64
Root
7y

My coworker requested I add a bunch of tracking to our product.

I've previously tried explaining to him (and honestly the rest of the company) about privacy issues stemming from tracking, such as by their beloved Venmo. Venmo tracks absolutely fking everything you give it access to, from location data to your entire facebook, twitter, foursquare, etc. feeds, and sells ALL of it to third parties. It's scary. but! this guy simply does not understand, and/or does not care, and marches right on into all the surveillance, loudly singing the song of convenience to all who'll listen. (Nobody else in the company cared, either. :/)

ugh.

Anyway, I'm conflicted.

I have to install some tracking, but I can probably come up with an excuse to cut most of it out and gimp their surveillance. It'll still be useful to us, but it'll limit the amount of data the tracking company can sell to third parties.

but they'll push this guy pretty hard on it, and he's as technically-inclined as a smudged glass of warm, stale beer. "Better for your conversion!" they'll say. "How much tracking do you want?" he'll reply. "@ashkin, why can't you do this right now? What else do you need to make this happen?" he'll firmly inquire. and so I'll be forced to make it happen...

ergh

Comments
  • 25
    I gimped it as best I could.
    Not even sure it's working anymore 😅

    I also tagged it in the markup so anyone privacy-conscious can easily find it and remove it.
  • 12
    I don't even know what to say here... so much carelessness and/or ignorance how do you not go insane?
  • 10
    @MissDirection I don't know.

    They pay pretty well. that really helps.
  • 3
    @Ashkin Developers do need to eat after all!

    It sucks that you have to tiptoe around this kind of money grabbing scheme. I fear it'll only get worse and start to happen with even the simplest of apps.
  • 1
    If this is about a web site, you should suggest piwik (if we're talking about the analytics kind of tracking), so at least no 3rd party company receives the data - and you can adjust how much you want the data to be anonymized.

    Piwik is basically an open source alternative to Google analytics.
  • 2
    @Ashkin lol fair enough.
  • 1
    @theCalcaholic Thanks! I'll definitely look into it
  • 1
    I'm surprised @linuxxx and @runfrodorun never commented on this.
  • 3
    @Ashkin I never saw the rant before! Let me properly comment when I've got a PC in front of me!
  • 2
    @linuxxx unleash the comment
  • 2
    @azous Will do when I get home!
  • 2
    I can't give much advice on how to handle your co-worker, you can't fix stupid most of the time.

    But yeah I fucking hate it with a passion when people take away your control of certain levels of how much data you reveal and then even sell it to third parties!

    It's very much not okay that they handle data like that and I hope they'll fucking pay for it one day.

    Much luck to you! Also a hug for having to deal with this level of stupidity :hugging_face:
  • 2
    @Root

    Also, if it wasn't you, it could be someone else who didn't care about privacy...
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