be the change you would like to see in the world

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

nice, but bad for business ... would anonymized tracking be ok in your world view Cassie?

positioning rants 🚀; bringing you ✍️ /buildbetter, 🎙️ /artistspotlight and🎙️ /web3magic; De*** & open-source HW/SW enthusiast; https://nf.td/bfg

Define anonymized tracking? It takes very little correlated data before you can pinpoint someone from it

Nillion doesn't really offer anonymization of data, despite the marketing — their products are more about storing encrypted data. Even their query processing is overstated: it does matching for query lookups with salted hashes, and the only aggregation supported is summation.

Teams that use analytics need far more than this, and generally what they want to infer, like your above scenarios, are too complex for their offerings. It is possible, however, to meaningfully measure impact without invasive analytics, even if it is harder. As an example, if you're selling a physical product, and you're paying for hosting, if the cost of hosting is based on usage, and sales are not increasing despite usage increasing, you know your conversion is poor. This isn't necessarily the fine grained data many companies have grown accustomed to having access to, but as users, we should be asking more often why they feel the right to have it.

Not engineer of your level and depth, but I imagine analytics data first flowing into anonymized place like nillion or other zk storage/compute and I'd be getting back to my dashboard results I need for optimizing business side of things like conversions, shopping, visits, etc. - stupid idea? 🙄