Blocking and Tracking

Alex Feerst
The Medium Blog
Published in
1 min readSep 8, 2015

Some Medium users have noticed that ad-blockers are blocking legit parts of Medium, such as our first-party analytics and icons. This is not good because they prevent you from making fullest use of the site (and at worst, new users might not realize what’s missing). To be clear, we don’t currently have any ads on the site and we don’t allow third-parties to track our users across the Internet as a result of their visiting our site.

We wanted to let everyone know:

  1. We’re aware of the issue.
  2. We believe this is due to technical stuff that has nothing to do with tracking or ads. In other words, there is no tracking going on that we’re trying to put past you. (In fact, Medium has worked with EFF to ensure that we are doing just the opposite.) We believe some ad-blockers are misrecognizing icons and other data from Medium as ads or tracking related.
  3. We are working both internally and with the various ad-block companies to fix this.

Thanks for letting us know about the problem. We’re on it. Keep letting us know how we can make Medium work better.

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Alex Feerst
The Medium Blog

Alex Feerst is a technology lawyer and expert on technology ethics in areas including artificial intelligence and neurotechnology - https://feerst.com/about