Sound the alarms? Pretty much every site you visit has facebook, google, and 20 other adtech pixels on it. Go download ghostery and check for yourself. Any business that wants to make money is using these pixels.. advertising would be nearly useless without them.

How else would you know who visits your site? How would you know if someone who made a purchase had seen one of your ads? If they were a new customer or old customer? If they might be interested in complementary products?

The go to answer is 'check the logs'. Good luck telling your 19 year marketing intern to check the logs. Or your director of marketing. Or your CMO. Or your agency.

Sites running tracking pixels are consciously tracking their users and feeding info to advertising players for their own benefit. I suspect many people would be surprised that this happens even when you're not signed into the relevant service and don't see anything like a "share this on Facebook" icon, but the basic concept of browser tracking isn't that weird. That pixel on The Verge didn't end up their by accident.

On the other hand, the Facebook SDK fires an event every time you open an app using it - by default, even if you aren't signed into Facebook, even if the app's creator never intended that behavior and gets no benefit from it. And, of course, auditing or controlling app behavior and data exchange is way harder than doing the same for browsers. The average person who runs uBlock or Privacy Badger still isn't emulating every app they download to study its behavior.

We put Hackers into jail for stealing personal data. Not comparing them together, but from moral perspective they seem equal to me.

It's probably closer to 100% than 10%; at any rate it's a lot more than 10%.

> It is shocking to see how few of these 10% speak up.

About...what? I mean, I pretty much am the overseer of changes to some specialized public sector medical billing systems that handle on the order of single-digit billions of dollars in annual claim volume and on the order of a million annual individuals. So connecting, storing, and processing personal information is a central part of what those systems do.

But what are you supposing I ought to be speaking up about just because I work on such a system?

There is a solution to this, and that's to have stronger privacy laws like the EU does, but American voters have flatly rejected anything like that and don't want such laws.

So maybe it's actually not 10%, or maybe just working with "personal data" isn't as automatically objectionable as you seem to think.

For example I know that whoever does IT for the local doctor's office, or dispatch for the plumbing company, is working with personal data. I don't think I'd consider either of those a problem.

Not comparing them together, but from moral perspective they seem equal to me.

Not sure how that's supposed to work exactly.

First, I guess: do you think that users are broadly aware of how much they're tracked and ok with it, or do you think the tracking is alright independent of that? (This question is more relevant if you're on the "tracking browser resizes" side of things than "recording products in a cart".)

Second: do you have any worries about data that's tame in isolation or on average causing problems as it's gathered and shared - deanonymizing aggregate data, revealing pregnancies by shopping history, etc?

Third: do you worry about keeping identifiable data in existence more generally? Assuming you trust yourself and your partners, there's still the concern that maintaining data troves like these increases the attack surface for everything from hacking to government demands.

2) I only support data in aggregate. Anything personally identifiable should be illegal IMO. As long as target finds 10,000 people who are pregnant due to their shopping habits, I think thats fine. If the system is set up correctly with one company collecting and aggregating data, then another company buying access to that data it is safe. Its a misconception that facebook sells data, they just sell access to it. So most data you can't actually de-anonymize.

3) I definitely support legislation around data storage and yeah I think thats a huge problem right now. Its super easy to collect a ton of data, even when you have no idea how to store it or even use it. Its literally 2 minutes of effort for me to grab every single name of someone who purchased something on ~50 ecom sites, but I know nothing about how to securely store that.

As far as the justification for where I work - Ads fuel the internet and create more benefit than they do harm. Millions of people run websites, create content, make free apps. That simply would not occur without ads to monetize them since people are unwillingly to pay for content. Microtransactions for content would be awesome but they haven't worked yet.

We're also on year <30 of widespread internet use. Its the wild west right now but we will fix it.

Newflash: the developers that make technology choices for the website and the journalists writing the articles for it are in entirely different organizations. It's usually dysfunctional when business users have the power to dictate technology choices to the tech team.

Just like paywalls are evil. And just like ads are evil.

But, I'm not exactly clear on how these things are supposed to all fit together.