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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> It appears that the government is starting to lose the ability to always dismiss constitutional rights ...

The text you quoted said dismissing the complaint without reaching appellants' constitutional arguments.

> organizations like the ACLU and the EFF need funding

Serious question: Do the ACLU and EFF profile their donors by collecting information from and reporting it to third parties? It's my understanding that the practice is widespread in the fund-raising business, and I read many years ago that the ACLU participated.

EDIT: I want to clarify, because some people are responding regarding web trackers. Those are a concern, but I'm talking about something else: Obtaining, from third-party data aggregators, profiles of donors: How much they make, their mortgage, what they read -- all the data that's collected about private citizens -- and using it to target their fundraising.

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EFF uses extensive technical and policy measures to protect member privacy. They also require the similar measures when they partner with other orgs on campaigns.

https://www.eff.org/policy

Ghostery reports Omniture(Adobe Analytics) on the ACLU homepage, and additionally Adobe Test and Target on their donate page. On EFF, Ghostery only reports Piwik Analytics on their home and donate pages. For comparison, the NYTimes homepage shows 35 trackers.

Personally, I don't have a problem with this. I am concerned about overreach in government policy, not nonprofits trying to learn a bit more about their supporters.

This is fairly off topic, but in case you cared, Ghostery's business model is to sell your browsing habits and blocked ads and blocked trackers data back to the people their extension blocks. They claim it's anonymized, and I'd venture to say it probably is, but it's still data about you.

I almost bought their enterprise solution last year, and we didn't talk about individuals' data at all. What they pitched me on is basically an aggregated version what the browser plugin does--tell me what trackers are running where on my sites.

This is surprisingly difficult for enterprises to keep track of. Different divisions might have different websites, or different campaigns running, and be placing things like tracking pixels or tags all over the place without telling anyone.

And embedded content can come with trackers of their own. For example if you embed a Storify feed in your site, you get 4 trackers with it. Surprise!

They'll host a page for the enterprise that lists out all the trackers, and gives visitors opt-out links for each one. Again--a total pain for most companies to try to do themselves.

It's all powered by people running the plugin, but the plugin data not what's for sale. At least, they never pitched me on it, and it's not part of their service description on their website.

Metadata collection is only bad when it's the Government doing it!

FWIW: I've not received anything but EFF-related spam from EFF to the email address I used to donate to them back in the day.

Not sure about ACLU.

Governments can use force on those they track. Corporations can't yet (they're working on that).

At the same time, the government has little reason to hassle people who aren't fringe minorities. Private companies have strong incentives to use data collection against the masses.

I don't buy either side of that statement. Government does hassle the masses, and I'm not sure what incentives private companies have to use data collection on the masses. My argument for the latter is probably a little weak, but certainly in the former, history is clear.

> I'm not sure what incentives private companies have to use data collection on the masses.

Have you met FaceBook?

Which government, and during what time period?

Of course, collecting metadata -- especially via centralized services like Google Analytics -- means you're creating a very tempting trove of information for both the government and private entities that may make use of it to your users' disadvantage.

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