As a hardware manufacturer who invests in R&D as much as in hardware manufacturing, our products end up being more expensive than the competition. This makes selling products and running the business slightly more complicated. This is were advertising and marketing become essential.
Doing marketing also has a cost and knowing which marketing campaign is efficient, which message has reached which audience in which platform is essential in order to optimize the marketing effort. That may sound stupid or even useless but not doing so is actually like asking a developer to write some code without getting any feedback on what is actually going on. That is just not doable.
We opted for collecting traffic data in the most ethical way as possible. This goes through hosting and processing our own database in our own server, and only collecting anonymous traffic.
In term of anonymity, I am not sure that there are many HTTP servers out there, that donāt collect traffic data along with IP addresses. Not sure a sys admin would want to work without traffic logs either. One can argue that traffic data can always be processed and thatās where VPNs are being useful. Just like sys admins, our marketing team donāt need personal data. This is not our business. We just need to know about the performance of an ad.
As the blog post from Kyle shows, we are transparent about it and always open to discussing a better way to achieve that.
To me it reads as a generic marketing reply to the topic in general not a targetted reply.