Sorry, I work with a marketing department so it’s just normalised to me to call it tracking despite the fact that yes, I agree with you that it’s surveillance and targeted ads are gross. What distinction are you making between tracking server-side, and spying? For me, I guess I’m talking about things like Google analytics or Google ads or hotjar or MS Carity when I say “tracking” in this context (JavaScript).
Well, if you sent a request to a web server, it is obviously gong to know that you requested something from it- so in general it should be the expectation of a user that the server owner has a reliable way to track that activity.
Tracking pixels, cookies, etc that follow a user around the web and gather activity that someone did NOT send to a server and relay it back to said server is IMHO spying.
Just because it’s being served into the browser on each payload doesn’t mean it was requested or desired.
All those things you named are spyware, marketed under the guise of diagnostic reporting. And, to be fair, that most certainly are also used for diagnostic purposes. But that’s not how they make money.
Sorry, I work with a marketing department so it’s just normalised to me to call it tracking despite the fact that yes, I agree with you that it’s surveillance and targeted ads are gross. What distinction are you making between tracking server-side, and spying? For me, I guess I’m talking about things like Google analytics or Google ads or hotjar or MS Carity when I say “tracking” in this context (JavaScript).
Well, if you sent a request to a web server, it is obviously gong to know that you requested something from it- so in general it should be the expectation of a user that the server owner has a reliable way to track that activity.
Tracking pixels, cookies, etc that follow a user around the web and gather activity that someone did NOT send to a server and relay it back to said server is IMHO spying.
Just because it’s being served into the browser on each payload doesn’t mean it was requested or desired.
All those things you named are spyware, marketed under the guise of diagnostic reporting. And, to be fair, that most certainly are also used for diagnostic purposes. But that’s not how they make money.