I normally focus on web development and its technical aspects, covering Drupal, WordPress, software architecture and code. Today, I’d like to reflect on my opinions on privacy, its ethical implications in a more abstract sense. I’ll try to avoid using marketing jargon here.
Please keep in mind what I mean by data tracking companies and marketers in the context of this article.
Data tracking companies
By data tracking companies, I mean mainly (but not always) large players (such as Google, Facebook, Hotjar or Netflix) with sophisticated tracking mechanisms.
Marketers
In short, marketers buy data from data tracking companies. By marketers, I mean your local business purchasing Google Ads (like your local florist) or a web agency using Google Analytics data to adjust campaigns. By marketers, I also mean large corporations and governments, using your personal data from data tracking companies to meet their agenda (such as Cambridge Analytica). Marketers often do not know, how the data was obtained. In that context, the data tracking companies can also be marketers.
Note that the marketers do not buy other organisations’ analytics data directly. In summary, they buy access to anonymized data sets, accumulated from millions of trackers by tracking companies. This happens though relatively, user friendly dashboards.
Whether you are the kind of a person who has “nothing to hide” from data tracking companies, that’s absolutely understandable. However, I would feel more confident knowing that we have a reliable option/s when deciding whether we want our data to be tracked or sold and by whom.
Personally, I use adblockers, a lot. The primary reason is speed. Using adblockers means faster loading times as a result of blocked scripts, which tend to be resource-heavy on the browser side. Adblockers can also prevent certain CRM scripts from tracking your activities on email (Mailchimp and HubSpot for instance). The second reason is a better battery life on mobile devices. Adblockers block trackers also. Your experience will vary, depending on the adblocker used.
Here’s a screenshot of my current Brave dashboard stats (I cannot validate how reliable these values are). I’ve been using this for a couple of months now. The numbers are significant.
Is it ethical to use adblockers?
I honestly don’t know. A large percentage of content creators rely on ads. So, is it ethical to prevent them from doing business? Are we stealing their work, by not watching the ads?
I’ll just note here that I disable adblocker when watching content from my favourite YouTube creators. This way, they can still monetize from their content.
Adblockers and adblocking browsers like Brave are fantastic, however, I do notice certain nuances, where parts of websites do not work correctly. This happens because the adblockers identify certain logic (JavaScript and Cookies combination) as marketing, hence crashing some functionalities on the website. I notice it especially when using bing.com on the Brave browser.
Another approach, instead of blocking data trackers could be bombarding them with fake/random data. The data tracking company would still have access to our data, along with other fake data. This would make their dataset technically worthless and unusable.
This would have disadvantages, such as massive resource consumption, mainly on electricity on the client machine and on the servers hosting the visited websites, These adblockers (and it’s bots) would need to behave as humans, be random and possibly use AI to browse the internet to imitate real, non-robotic user behaviours. This would inevitably cause AI vs. AI war detection; tracking companies vs. adblockers.
It could work on a small scale until it’s more popularized. I’m confident that once the tracking companies figure out their data is fake, they’ll find a countermeasure.
I also think that relying on the Cookie blockers is not the way to go. Cookie consent popups are terrible for UX. I believe that the content should be given on the browser level, in a standardised format.
Some ad personalisation is good, it personizes and improves the experience, however, personalisation is not only used for tailored ads. For example, YouTube and Facebook algorithms can place you in a certain information bubble. People who do not understand tech and marketing principles will assume everyone’s virtual reality is the same.
Like most of you (I think), I don’t mind if my web habits are being purchased by small local web shops and non-profit organisations to focus on their objectives. However, it gets more blurry when this data is used by large and more evil organisations. Now, being an “evil” entity is very subjective, but you get the picture. Political organisations can manipulate local opinion on elections and spread propaganda.
Using adblockers as a measure of prevention from being manipulated by marketers and addictive, personalized content is an understandable excuse to use adblockers to block trackers. I believe this is especially important for internet users who do not know how marketing works.
Is it ethical to add trackers to your projects?
Again, I don’t know. This website is using Google Analytics (somewhat hypocritical). That said, the marketing trackers are blocked by default.
Of course, your organisation can benefit from using trackers and make impactful, measurable business decisions based on the analytics. If not, your competitor will most likely do it, and survive. The common tracking tools are “free” (well, you are the product). Let’s not forget that tracked data will be purchased and used by other organisations, which could have a completely different agenda from yours. Of course, this does not happen directly, it happens under the cover of “marketing datasets”. Still, the real beneficiaries here are the tracking companies.
This brings a second question. Is it ethical to add trackers to your website? Knowing that the data you collect, will be potentially used (indirectly) by your competitor business, an opposite political faction or used for a project that is completely against your ethos?
I worked a lot with marketers, relying on Google Analytics data and other tracking mechanisms to target ads and campaigns that bring measurable value to local organisations and businesses.
These are tough questions. We certainly need a discussion around this.
Now, I covered mainly the old-school, web browser-based systems. It’s relatively easy to block tracking scripts on web browsers. Managing privacy on native apps (I’m looking at you TikTok, Instagram, etc.), is more complex, but it’s a topic for another discussion.
My opinions are my own.