Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

11
  • 27
    Of course they won't. Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 3:21
  • 60
    Just in case my position isn’t clear… There is no company that can be trusted to responsibly invade people’s privacy. They are going to hoover up data, including potentially sensitive health information, travel plans, workplace issues, school issues, work projects, et al. It is virtually impossible for someone to allow only a little private information to leak to advertisers when they aggregate so much data to make inferences about an individual. Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 12:28
  • 3
    To be clear, we are not sharing any data about SO/SE users with advertisers. You can read more about that in this comment. Commented Dec 15, 2023 at 21:31
  • 4
    While we don't plan to disclose a list of programmatic partners, we can share that there are currently fewer than 10 that meet the eligibility criteria for this kind of partnership. You can learn more about that here. Commented Dec 15, 2023 at 21:32
  • 22
    @Sasha What makes you think SE is not included in the "companies" I referred to? So advertisers won't know what page their ads are being shown on? Regardless, I block all that tracking the best I can, so I don't care that much. I don't think y'all have a very good grasp of just how intrusive this is or how much you're expecting us to trust that you aren't going to mess up and leak stuff you said you weren't going to share. The best option is to not allow you to collect it in the first place, so I guess I'll spend a lot more time logged out. Commented Dec 15, 2023 at 22:19
  • 15
    @Sasha then what data are you sharing with them that is interesting enough for them to pay for? Do you not consider enabling them to link their existing customer profiles to specific SO/SE users sharing our data? That kind of statement without explaining further appears incredibly deceptive. Commented Dec 18, 2023 at 20:39
  • 18
    I don't really think "trust" and "advertisers" should even be in the same sentence. Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 22:20
  • 3
    @Sasha How come my tracking blocker add-ons find up to 8 trackers on stackoverflow.com? If those aren't tracking user activity, then what are they tracking? How can I tell if that is SO spying on me against my will, or 3rd parties spying on me against my will? It's all the same to me btw: like every other person on the planet, I don't trust any private company which has made an unprofessional business decision to spy on their own customers. I would never conduct any form of business with such a company, neither as a private consumer nor as a representative of another company. Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 14:17
  • @Lundin Many things that appear as "trackers" are actually valid external software that we use to power our site functionality like ad-serving, analytics and cookie consent management. If you share more details on what you find concerning, we can take a look. Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 18:59
  • 1
    @htmlcoderexe "Trust" and "advertisers" never belonged in the same sentence, don't belong in the same sentence these days, and for the foreseeable future they will never belong in the same sentence. Commented Jan 6, 2024 at 10:53
  • @Sasha if you mean Google Analytics, I don't trust them. Commented Jan 12, 2024 at 12:58