The upstream comment said marketing is evil - a broad ranging statement. The comment you're responding to picked an example of marketing - not an unusual instance, just a common example of the thing the parent called evil. This seems like a reasonable response.

"Everyone passed the test" is generally understood, in the context of a classroom, to mean "the members of the salient set [students in class] passed the test".

Saying "marketing is evil" in the context of a comment thread about GA stripping, replying to someone defending a specific brand of tracking-marketing, can reasonably be taken to refer to that variety of marketing: the contextually salient variety of marketing, which this submission and the current thread are about.

this is the motte and bailey argument technique: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

Interesting in this case that you could maybe apply it to both situations:

Motte 1: Marketing is valuable and helps people spread information. Bailey 1: Tracking your every move against your will is fine and also profitable.

Motte 2: Tracking my every move is unacceptable and evil. Bailey 2: All marketing - even writing a blog post or website copy about products or approaches to problem solving - is inherently evil.

I don't know which you were referring to, and I kind of like it this way.

'Everyone' in a classroom meaning 'everyone in the class' is reasonable.

'marketing is evil' meaning 'tracking based retargeting is evil' is not.

You can feel that way if you want, but moving the goalposts when OP was talking about tracking tokens and cookies so that you can interpret their responder as being opposed to eg graphic design on webpages or post-conference conversations is dishonest in my mind. The kinds of 'marketing' you would try to defend are probably not the kinds of things they were calling evil.

You can feel that interpreting

> 'marketing is evil'

as

> 'marketing, in general, is evil'

is "moving the goalposts".

But I'd suggest you're putting a spin of your own on things here.

Well, what did GP say? It was a post entirely devoted to tracking-related modern marketing techniques. This post was a comment on a link entirely about defeating tracking-related modern marketing techniques. I'm not saying you're being intentionally disingenuous, just that my initial understanding of their post was apparently quite different from yours.

Maybe that's worth reflecting on? To me, it seemed pretty straightforward that they were referring to marketing as it was being referred to in the post, comments, and link that we're ostensibly discussing.

Sure, but if I wanted to make the point that tracking is evil, I'd say that. Obviously (due to the other reply that interpreted 'marketing as evil' as meaning exactly that) I'm not alone.