Pushing Back Against Privacy Infringement On The Web — Smashing Magazine

A "call to action" piece focused on bending the trend with privacy more towards people. Interesting as well since it is written by the Vice President of Data Governance at The New York Times, a media company that collects a tremendous amount of data from their customers and visitors.

I found this paragraph interesting.

Perhaps the most important property of the Web is trust. You can browse around freely from site to site because you can trust that your browser will protect your security and that, even as those sites run code on your computer, they won’t endanger it. That is a strong promise, much stronger than what you can expect from native platforms, but when it comes to privacy it’s a promise that we have broken. As you browse freely from site to site, your privacy is not in trustworthy hands.

I disagree with his assertion here on trust. Perhaps I’m being pessimistic, but I think the model that the web will follow is more like email. I used email before spam (wow, how old am I?). Email in 1991 was a lot like today in that I had an address, and it just worked to send anyone a note. It was fabulous. There was no pictures and web formatting, just plain text. Elm was my email client of choice.

Then spam arrived. Then scams arrived. With HTML email, we got beacons in our email. We have open rate tracking. We no longer trust mail servers, they could be bad actors. We don't trust any email that arrives in our inbox. We use sophisticated algorithms to judge every email and filter it in various ways. We have complicated digital signing practices to try and make it better. Real humans, that send real email to people, just hope that it actually shows up in an Inbox.

That is the model I think the web is trending toward. I think the days of using a web browser, with no protections, are numbered. These days you would never use email without spam protection and hundreds of things your server is doing for you. That is the model I suspect the web is evolving to.

Browser extensions, proxy servers, content blockers. That is what I will trust.