3 ms·

I just visited Ars Technica without the usual self-protection. I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co. A

I just visited Ars Technica without the usual self-protection. I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co. Ars Technica operates as maliciously as any other publisher. There's no "careful consideration here", just blatant disrespect for the privacy of their public.

ixtli 11y ago
Yes but that's not what's being discussed in this thread. However, I did mention it in another comment because I think it's terribly disingenuous of people to post in here saying "BUT HOW ELSE WILL THESE POOR POOR BLOGGERS SURVIVE" while we give them huge amounts of behavioral data, often unwillingly. Just because they're not clever enough to monetize their content doesn't mean I should have to suffer. But the reality is that I wont. Before you could ad block on iOS I just stopped going to bad websites. So clearly they prefer this to me even seeing their content at all.
newscracker 11y ago
I had tried Ars without ad blocking quite a while ago when it had a banner that detected ad blockers and displayed a message. I found lots of third party trackers and decided to turn ad blocking on again. Even if the UI has improved with the ads in the recent times, the UX and privacy concerns are quite bad. I don't subscribe to Ars for a few different reasons. My visits to the site have reduced drastically in the last couple of years (just a few times a month) and it's quite expensive for me. If Ars stopped using those trackers and also dropped the subscription price even by 50%, I would consider subscribing. I don't know if buying a subscription only turns off ads while keeping the trackers on (for an overly broadly termed reason called "analytics"). That would be practically useless for a reader like me. Frankly, I believe Ars (and other sites) could make more money than they are now by reducing the prices and letting in more people from various backgrounds and geographies (currency conversion rates and all). Being one of the better tech sites, Ars could also be a good role model if it eliminated all those third party trackers (no clue what influence its owner, Condé Naste, has over such things).

ixtli 11y ago

Yes but that's not what's being discussed in this thread. However, I did mention it in another comment because I think it's terribly disingenuous of people to post in here saying "BUT HOW ELSE WILL THESE POOR POOR BLOGGERS SURVIVE" while we give them huge amounts of behavioral data, often unwillingly. Just because they're not clever enough to monetize their content doesn't mean I should have to suffer. But the reality is that I wont. Before you could ad block on iOS I just stopped going to bad websites. So clearly they prefer this to me even seeing their content at all.

newscracker 11y ago

I had tried Ars without ad blocking quite a while ago when it had a banner that detected ad blockers and displayed a message. I found lots of third party trackers and decided to turn ad blocking on again. Even if the UI has improved with the ads in the recent times, the UX and privacy concerns are quite bad. I don't subscribe to Ars for a few different reasons. My visits to the site have reduced drastically in the last couple of years (just a few times a month) and it's quite expensive for me. If Ars stopped using those trackers and also dropped the subscription price even by 50%, I would consider subscribing. I don't know if buying a subscription only turns off ads while keeping the trackers on (for an overly broadly termed reason called "analytics"). That would be practically useless for a reader like me. Frankly, I believe Ars (and other sites) could make more money than they are now by reducing the prices and letting in more people from various backgrounds and geographies (currency conversion rates and all). Being one of the better tech sites, Ars could also be a good role model if it eliminated all those third party trackers (no clue what influence its owner, Condé Naste, has over such things).