So it's a crap deal.

Well, you can of course pay and use an ad-blocker. I have a subscription to a Dutch newspaper (on actual paper even), and use their site as well, but not without protection.

The ads in the paper newspaper are usually fine. Rarely do they affront or annoy; and they are tailored to the general profile of the newspaper's readership.

But whenever I use a clean browser profile to verify some piece of behavior in a website, or to see if a bug on it was caused by the use of uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, I am acutely reminded why I choose to shield my brain from the repetitive onslaught of internet advertisements with all their tracking and insulting attempts at trying to put me into a specific profile.

I don't mind internet advertisements as such though. There is a certain social media site that starts with an F but is not Facebook (and quite empathically and by design the opposite in terms of prudishness) which serves ads that are vetted by the website's advertising department, and are shown to users at random without the option of narrowing the reach to users with specific interests or demographics. These have never bothered me, and sometimes even serve to introduce me to a business that sells products I am interested in. Like my paper newspaper, advertisers only know the general profile of the site's members.

More sites should consider that option. No tracking, no tailoring beyond 'people that visit our website', and vetted by the site itself. Newspapers in particular have the knowledge of how to acquisition advertisers for this; they already do it in their paper editions.

Now I feel stupid. For all the doom and gloom about the impossibility about paying to not getting tracked and how Chinese and American spy agencies and Megacorps know everything about your online behavior, I never thought about simply returning to consumption of analog content as a reaction. Well, it's more expensive and worse for the environment, but I guess if you really value privacy that's bearable

But why pay if they're still being tracked? The value proposition here is off. Might as well not pay and use an ad blocker.

While ars technica is not a newspaper they often have posts that some of us find interesting.

They turn off ads and tracking for all but the lowest tiers.

> Free > Read a limited number of articles each month > You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads

> Basic Subscription > > $6 every 4 weeks or just $78 $60/year > ... > You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads

> Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription > > $9 every 4 weeks or just $117 $90/year > ... > No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking

(That last line is bold on the page.)

I don't know if this approach is fully compliant with the letter and spirit of the GDPR. The page itself contains three trackers, according to Ghostery, and has set several long-lived cookies without any interaction.

So paying is a double whammy.

The simplest way for WaPo to achieve this without having to deal with any adbockers or trackers would be to use an in-house system served from their own servers. Unfortunately, since they also have a free subscription where they do track people, that would mean two systems which would be redundant, and the in-house one also probably takes a lot of effort and manpower. Unfortunately, that leaves subscribers not knowing exactly what is being tracked and who is doing the tracking.

I mitigate this by using ublock and a container tab for news sites in Firefox. I would prefer to know this isn't needed because WaPo did the right thing, but I would still do anyways, as just because something shouldn't be needed for protection doesn't mean you shouldn't do it anyways if the cost is small enough.

Container tabs help protect from cross site tracking : whether or not you subscribe. So that is irrelevant here.

What matters though is what they track, and what they do with it. The problem with most tracking is that there are services that aggregate it between sites such that your viewing habits in one are available for use in another. There is tracking in an effort to make your service better, including for who you're tracking, and there's tracking as a source of revenue. The first is not a problem, and not anything fundamentally different than what you could experience while using a corner store in 1900. The problem is it's very hard to confirm which is being done much of the time.

1. Information can never be un-leaked reliably. 2. Even if current owner of the tracking company behaves , you never know what the next owner in case of bankruptcy / strategic sale does with the data. 3. If some unscrupulous employee of the tracking company leaks your information, there may not be any proof about it. 4. You never know if the information becomes dangerous when combined with some other information which may be leaked / required to be given in some other context.

So credible guarantee is the only thing that can make paying with money, and paying with information a true dichotomy.