The worst thing I ever worked on

Idiomdrottning posted a video transcript about the univesality of user tracking.

Two things come to mind

Thing 1 - a bad thing I did

I was working on a site with info for lawyers. Abstracts were free, or subscribe to read the full text. That seemed to work fine (lots of subscribers), but when we opened an office in the US, sales people there wanted more. So I had to insert a third party thing that made a box pop up inviting you to chat. They're only paying someone to chat with you because it's a sales opportunity. Well, on the face of it, only mildly annoying. But now every page loaded some javascript which tracked which page you were on, how you got there, and how long you stayed. It was all sent to the third party. There was no benefit to the user. It was just there to drive sales. Everyone was tracked. Who knows what happened to the data after they gathered it? I felt uncomfortable about doing this, but (a) it was my job to do the tech work, but not my decision, and (b) it was only applied to US users on that one site.

I offer my apologies for the small part I played in making the web worse. That's the only time I ever worked on anything like that.

Confession is good for the soul.

Thing 2 - a thing I can't do

I can't pronounce Idiomdrottning. The site belongs to a Swedish person called Sandra. Maybe it's easy to say Idiomdrottning if you're Swedish. Maybe it means something in Swedish?

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