The Oath websites and Medium are on my mental blacklists of sites I simply don’t bother with. The content isn’t good enough to care. It does mean I hit comment threads like this and can’t read the article. Oh well, I’m trying to reduce my internet time anyway.

Outline.com is great if you stumble upon some article you do want to read. Just put in the URL and it’ll strip away everything but the text and images. Here’s an example for the article for this thread: https://outline.com/RThZjn

There's a browser extension for it too. Outline has been super convenient when dealing with bloated news sites. Now I'm just thinking about how I'll get my browser to do this automatically for certain sites without having to click the outline button every time

Firefox has a built-in reader view that I like to use on particularly offensive websites.

Yes, I could do with a plugin to strip links to Medium articles.

Yeah, I was actually trying to find something like this too... maybe its time I looked into how to write browser plugins myself, but I have too many other projects right now.

I have a HN filter userscript for this purpose:

  https://megous.com/dl/hn.js

If you filter most of the news websites, and other pointless crap, HN gets pretty technical again.

Thank you!

I've just tried it out, works great. I'm not using quite as strict a filter as you are, basically Oath sites, medium and known paywalled sites. I will add to it as I go :)

If I get these redirect popups (not just popups over the content, which I can remove with Nuke Anything [1] or use Firefox's distraction free mode), I either just don't visit the site if I don't care that much about its content, or I open a private browser window, accept whatever popups they present, read the article then close the window to purge all their tracking shit.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/nuke-anything...

I just clicked through the links of that banner and I landed on https://www.oath.com/de/my-data/#protectingdata anyways, I will not read the article because I am sure these dialogs are built in a way to gain "consent" by trickery.

The dialogs are really confusing.

1st popup page: Some text about Oath with big "OK" button and same size "Manage Options" link. By clicking OK you agree to everything.

2nd popup page when clicking "Manage Options" link: Some more text about Oath with big "OK" button and tiny "Manage Options" link next to a headline. I have no idea what happens when I click OK here. Is the same as the "OK" button on the first page? I didn't manage anything here yet so I guess it could mean agree to everything again. On the other hand there are some settings you can change on the next screen (you don't know that at this point though), so maybe "OK" now means continue and use these settings? You have to trust that they are opt-in rather than opt-out, otherwise you need to check the settings.

3rd popup page when clicking manage "Manage Options" link: Some text about Oath partners with links within the text. The big button is called "Done" now but at this point it is not clear what exactly that means because there was nothing to manage yet. Clicking the link to show partners displays a list of 10 essential partners (Amazon, Google, ebay etc.) with links to 10 data privacy policies that you apparently automatically have to agree with. A bit hard to notice but there's another tab for IAB partner with 224 more partners. At least they aren't enabled by default.

I guess "Done" means use these options and it brings you back to the 2nd popup. I actually have no idea at which point I disagreed or disabled something, I just got trained to click a bunch of "OK" buttons with unclear meaning.

To give that dark pattern some context, Oath has recently been rebranded Verizon Media.

I went through the same process and I have no idea what I agreed to.

...and after landing on that page, you have to click through to the privacy Dashboard, where you can supposedly opt-out of individual partners.

I say "supposedly", because the first partner I clicked on led me to the "I'm not a robot" captcha.

After which I just closed the window. Guess I'll not read the article after all.

How on earth they expect this to fly under the GDPR, expecially considering that "[t]hese partners may access your device to collect data for ad selection, delivery and measurement", is beyond me.

I did the captcha, and the page greeted me with "an error occurred". Next click lead me back to the captcha step.

Just disable 1st-party scripts and 3rd-party scripts in the uBlock Origin popup for techcrunch.com and that modal should not appear anymore.

https://prnt.sc/mo26b4

Or even better, don't visit techcrunch.com.

If you disable everything except CSS and Images, you get an infinitely nicer site.

It's the bottom right button </> to disable all JavaScript on a site. (it took me a while to find).

I have uMatrix set similarly.

I just realised I had been reading "Oath" as "OAuth" - not that I am aware of visiting the site but I wonder if they chose that name to get some additional credibility?

Probably not directly tied to its similarity to OAuth, but I'm sure the name Oath came from thousands of man hours of brand psychology assessment and audience testing. Oath is the stapled together corpses of the adtech of Verizon and AOL and was/is ridiculed for being a poor name choice, but branding decisions at corporations of that size go through so many committees and data points and marketing schlubs, who knows how it came out as Oath.

  Oath, noun - profane or obscene expression usually of surprise or anger.

It's an apt name, because it describes exactly what I say whenever I land on one of their sites.

Not only that, they also keep asking you on every repeat visit but click 'ok' once accidentally and they will file that forever and never present you with the option to withdraw your consent.

I skipped the article when I saw it was TechCrunch. Their new web site is absolutely atrocious. I can't believe this is what web developers get paid to do. Just awful.

Anyway, I'll just read the comments here and that'll be enough for me.

Yeah, they're about the worst I've encountered. Good luck finding any privacy controls, or opting out of anything. Clicking into the pages that claim to contain these just sends you down a warren of links, mostly taking you to the parent website where there's another warren of links.

I hope their practices come under fire from the EU before long.

Oath has one of the more nagging GDPR pop-ups. I like Slashdot, they at least give an opt-out option to access the content. On TC you are either opting-in or forbidden to access. And it's not like a technical necessity either. My company, ProcessOne, has a Wordpress blog that doesn't set any cookies or local storage. It uses Google Analytics and internal WP stats. But they are properly configured to not track, just measure.

> On TC you are either opting-in or forbidden to access.

And it remains to be seen whether that is legal.

I don't think there is any "remains to be seen" about it. It's illegal.

Tweakers.net had their lawyer take a look at it, and they claim it is legal. I'd love to see it on trial.

My take on it is it is BS and a cost/benefit analysis.

According to the GDPR, it is not legal. What remains to be seen is whether the EU will enforce or not.

Complaints can be brought through ankle-biters like https://noyb.eu/projects-2/

OAuth is the definition of dark pattern.

The way they set up their pop up is plain evil, trying to deceive the user. In the end, it is almost impossible to find the opt-out options, and you have to agree to share your data with the largest ad-networks anyway, otherwise you can not use the website. The privacy "dash board" doesn't even work without error.

Even if you are not in a country where you are presented with that these pop-ups, the way this is handled should really make you think long and hard about the ethics of the companies behind oauth and techncrunch!

The company I founded helps companies increase transparency and controls for their end-users, make it more clear where your data is going and making it easier for you to actually make a decision on whether you want your data going to third parties

https://transcend.io/product

Yep. Frustratingly, the content pops in momentarily before the cookie popup system removes it all

Occasionally Safari’s reader mode can be used to show the content. I know other browsers now have a similar feature.

For those who don't know, Oath is Verizon.