<story><title>Browser extension that strips Google Analytics tokens from URL query strings</title><url>https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emgee_1</author><text>Marketing is evil.&lt;p&gt;It is lying on a massive scale.&lt;p&gt;If I want something I’ m go to look for it not the other way around.&lt;p&gt;If you track me I will dispise you and will root you out. Sort of &amp;#x2F;r</text></item><item><author>annabellish</author><text>&amp;gt;Marketing is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.&lt;p&gt;Tracking of all kinds aren&amp;#x27;t inherently evil. If companies didn&amp;#x27;t abuse the various ways they tell us are &amp;quot;how the world works&amp;quot;, then nobody would ever have needed tracking or ad blockers.&lt;p&gt;Reality is that no matter how often marketing departments tell us that marketing is vital to the future of the species, people are generally running pretty short on goodwill in these areas. The responsible actors, if there are any, are swimming in a poisoned pond.</text></item><item><author>pastullo</author><text>Why do you need this? Is it because you are paranoid of being tracked?&lt;p&gt;UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing.&lt;p&gt;Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn&amp;#x27;t protect your privacy. It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending.&lt;p&gt;Marketing is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.&lt;p&gt;I feel there is a paranoia about being tracked and privacy, where anything that is somehow tracking, is evil and must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>&amp;gt; Marketing is evil. ... It is lying on a massive scale.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Marketing&amp;quot; spans a very large area of activity.  At one end, it&amp;#x27;s the signage in front of a store, or even on the door, that tells you what the place is.&lt;p&gt;You probably aren&amp;#x27;t trying to insinuate that store signage (or the online equivalent, a domain name), is evil, but that&amp;#x27;s essentially what you&amp;#x27;re saying by being so broad.  That doesn&amp;#x27;t help the argument, doesn&amp;#x27;t help you, and doesn&amp;#x27;t result in useful discussion, so it&amp;#x27;s probably worth being a bit more concise.</text></comment>
<story><title>Browser extension that strips Google Analytics tokens from URL query strings</title><url>https://github.com/jparise/chrome-utm-stripper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emgee_1</author><text>Marketing is evil.&lt;p&gt;It is lying on a massive scale.&lt;p&gt;If I want something I’ m go to look for it not the other way around.&lt;p&gt;If you track me I will dispise you and will root you out. Sort of &amp;#x2F;r</text></item><item><author>annabellish</author><text>&amp;gt;Marketing is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.&lt;p&gt;Tracking of all kinds aren&amp;#x27;t inherently evil. If companies didn&amp;#x27;t abuse the various ways they tell us are &amp;quot;how the world works&amp;quot;, then nobody would ever have needed tracking or ad blockers.&lt;p&gt;Reality is that no matter how often marketing departments tell us that marketing is vital to the future of the species, people are generally running pretty short on goodwill in these areas. The responsible actors, if there are any, are swimming in a poisoned pond.</text></item><item><author>pastullo</author><text>Why do you need this? Is it because you are paranoid of being tracked?&lt;p&gt;UTMs offer a transparent, honest way of tracking where a user is coming from. This is super important for any company that runs multiple channel marketing.&lt;p&gt;Making impossible for company to track their marketing effort doesn&amp;#x27;t protect your privacy. It just makes it tougher for companies to manage their marketing spending.&lt;p&gt;Marketing is not evil. It&amp;#x27;s how the world works. You need to market something to be able to sell it.&lt;p&gt;I feel there is a paranoia about being tracked and privacy, where anything that is somehow tracking, is evil and must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;UTMs parameters are absolutely harmless and stripping them away offer no privacy benefit whatsoever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>annabellish</author><text>Marketing isn&amp;#x27;t _intrinsically_ evil. If you buy widget A from FooCorp, but wish it had some piece of functionality it didn&amp;#x27;t and make a post on their feature request tracker saying you wished it had that functionality and then, upon the release of widget B they email you telling you they&amp;#x27;ve released that and it does that thing you wanted, then that&amp;#x27;s a) marketing, and b) not evil.&lt;p&gt;Not only is it not evil, it&amp;#x27;s a targeted ad! You were _tracked_ to produce that ad!&lt;p&gt;In reality, that isn&amp;#x27;t how a good 90% of marketing really works. Instead, you got an unsolicited letter about widget 1 from a different company who bought your data from FooCorp, and widget 1 doesn&amp;#x27;t even do what you want, and because you don&amp;#x27;t buy it they sell your data to even more unscrupulous companies to get some return from their purchase.&lt;p&gt;I think it&amp;#x27;s important to recognise, though, that this didn&amp;#x27;t happen because marketing is evil. If everybody had just stuck to ethical forms of marketing then everyone would be better off, and we wouldn&amp;#x27;t need extensions like this which do screw things up for the people trying to be ethical.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s just like ads: You can do ads well, and we _didn&amp;#x27;t_, and now good ads need to be thrown in the trash alongside everything else. The next thing we try and do we should _remember_ these common stories, and maybe next time we can be a bit more ethical and not poison our own well.</text></comment>