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I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements b

I would love to use and pay for your service, but it's inexcusable than a service that charges $100+ / year has so many trackers that uBlock shows 87 elements blocked just in the account signup flow (/signup/connect-spending-account). A financial info aggregator is the one place where I would appreciate NOT having my data and behavior exfiltrated to third parties.

dehrmann 3y ago
Apparently revenue model is more important than a lot of things.
metalliqaz 3y ago
ouch
sbarre 3y ago
Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have. I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry. Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense.. There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals. I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking. Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.
- geekifier 3y ago
  My count might include additional elements from going through signup flow with their bank connection providers. My lists are: - uBlock - EasyList - EasyPrivacy - Online Malicious URL Blocklist - Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list - uBlock filters – Annoyances - AdGuard Annoyances filter - pl: Oficjalne Polskie Filtry > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify Yeah, if my bank started embedding those on their account page, I would GTFO.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Tracking behaviour on a marketing homepage is a bit different than tracking in the app. It's probably just conversion pixels for ad networks (ie, you need to determine if advertising on tiktok actually works). Not sure if you need to install JS from their specific networks, probably not. But generally I'm not against the idea if it's restricted to marketing sites.
  - sbarre 3y ago
    Yeah this is on the public inbound signup pages, not in the app itself (although I can't confirm that it's not in the app - I didn't sign up). This is pretty standard stuff, and while I'm not a fan of trackers and I personally block them, I don't resent companies that want to understand their traffic and prospects. As a business you want to know which paid channels are working and where your traffic is coming from. A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?
    - jemmyw 3y ago
      Referrer header? Or don't these services pass a query param when they send a user in? Why do you need to call back into their js?
      - sbarre 3y ago
        This is a good point. But it would mean more work on the Monarch side (and possibly more support for the analytics team when their customer messes up etc). I would bet that the JS is an implementation shortcut, and a way for the analytics service to avoid doing customer-side implementation support. Keep things as simple as possible (which is a reasonable business goal). Plus it means that the service you're using can refactor or change around how they handle things and you don't need to be updating your code all the time? But the tradeoff is that you end up in this situation where people ask "why do you need to load a JS file from a third party?"

dehrmann 3y ago

Apparently revenue model is more important than a lot of things.

metalliqaz 3y ago

ouch

sbarre 3y ago

Hmm would be curious to know which block lists you have. I'm only blocking 27 things with most of them being Split.io (for A/B testing I presume) Sprig, Stripe and Sentry. Those aren't really third-party trackers (even though I am blocking most of them) in the marketing sense.. There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify(??), which make sense to block but don't feel that intrusive if they're tracking inbound referrals. I don't even see 50 other things that I could be blocking. Not arguing the point here, just wondering what I'm missing since I try to keep pretty extensive block lists myself.

geekifier 3y ago
My count might include additional elements from going through signup flow with their bank connection providers. My lists are: - uBlock - EasyList - EasyPrivacy - Online Malicious URL Blocklist - Peter Lowe’s Ad and tracking server list - uBlock filters – Annoyances - AdGuard Annoyances filter - pl: Oficjalne Polskie Filtry > There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify Yeah, if my bank started embedding those on their account page, I would GTFO.
phone8675309 3y ago
> There's some analytics from Tiktok, Clarity, Reddit and Spotify This is completely inexcusable from a fintech company. It shows me, as a potential customer, that they're not serious - either they're trying to get acquihired or they have no idea about privacy.
- dmix 3y ago
  Tracking behaviour on a marketing homepage is a bit different than tracking in the app. It's probably just conversion pixels for ad networks (ie, you need to determine if advertising on tiktok actually works). Not sure if you need to install JS from their specific networks, probably not. But generally I'm not against the idea if it's restricted to marketing sites.
- sbarre 3y ago
  Yeah this is on the public inbound signup pages, not in the app itself (although I can't confirm that it's not in the app - I didn't sign up). This is pretty standard stuff, and while I'm not a fan of trackers and I personally block them, I don't resent companies that want to understand their traffic and prospects. As a business you want to know which paid channels are working and where your traffic is coming from. A question for you then, if this is "completely inexcusable": How else do you propose that companies monitor their sales and marketing efforts?
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    Referrer header? Or don't these services pass a query param when they send a user in? Why do you need to call back into their js?
    - sbarre 3y ago
      This is a good point. But it would mean more work on the Monarch side (and possibly more support for the analytics team when their customer messes up etc). I would bet that the JS is an implementation shortcut, and a way for the analytics service to avoid doing customer-side implementation support. Keep things as simple as possible (which is a reasonable business goal). Plus it means that the service you're using can refactor or change around how they handle things and you don't need to be updating your code all the time? But the tradeoff is that you end up in this situation where people ask "why do you need to load a JS file from a third party?"