This Article Is Spying on You

nytimes.com

17 pointslwf5 comments

Author here, happy to answer questions about the op-ed or the research. Hugely impressed the NYTimes let me do this!

Everything you hit on the browser is spying on you. Why the hell should the NY Times, which is the "Newspaper of Record" (or bad record), be any different? What makes you think anything is ever secret online?

Yes the old adage is true. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. That is, unless they care to harvest your information for days at a time and buy 3rd party information on you, in which case they can be pretty darn sure about what you are, at least in part.

I've made this point on here before, but what HN readers take as common knowledge is still pretty confusing and opaque to most people. To my knowledge a major newspaper has never published something like this, so I give them a ton of credit as they just went from a subset of their readers knowing about this to potentially all of them.

Any idea of the CPM for content based targeted ads v.s. behavior tracking / hyper targeted ones?

Thanks for protecting me, paywall!

/s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com