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Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

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Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#231

Post by laumars »

fnordsensei wrote: post #191
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, ads are just one of many problems. Newsletter popups, cookie consent (10x worse since GDPR), auto-playing video, in-browser crypto mining..? At this point, basic self-respect demands I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered.

Maybe the consent workflow should be abstracted and standardized, and put into web browsers. Rather than everyone rolling their own workflow (most which are horrible), the browsers could offer a unified way to do this, and a central place to revoke consent. Though it would probably take legislation to make orgs use it. The current workflows have a lot of dark patterns, despite GDPR.

Content owners don't want a standard way because they depend on user apathy, confusion and dark patterns to "trick" users into allowing websites to monetise their consumers data.

I say "consumers" rather than "customers" because at this point it feels more like the people buying data are the customers, rather than the actual daily website visitors.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#232

Post by Symbiote »

blub wrote: post #88
kbenson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if WaPo makes a distinction between subscribers and non-subscribers for this behavior (I'm not sure if they do or don't), they they are very clearly giving you a choice for how to pay for your content, with your money or with whatever information that can get out of you, and to that end they don't want you to block that because they actually want to get something of value out of the transaction. > I think it's…

I don't know how WaPo does this, but all newspapers I've tried including NYT and The Guardian and The Economist have a lot of tracking in their apps even for subscribers. So it's a crap deal.

When I visit washingtonpost.com from the EU, I see a page giving me three options:

> Free > Read a limited number of articles each month > You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads

> Basic Subscription > > $6 every 4 weeks or just $78 $60/year > ... > You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads

> Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription > > $9 every 4 weeks or just $117 $90/year > ... > No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking

(That last line is bold on the page.)

I don't know if this approach is fully compliant with the letter and spirit of the GDPR. The page itself contains three trackers, according to Ghostery, and has set several long-lived cookies without any interaction.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#233

Post by imglorp »

StevePerkins wrote: post #212
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditch Adblock and ABP, and get uBlock Origin instead. Cookie Autodelete, Ublock Origin, Decentraleyes, Don't touch my tabs!, FB Purity, First Party Isolation, google-no-tracking-url, HTTPS Everywhere, Link Cleaner, Privacy Badger, Smart Referer and of course uBlock Origin in advanced mode with all 3rd party scripts and frames blocked by default.

I know that Brave draws a bit of controversy on HN, but the fact that you just named a DOZEN plugins is the reason why I switched. That's just too much to keep up with, I need more sane defaults and built-in behavior.

Yes, I think BAT deserves a look. I'd much rather pay for good content than have my payment extracted from me subversively.

https://brave.com/faq-payments/#what-is-brave-payments

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#234

Post by paulgb »

asknthrow wrote: post #46
paulgb wrote: post #40

What infuriates me about WaPo is that even though I pay for it, their site is pretty much unusable without an ad blocker. The text jumps around as I scroll to make room for dynamically loaded ads. And then there are the bottom-feeding Outbrain (or whatever vendor they use) ads at the bottom of the article. It's a mess.

Have you considered voting with your wallet?

Fair question. I have, and have even cancelled before over it. But they still do quality journalism and it keeps bringing me back into the fold. Now I consider paying but using an ad blocker to be a more targeted instance of paying with my wallet.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#235

Post by tunap »

brennebeck wrote: post #70
adtac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So WP is afraid I'll shoplift articles? Because the purpose of CCTV cameras is security, not marketing.

I think the gp’s point was an analogy, not actually what is being used.

Better analogy: Please disable your data & use our "free wifi" to better triangulate your movements, download the contents of your contacts, emails, texts, browser history and while we're at it, drop a tracking app/cookie/x on your phone, etc....

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#236

Post by nkrisc »

johnchristopher wrote: post #105
SCAQTony wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we really blocking ads or are we really blocking malware? Calling our privacy tools adblockers is a misnomer don't you think for any site can simple put ad in a div and not get it blocked.

That's not how things happened. First they came with the blink tag. Then they added animated GIFs everywhere. They came with the pop-up. Then they put the pop-up under the main window. Ad-blockers' first usage was to make the Web readable. Then years later privacy concerns took over.

Regardless of how it began, using ad-blocking software today is a security measure to help keep your computer secure from malware. For me that's the primary purpose, the privacy concerns are important to but second to security.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#237

Post by sevensor »

marmaduke wrote: post #176
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, ads are just one of many problems. Newsletter popups, cookie consent (10x worse since GDPR), auto-playing video, in-browser crypto mining..? At this point, basic self-respect demands I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered.

> how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered I know HN has some JS, but I realized that I usually click on comments link for HN stuff since I know it's going to load super fast and not have a ton of useless crap on the page. If the comments are interesting I might read it, but most of the time there's more information in comments than the article itself. Or people quote…

Also, HN works fine with a browser that doesn't interpret JS at all. I usually post from w3m.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#238

Post by zentiggr »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #189
andai wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, ads are just one of many problems. Newsletter popups, cookie consent (10x worse since GDPR), auto-playing video, in-browser crypto mining..? At this point, basic self-respect demands I simply disable JavaScript. It's incredible how much faster the web is without it, and how much smoother, and how much less cluttered.

The problem is, the people who shape the web, of which some are on HN, will soon notice that people are just switching off JS to evade their tricks, and will make sure websites are unusable without it. Now the opposite is true, but some already implemented loading loading the text via JS, so you can't just read an article without turning on JS first.

And those are sites I don't visit anymore. Push, pull, mess with me, I go elsewhere.

Re: Tell HN: Now Washington Post is asking to turn off Firefox's tracking protection

#239

Post by isolli »

davidgh wrote: post #38
gwbas1c wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the payment model is broken. I'm not going to subscribe to a site that I only want to read a single article. We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.

Agree. I hope someone comes up with a “Netflix for online content”. I’m not going to subscribe to a dozen news sites individually and I also don’t want to make a purchase decision, even if tiny, every time I visit a site. For me a bundle of the top 10-15 high-quality news sites, perhaps letting me choose from different packages at different price points, and allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read…

Try Blendle: https://launch.blendle.com/

Articles cost between $0.10 and $1.15 (most between $0.20 and $0.50). You can request a refund if you don't like an article, which makes the transaction almost frictionless.

The one thing I miss is the ability to share articles without requiring the recipient to sign up for Blendle. Especially since the article can usually be read for free by going directly to the publisher's website. Five or so articles per month to share for free would sound about right.

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