11 March 2019

No Mo' WaPo

There will be no more links from or to the Washington Post's online edition here for at least a while, for a simple reason.

It's not the "ads." It's the tracking that comes along with them.

Since you've started hiding half of the content part of the page with a demand to turn off ad-blockers and helpfully suggested (incomplete and nonworking) instructions for turning off the ad-blockers — customized by browser, indicating that you're collecting data even for this — I'm voluntarily hiding the rest of the page by not going there at all until you grow up. Just because there are some really good values available at pawn shops doesn't mean I can or should ignore the stolen merchandise that's there (and not labelled!)… or the dubious ethics of how the rest of the merchandise got there and became available for purchase in the first place.

I don't care if my screen is filled with Heffalump attack ads, male-enhancement pill ads, and fifty-seven varieties of ads for writing schemeools. I do care if you're aggregating any data whatsoever regarding what I'm seeing, whether other ads or the content. I do care if you're trying to determine which articles catch my attention — or not — without any determination of why I'm scrolling the page (like, say, a dog nudging my elbow for an article randomly referenced elsewhere). I do care that you're trying to see where I go next. And that's before getting to both the untrustworthiness of your ad "partners"… and the untrustworthiness of your security measures for your database(s) of collected user information, which are far more extensive and intrusive than any "sanitized" or "aggregated" data you provide those same untrustworthy "partners." The irony that the WaPo became a "national" newspaper almost entirely on the basis of anonymous sourcing seems to have escaped y'all. And my tastes in film, or even news stories — especially in this isolationist era — are no more relevant than Robert Bork's… except to those who would misuse the data.

So bite me. I won't be biting your ads. If you can't do the data collection you want from the print edition, you won't be getting me to help you do it from an electronic edition.