Thread · 4 tweets · 21 May 2021

I completely understand that that was how it was designed to work. But a system that's easy to game by bad actors because they cannot be distinguished from good actors isn't a successful system — no matter the intentions that went into it.

My team and many others with us have spent the past four years working to make The Times use as little data and as safe processing as is possible without being a nonprofit bankrolled by a billionaire. I'll make zero claims that it's perfect or done, but it's far ahead of most.

We've entirely removed open programmatic, only marketing-related pages have 3P controllers and even then few, etc. Yet users perceive the UX as the same as if we have 300 programmatic partners because we have to get consent anyway.

Making good actors and bad actors look almost exactly the same doesn't help anyone's autonomy much. And it's not how it works in the physical world. My idea is the default tier should roughly match an equivalent interaction in a physical context, so people can decide easily.