Don Marti
Tue 16 Jun 2015 05:46:30 PM PDT
5 five-minute steps up
Jason Kint writes, in "5 Ways Industry Leaders Need To Step Up",
Needless to say I found myself shaking my head at a recent publisher event where sites were discussing how they could block Facebook from tracking their users. How on earth did this become a responsibility of the publisher to hack together a short-term solution?
It's not all the publisher's responsibility, but it's a fact of the Internet that (1) stuff keeps getting broken, often on purpose, and (2) in order for things to keep working, everyone has to keep his or her own piece safe. If you want to run a mailing list or email newsletter, you have to understand the current state of spam filtering and work on deliverability. And if you want to be on the web, you have to think about protecting your users from the problem of third-party tracking.
Do the short-term solutions right, and they don't take too much effort individually, but they turn into continuous improvement. And nobody has to wait for big, slow-moving companies to change, or worse, cooperate.
So here are five, count'em, five, quick ways to step up and make a difference in the problems of tracking-based fraud, users seeing ads as untrustworthy and blocking them, and data leakage. Should take five minutes each on a basic site, longer if you have a big hairy professional CMS.
Provide tracking warnings in page footers, to let users know when a browser is misconfigured.
Replace stock social buttons with safe versions, to avoid leaking your site's data.
Put some bonus pages behind a reverse tracking wall, to give users an incentive to get protected.
Replace confusing AdChoices links with links to a trustworthy tracking protection tool.
It's not the responsibility of an individual site to fix the whole problem, but there are plenty of small tweaks that can help slow down data leaks, encourage users to adopt site-friendly alternatives to ad blocking, and otherwise push things in the right direction.