I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.
It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive.
E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it:
The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you.
The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.
Why are you working with them now?
I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying.
Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.
Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it.
With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.