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Outbound Clicks - Privacy Controls + Gradual Rollout (self.changelog)

umbrae[A] が 投稿

As promised, we've now added some privacy controls for outbound click events: you can now go into your preferences under "privacy options" and uncheck "allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization". Screenshot: https://i.redd.it/6p12uqvw6v4x.png

More details on outbound clicks and why they're useful are available in the original changelog post.

Now that we've got a way to opt out, we're going to continue rolling this out slowly over the next week or two - we're going to take some time to ramp up to the extra traffic, but you're able to opt out immediately if you like.

As before, please let us know if you see anything odd happening when you click links over the next few days. Specifically, we've added some logic to allow our event tracking to be accessible for only a certain amount of time to combat its possible use for spam. If you notice that you'll click on a link and not go where you intended to (say, to the comments page), that's helpful for us to know so that we can adjust this work. We'd love to know if you encounter anything strange here.

Thanks very much for the feedback on this.

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[–]NicolasZN 24ポイント25ポイント  (2子コメント)

Wondering if, for the sake of consistency, you should flip the search engine indexing privacy option? Right now, to have the fullest privacy options, you uncheck everything except that box... which you check. https://i.imgur.com/0x6MeyG.png

[–]Celti 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

Hear, hear! Consistent options formatting is woefully underrated for how useful and necessary it is.

[–]cyniclikespie 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

To piggyback on this, you could just make the tracking opt in as well and preserve consistency in the menu that way.

Tbh this kind of feature being enabled by default is rather annoying.

[–]geo1088 9ポイント10ポイント  (3子コメント)

Just out of curiosity, how are you hosting screenshots via i.reddit if they aren't associated with any post?

Thanks again for the opt-out.

[–]kerovon 8ポイント9ポイント  (2子コメント)

Out of curiosity, will there be a way for mods to request aggregate statistics on things like the time to vote from going to an article? I'm really curious how that would play out for my main sub (/r/science).

[–]umbrae[S] 6ポイント7ポイント  (0子コメント)

Very possible. We've never had this data before so I think it will take us a while to think about how best to provide it, but I think it could be really interesting data for subreddits.

[–]appropriate-username 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

insufficient data for a meaningful answer

[–]Sophira 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Great news! I now have a request.

You've had the ability to track outbound links in your current framework (for logged-in users only) for ages; the "Recently Viewed Links" box in the sidebar tracks your five most recently-clicked links based on the contents of the <username>_recentclicks2 cookie, which is built client-side using JavaScript and which is sent to the server (because it's a cookie) every time the browser accesses reddit.com, even if the "show me links I've recently viewed" preference has been disabled. The box itself is built server-side using the cookie that the browser sent to the server, which means that there is server-side processing going on.

Now that the new option detailed in this post is in place, I'd like to respectfully ask that you either:

  1. Make the client-side JS not build the cookie if this new preference is unchecked, or:
  2. Move the building of the "Recently Viewed Links" box to be entirely JavaScript-based, using the HTML5 Local Storage API.

In the case of option 1, this would unfortunately mean that anybody who has the setting unchecked would lose the "Recently Viewed Links" box. Obviously, however, the cookie would also not be built and sent to the server. (Please don't mistake this option as simply removing the ability to use the RVL box without also disabling the click data collection.)

Option 2 will make the "Recently Viewed Links" box entirely client-side, which is (IMO) how it was intended in the first place (but there was no Local Storage API to do this at the time). Obviously, I favour this option.

Thanks for reading and considering this!

[–]youhatemeandihateyou 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thank you for allowing us to opt in or out. It is very much appreciated.

[–]verdatum 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

When is the preferences option going to have a "(details)" link attached to it?

[–]noobit 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

How often are articles read vs voted upon

Prepare to be disappointed

Also, the box is already unchecked for me, but iirc I never unchecked it. If by 'rolling it out' you mean enabling it for more users over time, do we have to wait till it's enabled to disable it?

[–]umbrae[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

That's interesting, thanks for flagging. I'll take a look. Can you remember if you've been to your preferences page sometime over the last few days (before today)?

EDIT: And no, you don't have to wait. Unchecking it now will opt you out for later.

[–]noobit 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yeah, I think I was on it today and in the past couple days (possibly yesterday). Just checked another account with a similar pattern and the box was unchecked there too, don't remember doing that either.

Also checked an account I know I have not visited that page on recently. That one was checked.

[–]FFSnipe 0ポイント1ポイント  (6子コメント)

Vote speed calculation: It's interesting to think about the delta between when a user clicks on a link and when they vote on it. (For example, an article vs an image). Previously we wouldn't have a good way of knowing how this happens.

Spam: We'll be able to track the impact of spammed links much better, and long term potentially put in some last-mile defenses against people clicking through to spam.

General stats, like click to vote ratio: How often are articles read vs voted upon? Are some articles voted on more than they are actually read? Why?

What other reasons are there for this? It seems like a lot of work to implement this and then implement a way to opt out just for the reasons you listed in the old post.

[–]geraldo42 6ポイント7ポイント  (2子コメント)

Those seem like pretty good reasons to me.

[–]FFSnipe 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

They are good reasons. I never said they werent. But all that work for those 3 reasons would be a waste of time and resources.

I was simply asking what other reasons are behind the implementation.

[–]umbrae[S] 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

It's useful in honestly so many ways. One example that I'm looking at literally right now (and failing at making a query for): We launched image hosting yesterday to all SFW communities. We're going to roll out to NSFW as well eventually, but it'd be useful to be able to ballpark the bandwidth that extra NSFW content is going to take. To do that, it'd be useful to see how many visits there are to NSFW content. There are other proxy ways to get a good sense of this, but outbound events are a really good way to get this data.

Things like this come up really often. There's also other feature ideas that could come up from this, like better stats for subreddits.

[–]shredditator 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

i hate the idea of reddit hosting images. add tracking etc...

this starts to feel very bad. next you do videohosting. sell user content and user data.

then you are forced to generate more leads, growth and what not for "reasons" and then it all ends up with adding every stupid idea that comes up to adapt to stay in the game.

like google had to do g+. like microsoft had to buy linkedin and make phones and so on.

i dont think that will work out.

[–]FFSnipe 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thank you for the reply.

To be honest I hadnt even thought of the new image hosting and how this could help with it.

[–]TotesMessenger -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)