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Comment by harel | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it the same as printers watermarking printouts? I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing. In a public forum in a far from perfect world there should be a place for accountability when people distribute photos they shouldn't.

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Printers shouldn't be watermarking printouts and neither should Facebook.

They shouldn't, true. But they are. And have been for a very long time. People who require anonymity would/should/could subvert all those things. But just to give one example: if the daughter I don't have for example was to be targeted by some ex boyfriend posting private photos, I would like to be able to pinpoint the source of those photos. In the case of Facebook that tracking/watermarking is limited to stuff coming out of the FB platforms. Open any photo done with a digital camera and you can get a lot of information from the raw data as well. What I'm saying - a blanket objection of all 'meta' tracking data is not helpful - because it does and will keep on happening. Education on how to work around it when it's needed is maybe the solution. And in some cases, like the example I gave, that tracking data can actually be used to do good.

No amount of tracking is acceptable in the same way the freedom of speech is absolute (no censorship is acceptable).

You can say it is not a slippery slope but our rights are eroded when we compromise.

If you need tracking you put the dots on your own print outs. There is no need to have dots on everyone else’s print outs.

I do not approve of any printer that watermarks my printouts. There is no two ways about that. Tracking is a side effect of showing us ads. We will be shown ads no matter what because they pay for the services we get for free and the 99% don't mind them. Without tracking on the ad front we'll see random ads, they would be less effective, that industry will ultimately collapse and we will start paying for every single service we use. Again - I do not condone it, but I don't have the will personally to fight it or let it affect me in any way. When i want my actions to be untrackable, I will take steps to make them so. I would however like both the ad world and consumers to reach some sort of middle ground in regards to what is acceptable and what is not. They way things are now are out of balance in favour of advertisers. It should be corrected.

>Isn't it the same as printers watermarking printouts? I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing.

I can't see how you can adopt a stance, which places accountability above blanket surveillance by condoning behaviour, which makes an assumption that a crime has been committed by default.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/printer-tracking-dots-...

https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...

I don't. I dislike tracking, but I am choosing my battles. Tracking won't stop. It will mutate with regulations. We cannot fight it. We need to understand it and educate those who are not technical about it. There are 3 sides to each coin. Yes tracking is bad. Granted. The flip side will be argued that tracking is a part of what pays for all the content we consume and create (advertising). The third side is that there are scenarios where being able to trace back a digital asset might be a good thing. It's not black and white. All i'm saying is that as long as we look at tracking/adverts as a single source of evil without understanding all aspects of it from both sides we'll never achieve anything. If it won't go away, then there has to be a compromise in the middle. We only appear like a lot of people here in our HN bubble. But we are nothing. We are maybe the 1% of internet users. The other 99% don't care, not aware. Our "needs" and whims are insignificant. Maybe because we're loud and appear bigger from a distance when stink is raised it is looked at and inspected. But no matter how loud we'll shout, ads and tracking will stay. So there has to be a compromise. and you as an individual with knowledge have ways to circumvent that tracking and adverts. We know about printer watermarks so a savvy journalist can use a non watermarking printer. We know about facebook image tagging and watermarks - a whistle blower worth his salt can remove them. But that guy who ruined a girl's life by posting some pictures will face consequences because he had no idea about anything. We can't win every battle and nor should we. There has to be balance.

I disagree; extrapolating the Pareto principle and arbitrarily defining needs/wants ratio on privacy, by drawing a relation between either being savvy or ambivalent and justifying the value of free content, is a non-sequitur. There are absolutely no excuses for any of these ultra shady practices to exist and equally, had the incumbents been stopped from weaponising and/or deploying their aggressive and insidious plans in the first instance, it would have dissuaded others to use their platform for similar purposes.

These practices are going to take an even more twisted turn with deep-nudes/fakes, GPT2 etc. and related trends. If we are to learn from our experiences, it is now important to fight and push back, rather than just roll-over and pretend to be dead or to accept current practices and seek a (non-existent) compromise, as you suggest.

Yes we can fight it until the cows come home. But tracking is a side effect of ads, and ads are not going to go away, unless you convince everyone to start paying for what was free services. How do you fight that? I'm seriously asking, not being cynical: You won't be fighting just the advertisers and their platforms. You'll be fighting the 99% you're trying to "liberate" because now they are going to pay.

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