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Outbound Clicks - Rollout Complete (self.changelog)

umbrae[A] が 投稿

Just a small heads up on our previous outbound click events work: that should now all be rolled out and running, as we've finished our rampup. More details on outbound clicks and why they're useful are available in the original changelog post.

As before, you can opt out: 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

One particular thing that would be helpful for us is if you notice that a URL you click does not go where you'd expect (specifically, if you click on an outbound link and it takes you to the comments page), we'd like to know about that, as it may be an issue with this work. If you see anything weird, that'd be helpful to know.

Thanks much for your help and feedback as usual.

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トップ新着論争中古い順Q&A

[–]SquireCD 33ポイント34ポイント  (7子コメント)

I remember being told that copied links wouldn't be tracked.

I'm on a tablet and all copied links are being tracked.

What gives?

[–]DoodleFungus 21ポイント22ポイント  (3子コメント)

I'm a tablet

[–]umbrae[S] 12ポイント13ポイント  (0子コメント)

A bit of this work is technically challenging (detecting right clicks vs clicks vs taps vs long taps on different browsers). I'll check and see if we can handle this better, thanks for the heads up.

[–]Pokechu22 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

That's not happening for me - what browser are you using?

[–]evman182 41ポイント42ポイント  (21子コメント)

If I uncheck the preference, do you delete the data that you've collected up to that point? If you don't, why not? Can we have the ability to clear that data then?

[–]umbrae[S] 5ポイント6ポイント  (12子コメント)

We don't primarily for technical reasons, but I'm open to considering it. I'll talk to the team about it. As weird as it sounds, deletion can be tricky to deal with at the scale of reddits data. We've already got some privacy controls in place here though (for example we delete IPs you're browsing with after 100 days), so I'm open to digging into it.

[–]manfrin 45ポイント46ポイント  (8子コメント)

If you're going to warehouse data about me, you absolutely need to give me the ability to request a deletion. Google lives on user data and they give you clean and easy buttons to delete anything they know about you -- reddit is not special, and data should be removable.

[–]Vidya_Games 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

^ I Agree

[–]think_inside_the_box -5ポイント-4ポイント  (6子コメント)

Google is also a huge company with amazing resources so " you can do it cuz google can do it" is not exactly sound reasoning.

But I agree with your other points.

[–]elmstfreddie 5ポイント6ポイント  (2子コメント)

Sure, but they also have infinitely more & complex info than reddit.

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

this seems like hyperbole. google has more products certainly, but i don't see any that are inherently more complex than what reddit has to manage.

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

True, but thats not what OP said.

[–]throwaway42 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

deletion can be tricky to deal with at the scale of reddits data.

They're saying they have a lot of data and users so it's tricky. Google is a tad bit larger.

[–]zcbtjwj 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

To be fair, if any company is going to be good at categorising and accessing data, its google.

[–]Zerdiox 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Oh boy, link the data with a user-id, so fucking difficult!

[–]evman182 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thanks for answering. I know a lot of the infrastructure is built around queuing events to take place asynchronously, and this seems like a good candidate for that.

[–]SikhGamer 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ttl?

[–]xyzi -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

One cheaper option might be to decrypt all data with a user specific key. When the data is supposed to be thrown away you simply delete the key for that user.

[–]TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK 17ポイント18ポイント  (15子コメント)

If I create a new account, am I default opt-in or default opt-out?

[–]umbrae[S] 7ポイント8ポイント  (13子コメント)

It's checked by default for all users, including your current user, so you'll have to explicitly opt out with a new user. If you want to opt out you should make sure to opt out with your current user too though.

[–]13steinj 23ポイント24ポイント  (12子コメント)

Will there be any mention of this on sign up?

Not trying to start anything, but making data collection an opt out, especially in a place that many new users don't think to check for a while, is kind of iffy to me.

[–]umbrae[S] 12ポイント13ポイント  (11子コメント)

I totally hear you. This is already explicitly mentioned in our privacy policy, which is linked on sign up:

We may log information when you access and use the Services. This may include your IP address, user-agent string, browser type, operating system, referral URLs, device information (e.g., device IDs), pages visited, links clicked, user interactions (e.g., voting data), the requested URL, hardware settings, and search terms. Except for the IP address used to create your account, Reddit will delete any IP addresses collected after 100 days.

(emphasis mine)

I know many folks don't read privacy policies, but hopefully privacy conscious folks do, and we put a ton of work into making our privacy policy easy to read.

[–]13steinj 5ポイント6ポイント  (0子コメント)

Oh, okay I'm fine with it then. Didn't know it was already in the added in.

