Re:Inside a viral website
by SamBam on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @09:01AM
(#26646694)
No one doubts that it's useful for the people standing to make money off of this. I think the question was whether it was an invasion of the reader's privacy, who probably don't realize that the blog owner can now track their buying habits.
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Only in the aggregate. The site owner doesn't know who purchased what. Only Amazon (obviously) knows.
The site owner only sees that 35 people bought book X while 24 people bought book Y.
Anonymous data can easily become identifiable when it's small enough, as GP was saying.
If someone runs a tiny blog that they attempt to monetize with affiliate links, and one of their only readers at the moment is their mother, I don't think they'd be happy seeing that one of their readers purchased a sex toy.