As a thought experiment: I run a web store, and I sell funny hats. I’m looking to sell more hats.
Is it unethical if I keep track of how many people buy which hats, so I know which kinds of hats sell best?
What about if I keep track of what hats each of my customers buys, so that I can tell which hats I might want to bundle together into hat packs?
Maybe I’m not super technical, so I pay a 3rd party service to analyze my transaction logs and tell me the above answers.
Or I realize some hats aren’t selling, so I check to see if people are going to that page and just not purchasing, or never going to that hat’s page at all.
To say that sites use tracking to “manipulate” users is playing pretty icky word games. Yes. The purpose of all marketing is to “manipulate”. So are opinion columns in newspapers. Job interviews are an employer manipulating a candidate and a candidate manipulating an employer. Manipulation is just a scarier-sounding word for “persuasion”.
You are the one playing a word game, arguing semantics. I added the "user" prefix to clarify, yet you insist on comparing apples and horse-apples. I understand your angle, yet the whole discussion is about horse-apples, so i do not see your target. My guess is "making the latter sound more palatable". Take your small "the well known term used in this thread and source article is shit" victory and be happy, you are not getting more.
I don’t get any value out of whatever weird victory you’re claiming I’m aiming for. I posed the analogy because I’m curious how people here view different kinds of tracking, and at this point I’m not happy, I’m sad that this thread became a weird attack on my intentions rather than an actual discussion.
there are no meaningful "different kinds of tracking" in this context. The word is well known and used. Arguing that there is a theoretical subset of a more general definition of the word, for which the ethical criticism of the actual common market reality that the word references in this context, may not apply, is semantically possible, but just "playing word games"
Is it unethical if I keep track of how many people buy which hats, so I know which kinds of hats sell best?
What about if I keep track of what hats each of my customers buys, so that I can tell which hats I might want to bundle together into hat packs?
Maybe I’m not super technical, so I pay a 3rd party service to analyze my transaction logs and tell me the above answers.
Or I realize some hats aren’t selling, so I check to see if people are going to that page and just not purchasing, or never going to that hat’s page at all.
To say that sites use tracking to “manipulate” users is playing pretty icky word games. Yes. The purpose of all marketing is to “manipulate”. So are opinion columns in newspapers. Job interviews are an employer manipulating a candidate and a candidate manipulating an employer. Manipulation is just a scarier-sounding word for “persuasion”.