[–]jsprogrammer 5ポイント6ポイント  (4子コメント)

This is already explicitly mentioned in our privacy policy, which is linked on sign up:

Looks like that clause only went in to effect on Jan 1 of this year and was added to the policy in November 2015. Since my account was created before then, I would not have seen this in the privacy policy.

Where is my consent to this new policy?

[–]RRettig 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

There is probably some bs clause that says you agree to all future policy changes by accepting the policy the first time.

[–]umbrae[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

We posted about privacy policy updates here before they went live: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3tlcil/we_are_updating_our_privacy_policy_effective_jan/

And also had a sidebar notification up for 7 days (I think more, but I can't recall) on the homepage.

[–]jsprogrammer 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

I don't subscribe to this subreddit and I certainly do not check its side bar twice a week.

The prior policy stated:

If we do, we will let you know by revising the date at the top of the policy. If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to r/announcements, the front page of the Services or sending you a notification).

Does reddit not believe this was a change OR does reddit believe that it was not a material change? The announcement that you kindly linked to does not mention that reddit will track out-bound link clicks.

What is going on?

[–]OsirisPalko 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

OK but like I created my account rather recently and still did not have an option to opt out.

[–]Ru5tybike5 19ポイント20ポイント  (3子コメント)

Is there any way you could put a small amount of work into providing an option to opt in or out when a new account is being created? Most companies make this sort of thing very transparent during account creation. Usually right next to the mailing list sign-up check box there is an option to opt in or out of promotional programs. Announcing it on /r/changelog and hiding the opt out under two layers of preferences isn't exactly forthcoming.

[–]ser_marko 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Second this.

[–]vcarl 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Promotional programs are different from this, though. Facebook, Twitter, Google (and pretty much everyone else) change links to point to a redirection service they own so they can track clicks, with no way to opt out. The fact that reddit is providing an opt out is going above and beyond industry standards for this type of data collection.

[–]JDGumby 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

I know many folks don't read privacy policies

MOST people don't - and they're the ones who most need to be protected from people like YOU.

[–]TarMil 5ポイント6ポイント  (5子コメント)

The option says "for personalization". What kind of personalization? Based on the linked posts, it seems to be only for statistics.

[–]umbrae[S] 8ポイント9ポイント  (4子コメント)

Yeah, it's for both but statistics is the easier thing to reason about backward-looking. We can't do a lot of personalization without first having a sense of how the data looks, but I can give you some idea.

One simple example would be a recommendation to unsubscribe: let's say you subscribe to /r/art but we notice that you never click the links or vote on anything from there. We might recommend to you that you unsubscribe since you seem to not be getting much value out of that subreddit. Conversely, if you seem to really often click on rocket league links from /r/gaming, we might recommend to you that you subscribe to /r/rocketleague.

Voting also gets some of the way there but many many folks don't vote much, so this is really helpful for making suggestions like the above.

[–]TarMil 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Right, so nothing implemented yet but it opens possibilities. Thanks for the info!

[–]chx_ 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

you never click the links or vote on anything from there. We might recommend to you that you unsubscribe since you seem to not be getting much value out of that subreddit

Uh oh... that's a very bold statement. I think I rarely if ever upvote anything in Ask Historians and links are very rare in the first place. Does this mean I should unsub from Ask Historians? Absolutely not! And I push back early because as years pass ideas become code and suggestions become automated actions... we've seen that before.

[–]TarMil 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Gotta say I hope this never turns into a replica of Facebook's "Top Stories" bs.

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

you seem to not be getting much value out of that subreddit

Low value doesn't mean bad, it could be a very good temp sub.

[–]evman182 33ポイント34ポイント  (7子コメント)

I don't know how the response to the original post didn't make this clear. If you're really trying to be transparent about this, it ought to be posted to /r/blog or /r/announcements

[–]l3d00m 3ポイント4ポイント  (2子コメント)

Wasn't it announced on /r/announcements before?

[–]pcjonathan 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Out of curiosity, does this include media embedded by reddit and RES?

[–]TheEnigmaBlade 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

From what I can tell, links are embedded media are unaffected for both Reddit- and RES-made expandos. Title links contain the outbound data, while the links in expandos do not.

[–]en_fuego_420 4ポイント5ポイント  (2子コメント)

I'm getting DNS errors or something, it doesn't redirect me to the link, it just goes dead trying to load out.reddit.com.

Doesn't even work now.

[–]umbrae[S] 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thanks for the heads up, that's concerning. If you're comfortable sharing, where in the world are you?

[–]en_fuego_420 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

It could have been due to peerblock, I'm in Australia.

[–]BlankVerse 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

Is this why I'm getting out.reddit.com/..... for all links on my iPad?

