They mention that in the article, in passing. "WIRED, for context, lists 164 partners."

We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.

Uhm, that isn't free.

And (some) advertising would be fine. Tracking is not.

Somehow TV and print media functioned on advertising without such invasion for decades. Online publishing is much much cheaper than print publishing. And some of the biggest companies in the world, like Facebook and Google, make heaps off advertising. I don't buy this argument at all. The exchange of value is overwhelmingly, unprecedentedly tilted toward advertisers. It is beyond reason.

I'm not paying 5 cents to read an article unless I know in writing that 4.95 of them are going to the human person who wrote it.

They get multimillions of hits a day on a mere dozens of articles. Economy of scale works both ways.

What they should do is offer a tier system through your internet provider. $10/$20/$50 a month and you get access to tiers of services without ads or tracking other than tracking that you used the site.

Sure, but that's not the only article you read on the internet that morning. Every other site you hit took a similar fingerprint of you and soon those tiny "this profile/user likes rugby" data points start to add up. Swapped across 1700 (that we know about from this article) on a constant basis makes it easy to target you, specifically, when "this profile likes rugby" and "visits these sites from this network while that phone is at a certain geolocation during these hours" and "this device pinged this website every weeknight approx 20 min after that other device on the same network closed the Instagram app and started snoring."

All pulled together into their model of you, as a digital pawn to be pushed whichever way they think will make them the most money that day.

Where's the consent?

I give my name, age and weight to whatever health app, and yeah, I think it's normal to expect a few marketing outreach attempts from them and their advertising partners down the line. But even that's pushing it for me, and once it feels like spam, we all deserve an easy way to turn it the fuck off.

There's no consent with this shit they're pulling. It's unacceptable. Fuck their feelings or considering their business model. It's certainly not being reciprocated.