Ars Technica is one of the major technology news sites I follow, as it carries a lot of interesting stories about computer, general technology, and science news.
Last week, however, reading the site became much more difficult.
In relation to the California Privacy law going into effect January 1st, the owner of Ars Technica (and Wired), Condé Nast, put up a pop-up dialog over the front pages of these sites (and maybe others), and required visitors to click through the dialog to access the sites.
However, the click through did not take. On the next visit to the front page, the dialog showed up again. And on the next visit, and the next…
A couple of tweets to Ars Technica’s Twitter account has so far not resulted in any response. It seems like Ars Technica are not monitoring their mentions, and based on a previous case a few months ago (related to their new GDPR dialog popping up several times a week), they are not monitoring their DM channel, either.
I had an early suspicion about what was causing the problem. I have been browsing with third-party cookies disabled for the past couple of years, after I got tired of ads about products I had no intention to buy following me around the net for weeks on end.
Considering Ars Technica and Wired’s target audience, I would guess that a lot of their readers are disabling third-party cookies, too.
Except for one banking site, that have mostly worked fine. Until now.
A bit of testing determined that my initial guess about the cause was correct: The Condè Nast dialog requires that third-party cookies are enabled.
This means that in order to register “accept” of an update to Condè Nast’s privacy policy, the users have to permanently enable third-party cookies, allowing all web sites (not just Condé Nast’s) and all advertisers to track them across all sites on the net that are linked into their various tracking systems.
That isn’t a privacy improvement, it is a privacy invasion!
Condé Nast: Please fix this.
Update Jan 10: The Ars Technica site has now been fixed AFAICT. According to info I got yesterday, the problem also affected users of Privacy Badger.
