Interesting People mailing list archives
Re Getting around paywalls ...
From: "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2017 10:00:42 +0000
---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Christian Huitema <huitema () huitema net> Date: Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 9:41 PM Subject: Re: [IP] Re Getting around paywalls ... To: <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () listbox com> On 4/25/2017 6:45 AM, Dave Farber wrote: Begin forwarded message: *From:* Dan Tappan <dan.tappan () gmail com> *Date:* April 25, 2017 at 8:06:11 AM EDT *To:* dave () farber net, ip <ip () listbox com> *Subject:* *Re: [IP] Re Getting around paywalls ...* I've been calling for a micro-payments system for reading newspaper articles for a long time. I'm all for supporting journalism, and I have digital subscriptions to a number of publications, but asking people to pay on the order of $200 a year to 1/2 dozen different publications is just not reasonable. Absolute $$$ aside, by the time you get to that many subscriptions you're just reading the occasional article from each so the $$/article is way out of whack. There is also a privacy issue there. Many newspapers are ad funded. The ads are a distraction and a nuisance, but they would be tolerable if it were not for the underlying tracking. The advertisement technology has given us ad auctions and a complex opaque ecosystem that basically attempts to keep tabs on people and their browsing history. Many of us believe that this "corporate surveillance" system is just evil. The best protection against that surveillance is to use ad blockers, or more specifically tracking blockers. Of course, blocking ads also blocks the revenues of the ad-funded newspapers. They are not happy about it, and I often get the suggestion to buy a subscription. The problem there is that buying a subscription does not prevent the tracking. The typical "privacy" policy is hard to find -- for the New York Times, for example, you have to scroll to the very bottom of the home page, the very last line of gray tiny print, and find the "privacy" keyword. (It is here: https://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/privacy/policy/privacy-policy.html.) If you click on it, you get a long page that was probably vetted by a team of lawyers and describes every kind of tracking and advertising that they could think off. Nowhere will you get something as simple as "if you subscribe and you opt to not be tracked, we will not track you and we will also not let third parties track you through our site." And that's too bad, because if they did say that I would in fact subscribe to many of these newspapers. But what you get is instead, "if you subscribe, we will verify your identity in order to check the subscription, and we will track you even more efficiently than if you were not a subscriber." No, thanks. So, yes, if anonymous micro-payments worked, that would be great. -- Christian Huitema This message was sent to the list address and trashed, but can be found online. <https://www.listbox.com/login/messages/view/20170425214133:786E6250-2A21-11E7-AF91-C05CB27DA00C/> ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125 Unsubscribe Now: https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170426060102:3E60B504-2A67-11E7-B401-DFB95DB462F7 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Re Getting around paywalls ... Dave Farber (Apr 25)
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- Re Getting around paywalls ... Dave Farber (Apr 26)