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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

We need a new rule for tech, that says "Any major tech conglomerate grows until their main source of revenue is tracking and telemetry."

Why the fuck does Intel need to know "the category of websites I visit, but not the URL themselves"? Who defines the categories? We all know that metadata is at this point as important as data.

Stallman was right.

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> We need a new rule for tech, that says "Any major tech conglomerate grows until their main source of revenue is tracking and telemetry."

The "Don't be evil" rule.

You mean because that was stricken from Google’s corporate values once they were big enough that two of their main sources of revenue were tracking and telemetry?

Basically: any company that claims immutable principles will eventually mutate those principals.

Not defending the opt-out thing, but they are probably talking about video-first sites -- NetFlix/YouTube/TikTok/whatever likely call for different performance optimizations than Reddit or HN or Facebook.

And yes, Stallman was and is right about a great many things. He will be remembered with respect in the underground general-purpose computing scene of the not-too-distant future.

But we don't know that, do we? There might be a government-pushed category of websites that they monitor and report upstream for legal purposes [1]. You don't need 30 categories to know if I'm on a video-playing site or not. And you can monitor performance without knowing that I was on a website or not. They write the video decoding engine, it can tell them if it's not performing as expected, no matter if I was on "Social media site" or "Porn streaming site".

It is all bollocks. A smoke screen. A slippery slope. It starts with performance metrics and ends with selling user data for profit.

1: I am wondering that if you know what category of website an anonymous user is visiting, and what time they open/close the tab, it should be possible for three-letter agencies to uniquely identify you and track you across the internet.

rms is only seventy, unless you have information to the contrary we should expect him to live another few years yet!

Now wait and see what AI does with all of that data...

As a practitioner in the AI space: absolutely nothing useful.

For sufficiently high standards that may be true, but even if so, it won't prevent numerous organizations from profiling based on it anyway and targeting accordingly.

Also, in favor of freedude's position, we may have just not waited long enough to see yet, because unless they're forced to there's no way they'll ever be deleting the data.

And how do they know the category if they aren't "collecting and using" the URL?

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