[–]DrHemroid 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Clicking links on reddit sometimes send me to "page not found" reddit pages.

Example:

(Game of Thrones spoilers)

https://www.reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/4rdpj3/everything_what_went_through_emilia_clarkes_head/

Goes to

https://www.reddit.com/t3_4rdpj3?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DGxfkUfQwdO8&token=AQAAav99V9siUQ2vLctPOe2UEa6NmbpT1xNvWoHjMSNYp2uY1RNf

When it should go to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxfkUfQwdO8

[–]TotesMessenger 8ポイント9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)

[–]RoboBama 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Just wanted to say thanks for giving us an opt out for this. I was wondering whether the adnins forgot about this or what. Well done, and keep up the good work!!

[–]SheeEttin 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

So how are you going to visually distinguish a link that's been rewritten?

[–]13steinj 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

They won't.

All outbound links (from what I understand, of link submissions) will be rewritten assuming you don't opt out.

Personally, I've opted out, but then again I'm paranoid. I don't actually care that reddit would be tracking what messed up shit I'm into, but my mind jumps straight to "tracking...leaks...justincase"

[–]JDGumby 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

They won't.

All outbound links (from what I understand, of link submissions) will be rewritten assuming you don't opt out.

Because they want to hide what they're doing from most users (face it: any hubbub will die down in a couple of weeks and future users will never have the slightest clue that this is happening) under the guise of being nice to them and not confusing them with mangled URLs when they hover over links or look at their address bar.

[–]Mackinz 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Will we ever be able to opt out of Reddit's mobile view with an actual setting as well? The recent major changes to Reddit annoy me, but constantly being redirected to the mobile site I have repeatedly opted out of is ridiculously annoying. At least I don't have to do so with external linking...

[–]8Milesofshade 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thanks for letting us know, by sending us PMs, or posting this on a default sub like r/Announcements!

[–]deeiks 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

This feature seems to break setting links to visited, at least on mac w. Safari.

[–]mrjhandel 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

yep. I actually only found this thread because I was trying to work out why none of my links were turning purple anymore.

[–]jsprogrammer 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Why wasn't the new clause mentioned in the annoucement of the new, "simpler", "functionally very similar" privacy policy?

[–]serex 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

I don't really mind being tracked, but I'm going to opt out because the redirect is noticeably slow. It varies between 100ms to 1.5s, average of 500ms

[–]umbrae[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

It would be surprising to me if this was very noticeable, as we both prefetch DNS and SSL and also put a lot of work in making the server side very fast. It should match what is essentially your connection to the wider internet.

Here's a graph showing the mean, 90th percentile, and 99th percentile in ms (yes, less than 1ms). I'm really proud of how fast this is. https://i.redd.it/gaiz13xd8v7x.png

[–]Edrondol 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

It's done wonders for your server stability.

[–]rawling 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

If you're not tracking outbound links, how are you populating "recently viewed links"?

[–]JDGumby -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Disgusting.

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

...which I see still doesn't mention the only actual use of this: more information to sell to your ad partners, thus getting more money from them.

As before, you can opt out: go into your preferences under "privacy options" and uncheck "allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization".

Of course, the vast majority of users will have absolutely no idea this is happening. Which is, of course, why you have it default to on, counting on any hubbub about your behaviour to die down after a couple of weeks so that future users will have no warning about what's happening.

Hell, even Facebook splashes big fat notifications on their pages whenever there's a privacy settings change, not relying on posts in sections that relatively few people will ever even know exist.

[–]onmyouza 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

I remember I've unchecked this before, but when I go to preferences, it's checked again. I guess I have to stay vigilance from now on.

[–]umbrae[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

That's surprising. We did have a data issue we had to fix really early on in the preference existing, but we explicitly tried to not affect anyone who had actually interacted with the setting. Do you recall when you updated your preference?

[–]onmyouza 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Don't really remember, probably 2 weeks ago.

[–]jackasstacular -2ポイント-1ポイント  (1子コメント)

Change your prefs here.

Scroll down and uncheck 'privacy options->allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization', and don't forget to 'save options'.

[–]fjarlq 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I tried using this link, but I couldn't save my preference. I expect that's because you linked directly to the "np" (No Participation) version of the /prefs link.

The correct link is: https://www.reddit.com/prefs

[–]PK4278 -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

Judging by these comments, a lot of people want to opt-out. So I guess Reddit will be targeting those unaware of the changes with this feature, sounds ethical. Also, I turned off the feature before rollout and today it was re-activated. What gives?

[–][削除されました]  (1子コメント)

[deleted]

    [–]evman182 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

    That's a separate change from this one.