Learn Privacy
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
Link tags: thirdparties
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Blogging and the heat death of the universe • Robin Rendle
A cautionary tale on why you should keep your dependencies to a minimum and simplify your build process (if you even need one):
If it’s not link rot that gets you then it’s this heat death of the universe problem with entropy setting in slowly over time. And the only way to really defend against it is to build things progressively, to make sure that you’re not tied to one dependency or another. That complex build process? That’s a dependency. Your third party link to some third party font service that depends on their servers running forever? Another dependency.
Measuring Performance behind consent popups – Simon Hearne
- Opted out experiences are ~35% faster
- Opting in downloads 2.5MB of additional JavaScript
- Opted in repeat views are twice as slow as opted out
The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com - Signal v. Noise
Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.
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In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.
Responsible JavaScript: Part III – A List Apart
This chimes nicely with my recent post on third-party scripts. Here, Jeremy treats third-party JavaScript at technical debt and outlines some solutions to staying on top of it.
Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.
But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces.
What would happen if we allowed blocking 3rd-Party JavaScript as an option?
This would be a fascinating experiment to run in Firefox nightly! This is in response to that post I wrote about third-party scripts.
(It’s fascinating to see how different this response is to the responses from people working at Google.)