Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpmcadam | Hacker News Reader

"NPR’s sites use cookies, similar tracking and storage technologies, and information about the device you use to access our sites (together, “cookies”) to enhance your viewing, listening and user experience, personalize content, personalize messages from NPR’s sponsors, provide social media features, and analyze NPR’s traffic. This information is shared with social media, sponsorship, analytics, and other vendors or service providers"

By the way, there is no 'reject' option for npr.org, just 'Agree and Continue'.

I'm not sure whether there's a difference between this and what they're reporting on, but I wasn't willing to accept to find out.

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If you click the “your choices” button it takes you to the nothing-but-the-text version of the current article, which is usually far preferable anyway. In this case that is https://text.npr.org/1068930998

Not making it say “disagree” or “reject” seems a bit dark-pattern-y, and making a button captioned “your choices” dump you straight at the leave-it side of take-it-or- make it seem like a snarky punishment for even daring to prefer not to be stalked online, but at least the option exists.

You may be interested in http://text.npr.org

Bless you! This is superb.

that's awesome, I wish more sites offered a slimmed down txt-centric version. if they added a minimal search it'd make it a lot more functional. as is, needed to clip the story number from the orig url to find it there:

https://text.npr.org/1068930998

CNN also has the lite version: http://lite.cnn.com/en

github repo with small lite websites https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites

nice! Thanks :)

This surveillance economy stuff should really be illegal.

And who will take a stand against surveillance and data trafficking... the government?

I didn't listen to the 14-minute story, either, just read the article that had very limited information -- but certainly one major difference is storage of personal health data. The closest NPR gets to that is whether you read, say, an article like "COVID vaccines may briefly change your menstrual cycle, but you should still get one."

If you're implying hypocrisy, I don't think it exists here. News companies sharing data with advertisers (so, nearly all of them) should absolutely be reporting on this issue. If I got/tracked periods, this is information I would want to know.

If you’re worried about cookies, you could open the page in a private browsing mode. Cookies will not be saved between browsing sessions regardless of what you agree to.

Though some news sites detect private mode and block the article. NYT for example.

No one is worried about cookies, as they are just one and zeros on a computer. It is the personal information being shared with sponsors, social media, analytics, and other vendors or what ever they feel is offering them enough money.

The reason we are in this privacy hell is the confusion between technology, ie cookies, and personal information, ie sensitive information about people and their lives that get traded like commodity goods. It is how technology is used that matters.

The cookie is just an implementation detail. Agreeing to the terms of the average cookie wall will let the website in question capture your IP address and browser fingerprint and then sell on that information for combination with other data sources.

There are many finger-printing and tracking methods of which cookies is but one. A couple of them can effectively “break” the private/incognito barrier (perhaps with less accuracy and/or precision, but given enough data-points discrepancies can be averaged out).

I just hit "reader view" in firefox (icon next to search bar) and all that crap goes away leaving just the article text and images.

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