For real, though. It’s always annoyed me how popular these things are. Just companies saying outright that they’re tracking every fucking thing the user does, but put a “feature” bow on it and people eat it up. Uuugghh.
Most, if not all, of these year in reviews is literally “here’s a summary of the things you explicitly did on our platform while logged in to your account this year”. It’s kind of absurd to call that tracking. Like, Lemmy and Piefed do have that data, this meme aside. It’s literally located at https://lemmy.ca/u/ech (admins, but not regular users, can also see upvotes and downvotes). They just chose not to do any sort of summary or analysis of your data for the year.
And why do you think every service is demanding people make accounts to use their site? Or outright stating they “need” to use tracking cookies if they don’t? It’s for the user data. Yes, there is some obvious data that a server needs to store to make things usable, but these companies are gathering much, much more than that, and to defend the blatant ploy to acclimate users to the unlimited gathering of their information is naive at best.
Companies are tracking you, but if you want a feed or the ability to post, comment, upvote/downvote and block users, you kinda need accounts. We could always go for the 4chan experience instead, of course …
For real, though. It’s always annoyed me how popular these things are. Just companies saying outright that they’re tracking every fucking thing the user does, but put a “feature” bow on it and people eat it up. Uuugghh.
Most, if not all, of these year in reviews is literally “here’s a summary of the things you explicitly did on our platform while logged in to your account this year”. It’s kind of absurd to call that tracking. Like, Lemmy and Piefed do have that data, this meme aside. It’s literally located at https://lemmy.ca/u/ech (admins, but not regular users, can also see upvotes and downvotes). They just chose not to do any sort of summary or analysis of your data for the year.
And why do you think every service is demanding people make accounts to use their site? Or outright stating they “need” to use tracking cookies if they don’t? It’s for the user data. Yes, there is some obvious data that a server needs to store to make things usable, but these companies are gathering much, much more than that, and to defend the blatant ploy to acclimate users to the unlimited gathering of their information is naive at best.
Companies are tracking you, but if you want a feed or the ability to post, comment, upvote/downvote and block users, you kinda need accounts. We could always go for the 4chan experience instead, of course …
Off topic, but 4chan is exempt from Australia’s recent social media minimum age laws because of the fact that it doesn’t require accounts.