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.

How is campaign tracking a "war on consumers"

Consumers value their privacy and don't want to be tracked. Adtech keeps insisting on tracking users without consent. So users develop tools that neutralize the tracking. So adtech develops counter-measures. So users develop counter-counter-measures.

And on and on it goes.

Consumers don't want to be tracked because it's become a meme to dislike tracking.

If you think about it... what's the problem with a URL tracking which advertiser you came from? Why would you insist that it be a secret which ad you clicked to come to a site?

This tool is removing URL parameters some of which are absolutely harmless and not violating anyone's "privacy". We really need to draw the line somewhere and decide what the heck means "privacy" at this point, because everything can be interpreted as violation of privacy.

Likewise, are those site owners allowed to exist, or should they just offer content at a loss, and pay millions of ads, and have no even clue which ads worked and which didn't? And when there's a paywall of course everyone is SUPER ANNOYED by the paywall.

So to recap, the public wants absolutely everything, for free, and they want to disrupt as much as possible from the site's mechanism to understand what the other side of this communication is and what they want.

> it's become a meme to dislike tracking

Good.

> what's the problem with a URL tracking which advertiser you came from?

It's additional bits of information used to identify me.

> We really need to draw the line somewhere and decide what the heck means "privacy" at this point, because everything can be interpreted as violation of privacy.

Okay. If I explicitly give you information and you use it for my benefit alone, it's not a violation of privacy. Everything else is.

Concrete example: people provide their addresses to companies so they can have packages delivered. This is obviously legitimate. Selling my address to marketers so they can spam my inbox with unwanted ads is obviously unacceptable.

Placing identifying information in URLs is unacceptable simply because I didn't explicitly choose to reveal that information. I don't even care if it's harmless, the sheer audacity of these people is offensive.

> This tool is removing URL parameters some of which are absolutely harmless and not violating anyone's "privacy".

Yeah, I'm not risking it. They'll probably find a way to abuse this information if they haven't already. Marketers are not supposed to get any data whatsoever. I'm increasingly convinced marketing shouldn't even exist to begin with.

> should they just offer content at a loss, and pay millions of ads, and have no even clue which ads worked and which didn't?

Don't pay for ads in the first place.

> And when there's a paywall of course everyone is SUPER ANNOYED by the paywall.

That's okay.

> the public wants absolutely everything, for free, and they want to disrupt as much as possible from the site's mechanism to understand what the other side of this communication is and what they want.

I guess. Just return 402 Payment Required if people are expected to pay. We refuse to be the product.

I feel GDPR drew a good line: Any information that can be used to directly or indirectly identify an individual needs a legal reason, one of which is consent.

Is the information you collect unusable for directly or indirectly identifying an individual? Go wild! :)

I guess they're anthropomorphizing "the industry", treating all of them as responsible for what any of them do. But to steelman this viewpoint, industry should be unsurprised that consumers are filtering out UTM in the process of filtering everything, just as consumers should be unsurprised that the industry does what it does.