I was watching ABC TV this morning, and some commentators from “Download This Show” were talking about digital privacy. They mentioned that cookies were used to track you all across the internet and invade your privacy blah blah blah. As I work closely with digital marketing people I have to know a bit about that sort of thing, and I’m not scared of it, but I figure I should tell you guys a bit about potential privacy things.
First of all, cookies. The old site has cookies. I use them to store information you want me to know about your preferences, e.g. screen size and what features you want on your custom page etc. Whenever you come to the site, your browser sends me the cookies and I look in them to see what to do. I don’t know your identity, though it is extremely likely that if you’ve put your BGG user name in the cookie that you’re that same person. But you could put my BGG user name in there if you like. That’s about all cookies are good for.
However, the privacy stuff gets a bit more interesting once you combine it with “pixels” and tracking. A pixel used to be exactly what it says. The page includes a one pixel image which is too tiny to be seen really. However, that pixel is loaded from Facebook. So when your web browser goes to load that pixel from Facebook, it gets told “Facebook user John Farrell requests this pixel because he’s looking at extstats.drfriendless.com” or whatever. So then Facebook knows what you’re looking at, because the person who made the website (me) put the Facebook pixel on the page.
This is very very common on the internet. You’d be appalled. I have a browser plugin called WASP.inspector which tells me how many pixels get installed by a page. news.com.au just downloaded 295 of them in the page. Practically every site you go to has such stuff on it.
Now what the Facebook pixel does is reports back to Facebook that you went to this page. It doesn’t tell me who you are, that information stays with Facebook. But it does mean that if someone goes to Facebook advertising and says “I want to sell stuff to people who like board games”, Facebook can identify you as such a person. Facebook does not tell the seller who you are, they just take that seller’s ad and stick it on your page. So it’s really only Facebook who knows everything about you, and hey, you knew that Facebook knew that stuff anyway, didn’t you?
So, on drfriendless.com I use this thing called Google Tag Manager, which is a place where I can configure all of the pixels I want to dump on you, i.e. all of the third parties who will find out that you visited my site. As I have no particular need to tell Facebook that you were there, there is no Facebook pixel in my GTM, so Facebook does not know that you came to DrFriendless.com. The only thing I do use is Google Analytics.
Analytics is a Google product which tells me a bit about my visitors. Some of the graphs it produces are shown below. Now you know that a person like me who creates a site like this wants those stats! So that is the evil privacy-invading tracking that I’m doing.
As for the future, I intend to be very transparent about privacy. The new General Data Privacy Regulations in Europe kinda require it, as I am operating in the European market, and I think the rules they have are sensible. So I’ll comply with them as much as I can from the ground up.
I also intend to allow users to log in to the site. This won’t be a requirement to get your stats, that will be public as always, but there are some ideas I have that require that I associate data with you, and for that I need to know your identity. And like the cookies on the old site, there will be only circumstantial evidence that links your account on drfriendless.com to your BGG account.
And as for pixels, I think it’s fair to say that I’ll tell you if I add more tracking pixels to tag manager. It might be, for example, that I add the ability to play games online to the site, and one day I need to advertise on Facebook to get more users. So then I could add the Facebook pixel to the site, and tell Facebook “I want more people who are like the people I already have”. I think that would be a reasonable use case.
Oh, and finally before I go, I should tell you that you can block this tracking stuff. I used to run Chrome extensions called Ghostery and Disconnect that stop the pixels, although I don’t know how. I know they worked though, because for days I couldn’t get work’s Google Tag Manager integration happening on my laptop. I eventually realised that if I wanted to test tracking pixels I had to stop blocking them. Hence now wherever I go all of my privacy gets invaded. On the other hand, Facebook ads do occasionally show me things I want, which is a pleasant change.
