow you home" and you don't like that policy, then don't go to that store. That simple. It doesn't make sense to go into the store and have your goons beat up their employees. That might mean that you can't go to the stores you want to go to, but that's how it goes. It seems as clear online as it does in the physical world.
(tldr without the analogy: The overwhelming majority of people don't care about being tracked online because there are no obvious ill effects. The problem with ad blockers is that it makes more sense to just avoid sites that show ads, but most people don't want to do this because it would exclude their favorite sites.)
[+] [-] hoopsho|10 years ago|reply
So Metiix Blockade was born out of this frustration... Now I have "bouncers" protecting my whole network for every one of my devices.
I hate when a web page decides what ads and trackers it wants to pull down from the Internet. With Blockade, I have taken back control of that process and I get to dictate when and where I want to provide my information.
I love feeling like I have the real internet back. No more of these ads and trackers taking over every place I go.
[+] [-] wouterinho|10 years ago|reply
They made an (anecdotal) video by promising a free cup of coffee in exchange for your contact list on your phone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYXM56YJWSo (Dutch unfortunately)
[+] [-] buro9|10 years ago|reply
I've been operating browser separation (Google in Chrome, social in Chrome incognito, and everything else in a locked-down privacy mode only Firefox - all with uBlock) for a while, and also use anonymising VPNs for anything I really don't trust, and my own VPN with streisand and Dnsmasq (with a hosts very similar to https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/ ).
On my mobile every link I click in any app I open in Dolphin Zero (still on that DNS blocking VPN - which blocks all trackers in apps too), and I only keep apps I actually use and trust the publishers of on my device.
It feels like a chore (manually copying links from one browser to another depending on trust level), I wonder whether it's worth it sometimes... but then I occasionally get to see someone else's experience of the web and it's so incredibly and perniciously been invaded by advertisers that I am glad I do all of this.
It's become so bad that I even had to change my uBlock origin rules for my online bank ( https://banking.smile.co.uk/SmileWeb/start.do ) to block even first-party scripts... because they use Adobe, Omniture and Tealium tools to measure stuff and for A/B testing of their online banking features.
I now block absolutely everything and tell others to do so too, but unfortunately there is collateral damage.
The very sites I care about may not require advertising revenue, but do value tracking data that helps them spot errors, debug things, find out what screen resolutions they should cater for. Their analytics, client-side debugging, this is all now rendered useless to them.
PS: If you happen to work on Firefox for Android, please enable browser.privatebrowsing.autostart to be configured via about:config. I would love to default enable private browsing in a UA capable of running uBlock on my mobile.
[+] [-] raverbashing|10 years ago|reply
Oh you want location data here it is, this morning I've been all over the planet. Want to know all the websites I'm visiting, sure, here's a million of them.
Just based on the fact that they keep trying to sell you the thermometer after you already don't care kind of points out that they're being had, and I'm all for helping it happen
[+] [-] tux3|10 years ago|reply
Some will disagree, but I think the comparison was spot on.
[+] [-] austinjp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|10 years ago|reply
I already have adblock plus on my computer.
[+] [-] elorant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atirip|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/user/SurveillantCameraMan
[+] [-] theshadowmonkey|10 years ago|reply
https://adblockplus.org/about
[+] [-] blfr|10 years ago|reply