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Ask HN: Is our criticism of surveillance not a bit hypocritical?

9 points by AliAdams ↗ HN
It feels like we have a bit of a double standard on here when talking about metrics / tracking.

Quite commonly we see articles about tracking users etc but with the stories such as the London 'tracking bins' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198883) and NSA stories we have a significantly more negative response.

I'm a fan of metrics and tracking - the amount we can learn and good we can do with such information is incredible. In my mind though, there is not much difference between tracking user views on my website and tracking pedestrians walking in my city.

What makes one more 'right' than the other?

10 comments

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jaachan
The bins article talked about things like "Installing a sensor in the bathroom so you know which gender the person has." Not to mention they'd connect things like which shops you visit and at what time. At any time a police officer could come along and say "We want all records you have on MAC address xx:xx". Quite a difference from websites tracking people.

The same problem exists with Google tracking - it's not that you know who's been to your site, it's that Google know every site you've been on, when you've been there, and what you did there.

AliAdams
If there was a good way for people to determine site visitor gender, I bet they would do that too.

I realise that the data is a bit more complete when you are looking at movement on the street, so an officer taking the data would have more 'useful' information than that acquired from a user visiting a website, but that surely doesn't mean that collection of such data is wrong?

It's like if an old lady sitting on a porch kept a tally of the genders of people walking down the street each hour - all you are doing is automating the old lady.

jaachan
"All you do is automate X"? But automating means you can do things at a much larger scale. Before if you'd want to track cars on a given road, you'd need to pay a few people to write down plates. Now you can keep track of every car in every street 24/7 almost without fail.

Automating is a big deal, it's not something that makes no difference.

regis
I believe that tracking users in this way is wrong no matter what the reason is. About 2 or 3 years ago I removed all analytics and other forms of tracking from my personal website and all other projects. At first it felt weird, now it just feels normal and when someone shows me their google analytics dashboard it feels plain creepy.

I suggest that if you support privacy then the things you create should reflect that.

mattm
I'm curious, do you find you have had more or less success with your projects because of it? Do you have any projects where users pay money?
dbond
There is quite a difference between them, google analytics on your website would be more akin to an individual shop tracking the people who walk inside. I think a better comparison for these "tracking bins" would be your ISP logging your traffic and selling metrics to third parties. The key difference here is that it was public, in a place you thought you wouldn't be tracked, ever.
regis
Your analogy would only work if the website was actually hosting their own analytics. Using google analytics is quite literally participating in a larger tracking program. It is not the same as individual shops collecting data on customers for their own use.
dbond
From Google's perspective, true. Does google actually sell the aggregated data though?
regis
I don't know the details of what they do with it. But for instance, someone can purchase ads targeting a specific type of user and google probably uses this browsing data to decide if the user should be targeted for a specific kind of ad or not. That advertiser is in turn getting better ad targeting due to you using google analytics on your website.