Tracking

I���ve been reading the excellent Design For Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog. There was a line that really stood out to me:

The idea that it���s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous.

It stood out to me because I had been thinking about certain practices that are widespread, accepted, and yet strike me as deeply problematic. These practices involve tracking users.

The first problem is that even the terminology I���m using would be rejected. When you track users on your website, it���s called analytics. Or maybe it���s stats. If you track users on a large enough scale, I guess you get to just call it data.

Those words������analytics���, ���stats���, and ���data������are often used when the more accurate word would be ���tracking.���

Or to put it another way; analytics, stats, data, numbers ���these are all outputs. But what produced these outputs? Tracking.

Here���s a concrete example: email newsletters.

Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?

You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that���s tracking.

Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?

You may well answer that this is a widespread���nay, universal���practice. Well yes, but a) that���s not what I asked, and b) see the above quote from Design For Safety.

You could quite correctly point out that this tracking is out of your hands. Your newsletter provider���probably Mailchimp���does this by default. So if the tracking is happening anyway, why not take a look at those numbers?

But that���s like saying it���s okay to eat battery-farmed chicken as long as you���re not breeding the chickens yourself.

When I try to argue against this kind of tracking from an ethical standpoint, I get a frosty reception. I might have better luck battling numbers with numbers. Increasing numbers of users are taking steps to prevent tracking. I had a plug-in installed in my mail client���Apple Mail���to prevent tracking. Now I don���t even need the plug-in. Apple have built it into the app. That should tell you something. It reminds me of when browsers had to introduce pop-up blocking.

If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn���t they lose their status?

But that line of reasoning shouldn���t even by necessary. We shouldn���t stop tracking users because it���s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it���s wrong.