Double surveillance
In my previous email, I mentioned how surveillance on the internet was the architecture working as planned.
But there's a side to it we don’t always think about:
When someone visits your website and it loads a Google Analytics tag, that visit isn’t just displayed on your analytics dashboard, it’s reported back to Google too.
Google now knows that person visited your site, at what time, on what device, and connects it to everything else it already knows about them: searches, emails, location history, Chrome habits, 2am YouTube binges…
Your visitor didn't agree to that (clicking “I accept” out of consent fatigue doesn’t count). They just came to your site.
None of this required thought: the analytics came with the website, the embed was the obvious way to share video, and Facebook told you the pixel was necessary for your ad campaign to work.
You knew these tools tracked your visitors, that's why you installed them. What was probably less obvious was that the platforms were reading over your shoulder the whole time and keeping their own copy:
- A YouTube embed pings Google's servers the moment your page loads, whether someone plays the video or not. Most people don't realise tracking is already taking place here.
- Google Analytics gives you a nice dashboard, but gives Google something too: more data points on your visitor to add to their own pile.
- The Facebook pixel goes furthest. It feeds your visitor data into Meta's targeting system, which means any competitor can now run ads against the audience profile Meta has quietly built from people visiting your site. You paid to build that audience – someone else gets to use it.
You didn’t decide to hand your visitors' data to a surveillance network, you just didn't decide not to either.
The good news: this is one of the more fixable problems, and the alternatives are genuinely good.
More on that soon…
Colin