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As someone who is (sometimes militantly) pro-customer, I don't think tracking parameters are "war" - they are just a tool used to understand visitor flow, and ideally improve the visitor experience.

They are fundamentally first-party analytics - they show up in the server logs of the site visited, and that site needed to craft the link in order to place the parameters in the first place. There's a big difference between URL parameters and e.g. cookies attached to third-party javascript.

I definitely support the freedom of people to remove these URL parameters if they want. But it's not fair to classify them as a "war" - they are a tool used by scrupulous marketers, too.




I think the problem is that it's not possible for end users to know what's happening with the tracked data. Is the company on the other end creating a shadow profile of every single user (like Facebook)? Are they selling the data to companies that do user profiling? No idea. Who am I supposed to trust?

Even if there are scrupulous entities, the harm caused by the unscrupulous ones overshadows them.


Companies can only log information about your interaction with their sites. With very few exceptions, that just means on whatevercompany.com. Basically, they only have the data you explicitly give them.

In the case of some large sites that provide pervasive services like FB, Twitter, and Google, you interact with their sites incidentally as you surf in the internet. It's these sites that are a potential privacy risk IMO.




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