Image by Christopher T. Howlett - The Noun Project
The Internet is getting uglier every year. Whether it is the amount of ads on websites, social media feeds and surrounding thumbnails, the cookie pop-ups on every single website with the worst and ugliest offenders being the news media and even government websites, it is getting worse. But you never noticed, because it has been creeping up on use steadily over the years. Just stop and have a mindful look right now at the website you are on. Not this one of course, this one (Medium) hasn’t yet been polluted. Maybe Ev Williams - CEO at Medium has learnt from his days at other tech firms?
Daily Mail Cookie Monster
It now takes longer to stop cookies on websites from downloading on your machine as it does to actually find what you are looking for. I’m now pleased that I am an Apple user as slowly but surely they are taking privacy seriously or so they say and are making their own apps block anyone from grabbing data. And allegedly all apps are now customisable so you can block data grabbing. I am sure the wizz kids will find ways around them in years to come. Having said that Apple are not guilt free, they themselves have created ugly products littered with ads, like their news app.
Over the coming months I will look for some examples of Cookie Monsters, ugly social channels and just anything else that grabs my attention and share it as part of my #theuglyinternet campaign.
Actual image from a real website
I received a LinkedIn invitation from someone I do not know, advertising their data scraping service. She said give me the website you want data scraped from and how long for. Unreal that companies like this actually exist. No wonder we now find ourselves on the Ugly Internet.