I feel that the issue at heart consists of two parts (a) convenience and (b) cost.
The first example in the article shows this. A small publisher who wants to add commenting / discussion functionality on their website. They settle on a turn-key solution provided by Disqus. All they have to do is embed 5 lines of HTML and boom: fully fledged commenting. There's no need to invest time and money setting up and maintaining their own infrastructure to host comments.
The problem here is that the solution is that the publisher doesn't pay for the privilege of leveraging Disqus. Of course, there's no such thing as a free lunch and so Disqus will generate revenue by passing along trackers from partners who deal in advertising.
Most "solved problems" for small publishers work in similar ways, leveraging embed code and outsourcing hosting of content or complex functionality: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook widgets,... You want search on your website but you don't have time, expertise or budget? Google Site Search will give you what you need for free. The downside is that anytime you embed these third party widgets on your website, you also expose your visitors to the host of trackers that will invade their device through that embed code.
Now, imaging a Web where none of these convenient affordances existed and you will understand that small publishers would be hard pressed trying to build and deliver similar user experiences compared to what is possible today. Hosting video clips, or setting up a fully fledged search is prohibitively expensive if you don't have the resources and/or the expertise to do so.
You could also look at this from a different perspective: So many non-technical people are now able to publish content and provide rich user experiences to large audiences because of the widespread availability of these tools. Both the availability of "free" tools, and the influx of non-technical people over the past decade feed into one another.
Case in point: The wide-spread success of YouTube or TikTok where millions can just stream from their phone anytime anyplace, even though streaming video independently online (e.g. through a bespoke solution) is still very much prohibitively expensive.
People buy into these tools because they are convenient, and so easily accessible, and always available. As with most things, they don't consider the hidden but massive costs that come with it.
And so, I think that the amount of tracking only partly depends on how well funding covers the design, development and upkeep of a website. Plenty of massively expensive projects have this feature request "As a content manager, I want to be able to embed a YouTube Video in my copy." Boom. Trackers again.
At this stage, the reality is that if you want to avoid trackers on your website, it inevitably needs to be a conscious choice or strategy.
Those are very good points. I think using trackers on websites is not evil in general, it's just that we make it way too easy for the third parties to persistently track users across sites. A single Facebook, Google or Youtube script is not very problematic from a privacy standpoint, if 60-80 of sites have such a script it can have serious privacy risks for users. So I'd say we just need to make it harder to re-identify individuals across many sites, then the privacy risk becomes much smaller.
I think that the right to privacy, at it's core, is really a right to consent. That is, individuals decide whether or not consent to divulging personal information to another party. That could range from storing someone's fingerprints, to tracking the websites they visit across the Web to opening up their mail and reading the contents of the envelope.
The issue is in how that consent is obtained.
So, today, the Internet has become the primary medium for most transactions. Whether it's booking a flight, ordering food, buying books, making a restaurant reservation, reading the news or applying for jobs. The biggest societal change of the past 20 year is the reliance of our daily life on the Internet. If you don't have access to the Internet today, you are at a huge disadvantage.
The big problem is that with any of those cases I just mentioned, you are required to access on line services and, in doing so, implicitly consent to the fact that your visit will be tracked and analysed by (a) the operator of the website or platform (e.g. American Airlines) and (b) any third parties that track you through embed codes.
Moreover, you don't know in advance whether or not you will be tracked until you open up the website and be confronted with a YouTube embed and a set of AddThis buttons, at which point it's already too late to retract your consent.
This is the very reason why the EU has issued the GDPR regulation forcing website operators to explicitly ask consent from visitors on their own behalf, and the behalf of third parties tracking through embedded widgets.
One downside of the GDPR is that end user is confronted with a pop-up before they get to the actual content.
Another downside is that some website operators tend to make consenting explicitly obtrusive unless you, as a visitor, hit the big green, flashy "Accept All" button that brings you directly to the content. Which is anything but what the GDPR envisioned.
A final downside is that the GDPR is difficult to enforce. As one is required to file a formal complaint if one feels that their rights aren't respected by website operators, which is generally not something most individual consumers are willing to spend time, money or effort on.
Even so, despite these downsides I feel that the GDPR is a step in the right direction, as it forces website operators to think about consent.
Consent to divulging personal information is only one part of the equation. I think the other part, the really problematic part, are the ends to which personal data are harvested and in whose hands that data ends up. While I agree with the statement that tracking in itself isn't evil per se, I think that scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, and how harvested data is used by advertisers to accurately target consumers, well, that is completely problematic. I think that far more regulation and, above all, enforcement of that regulation, is needed in this area.
Context very much matters. Personally, I don't mind being tracked across several e-commerce shops to provide me with relevant offers. I do mind being tracked on websites that absolutely have nothing to do with e-commerce, only to notice how that information ends up being used/abused in totally unrelated and, frankly, unwanted/undesirable contexts.
The first example in the article shows this. A small publisher who wants to add commenting / discussion functionality on their website. They settle on a turn-key solution provided by Disqus. All they have to do is embed 5 lines of HTML and boom: fully fledged commenting. There's no need to invest time and money setting up and maintaining their own infrastructure to host comments.
The problem here is that the solution is that the publisher doesn't pay for the privilege of leveraging Disqus. Of course, there's no such thing as a free lunch and so Disqus will generate revenue by passing along trackers from partners who deal in advertising.
Most "solved problems" for small publishers work in similar ways, leveraging embed code and outsourcing hosting of content or complex functionality: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook widgets,... You want search on your website but you don't have time, expertise or budget? Google Site Search will give you what you need for free. The downside is that anytime you embed these third party widgets on your website, you also expose your visitors to the host of trackers that will invade their device through that embed code.
Now, imaging a Web where none of these convenient affordances existed and you will understand that small publishers would be hard pressed trying to build and deliver similar user experiences compared to what is possible today. Hosting video clips, or setting up a fully fledged search is prohibitively expensive if you don't have the resources and/or the expertise to do so.
You could also look at this from a different perspective: So many non-technical people are now able to publish content and provide rich user experiences to large audiences because of the widespread availability of these tools. Both the availability of "free" tools, and the influx of non-technical people over the past decade feed into one another.
Case in point: The wide-spread success of YouTube or TikTok where millions can just stream from their phone anytime anyplace, even though streaming video independently online (e.g. through a bespoke solution) is still very much prohibitively expensive.
People buy into these tools because they are convenient, and so easily accessible, and always available. As with most things, they don't consider the hidden but massive costs that come with it.
And so, I think that the amount of tracking only partly depends on how well funding covers the design, development and upkeep of a website. Plenty of massively expensive projects have this feature request "As a content manager, I want to be able to embed a YouTube Video in my copy." Boom. Trackers again.
At this stage, the reality is that if you want to avoid trackers on your website, it inevitably needs to be a conscious choice or strategy.