Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorams | Hacker News Reader

At some point companies like Fast Company have to accept that they are a significant part of the problem, and just writing articles about it is not enough. This page contains a ridiculous number of trackers. The site pulls in content from the following 3rd-party domains:

s.skimresources.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, secure-cdn.mplxtms.com, z.moatads.com, ml314.com, secure-us.imrworldwide.com, www.googletagservices.com, www.google-analytics.com, www.dianomi.com, d1z2jf7jlzjs58.cloudfront.net, static.chartbeat.com, assets.adobetm.com, platform.twitter.com, www.queryly.com, cdn.polyfill.io, www.lightboxcdn.com, content.jwplatform.com, platform.instagram.com, www.inc.com, images.fastcompany.net, connect.facebook.com, cdn.conversant.mgr.consensu.org, cdnjs.cloudflare.com.

images.fastcompany.net is probably just used to serve static content from a cookieless domain and some of the others are CDNs for libraries, but the rest are all there for tracking purposes.

If you don't like what the ad industry is doing with people's personal data, please don't keep giving them ways to get to it.

This point was made recently about the NY Times having an editorial about advertising / tracking being invasive, while also having advertising / tracking on their own page.

The justification / defence given was that you want separation between editorial and business decisions. If the two are aligned, the freedom of the editorial team to write what they want will diminish, and the business will ultimately dictate what gets written.

If it feels a bit pessimistic, I agree, but pessimistically, I also feel like it's just realistic.

There is a difference between a news platform publishing a news article or op ed story that denounces things the host company itself might be doing and a corporate PR office issuing a statement.

Is google hypocritical for having flat earth stuff on youtube and running huge satellite imaging operation?

(Edit: I should probably have replied to the "hypocritical" comment below :))

As their long form journalism with moving graphics and images is so popular and gets so many clicks, think how awe inspiring and what a major effect it would have to shut down all of that stuff on articles talking about that stuff, just to give people a dose of what it could/would be like. It would be respected, get other articles about it, etc.

They also have the distinction of being the first page I've ever run across where temporarily enabling javascript on their domain causes the page not to load, whereas leaving it off does make it load. Makes "forbid fastcompany.com" an easy choice.

Many of the "disable your ad blocker" dialogs are implemented in JavaScript, which is why this happens. Silly, but that's where we are.

This is surprisingly common. They keep the content on the page in order to make it available for crawlers, and then use JS to hide the content until it's determined you don't have an ad-blocker, or you've accepted some draconian terms, or whatnot.

Better to leave JS off if the site works without it. :)

The problem of this line of thinking is that it assumes every company is just one guy in a basement who's responsible for all facets of all operations. In the real world, an editorial department doesn't get to dictate what technology gets adopted by the SEO department, or how accessibility is implemented by the software development team.

It's easy to say "well company X should really simply do [Y] to fix [morally good cause]", but in reality that ends up being non-actionable because it doesn't take into account that due to bureaucracies, some things are easier said than done.

Another thing that I think is somewhat counter-productive is criticizing a news outlet for doing things that are at odds with what they write. News outlets are not about leading world changing initiatives by example, they are about spreading information so others become conscious of issues they might otherwise not think about. I feel that saying "well I see you don't put your money where your mouth is" somewhat weakens the importance of the point being made (i.e. if it isn't being done, then it must not be that important)

Yikes. What's the word for this? It's not exactly "hypocritical", but it is in that realm.

Nah, hypocritical is exactly the right word.

CDNs absolutely identify and track you on the backend.

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