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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Privacy Guides
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If I’m reading an article on espn.com for free, there has to be some value exchange. I either need to pay to read the article or I need to be willing to be included in future advertising to people who have read that article. We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.
I would be willing to pay 5p to read that article if there was an automatic and easy mechanism to deliver that transaction to espn.com.  I want their journalists to get paid and I want the content to keep existing. But I’m also not such a dedicated fan of that site that I’m ready to subscribe monthly. The last thing we need is an Internet full of subscription paywalls.
So in the meantime, if the fact that I read an article on espn.com about rugby scores puts me in an audience of people who like rugby and this complicated web of advertising is going to show me rugby ads and ESPN is going to make money from that and that is going to keep the articles free … sure, whatever they gotta do I guess. I’m not sharing anything personal or private with espn.com so if they want to pass that along to 1600 other places so I can keep reading for free… whatevs.  It’s not the model I would’ve chosen but I don’t have a better plan to keep ESPN in business. 
Sure, but that's not the only article you read on the internet that morning. Every other site you hit took a similar fingerprint of you and soon those tiny "this profile/user likes rugby" data points start to add up. Swapped across 1700 (that we know about from this article) on a constant basis makes it easy to target you, specifically, when "this profile likes rugby" and "visits these sites from this network while that phone is at a certain geolocation during these hours" and "this device pinged this website every weeknight approx 20 min after that other device on the same network closed the Instagram app and started snoring."
All pulled together into their model of you, as a digital pawn to be pushed whichever way they think will make them the most money that day.
Where's the consent?
I give my name, age and weight to whatever health app, and yeah, I think it's normal to expect a few marketing outreach attempts from them and their advertising partners down the line. But even that's pushing it for me, and once it feels like spam, we all deserve an easy way to turn it the fuck off.
There's no consent with this shit they're pulling. It's unacceptable. Fuck their feelings or considering their business model. It's certainly not being reciprocated.
I'm not paying 5 cents to read an article unless I know in writing that 4.95 of them are going to the human person who wrote it.
They get multimillions of hits a day on a mere dozens of articles. Economy of scale works both ways.
What they should do is offer a tier system through your internet provider. $10/$20/$50 a month and you get access to tiers of services without ads or tracking other than tracking that you used the site.
Somehow TV and print media functioned on advertising without such invasion for decades. Online publishing is much much cheaper than print publishing. And some of the biggest companies in the world, like Facebook and Google, make heaps off advertising. I don't buy this argument at all. The exchange of value is overwhelmingly, unprecedentedly tilted toward advertisers. It is beyond reason.
We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.
Uhm, that isn't free.
And (some) advertising would be fine. Tracking is not.
I didn’t count them, but wired itself has a very impressive list of “partners” in their cookie disclaimer too.
They mention that in the article, in passing. "WIRED, for context, lists 164 partners."