Are you asking permission for misbehaving by trying to determine exactly how much is too much?
Is there some magic scale threshold for excessive force? No. There is no fine line because you shouldn't be anywhere near the line.
100 billion. It's not 'lots' or millions, or a billion we're talking about here. It's one hundred billion. That's 80 events per day on average for every human they've ever seen (1.2 billion, in the about section). If they see half of those on any given day that's 160 events per person, maybe 200. Per day.
Fine grained tracking you do on your own site to determine why people leave and whether they see your new content? I could see my boss asking for that. I wouldn't be enthusiastic. I might make excuses that I was too busy doing other things to help. I might even complain, but we probably aren't running that forever anyway because it tells you less and less over time but still costs the same.
But this is an ad network, not a usability study. We are currently busy handwringing about ad networks, and I'm a little taken aback by the dissonance here.
Nice spin, but you made the statement as if there's a difference so yes, I'm asking you to define the limit. You can't say "anywhere near the line" and not be able to tell me what the line is. Unless you have some understanding for what is reasonable for the business metrics, it's rather useless for any further discussion.
Those ads do have owners, paying a lot of money to both distribute and see how people are interacting with their content so it's the same thing as a website. And there are lots of tracking events to capture so it's easy to add up to billions, but as the article states it's not all user events. Only 10B come from users with everything else being backend server logs.
> I wouldn't be enthusiastic. I might make excuses that I was too busy doing other things to help
Ok... so being dishonest to avoid doing your job is fine? If you are against then don't do it, but what is the point you're trying to make here?
You haven't answered any of the questions or provided any reasonable details.
What does ethics class have to do with this? I'm sure the question of whether lying in your job to avoid doing a particular project would be far more interesting to study anyway, I'll be sure to bring it up the next time I teach one.
