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Jeff Rawlings
Entrepreneur, citizen scientist, and insatiably curious generalist

Here’s The Other Thing With Ad Blockers

Wired, I am a longtime fan — like, really a long time, and really a fan. I’m a subscriber to your print magazine, and have been since sometime in the mid 90s, with perhaps a lapse or three when I’ve moved. I follow you on Facebook, and click your stories in my feed often enough that I’ve frequently read most of the magazine before the hard copy arrives.

Needless to say, I was a bit surprised when I was confronted by your “Here’s the thing” popup last week. A quick search of my password manager (Dashlane, by the way — highly recommended) revealed that no, I don’t have a login for wired.com. So, I did a quick reload of the article and clipped it to Evernote to finish reading it. And I didn’t even feel bad about doing so.

In some respects, I do get your point — I understand that advertising is a huge part of your business model. The thing is, a lot of the time I actually like your ads; after all, they are highly relevant to “people like me.” I didn’t even try to block them. I don’t use Adblocker or Ghostery. I do, however, use EFF’s Privacy Badger to prevent cross-site tracking. I’m sure you know the difference, being Wired and all, but here is a description from Cory Doctorow:

The nonprofit world does a lot better: EFF’s Privacy Badger doesn’t track you and doesn’t take money to make exceptions. It also has a much narrower purpose: blocking ads that use “non-consensual tracking” that allow for “retargeted” ads that follow you from one site to another.

I know there is a war brewing over ads, but there really should be a way for you to respect people’s legitimate privacy concerns — especially those of your actual, paying customers. Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for ways you could improve your customer experience:

  1. If your cookie got deleted by Privacy Badger, what about serving an ad without the tracking cookie? I know this might require a bit of old-school reporting to prove to advertisers you served the ad, but really, Privacy Badger won’t block it, and I won’t mind glancing at it.
  2. If you really need a cookie, and you believe that you aren’t violating Do Not Track, perhaps Privacy Badger made a mistake. You could always try to improve the software. EFF even invites pull requests.
  3. For your actual customers, you may want to consider sending a login credential with their magazine’s address label. (You may even have done so — but I didn’t bother looking last month, because I didn’t know this was going to be a problem.)

So far, I have avoided the elephant in the room, which is this: according to Privacy Badger, you seem to be tracking me in ways I have not approved. I hope I’m wrong; and if not, I hope you’ll change your mind about that. I have a lot of respect for Wired, and I would prefer to keep it.