Substack - privacy + advertising?
July 24, 2020 11:16 AM   Subscribe

Substack seems to be a very common platform these days for newsletters/blogs etc. I have questions about their privacy and advertising policies.

Q1: As best as I can tell, their privacy policy says they track you both when you're on the site and elsewhere online, and that they will allow advertisers to target ads to you but not give advertisers your data. Is this an accurate reading? Is their privacy policy any better or worse than anyone else's privacy policy these days? Which I guess means: Is this reasonable in the context of the current "privacy environment"?

Q2: They also state they do not run ads. How is this reconciled with the comments about advertisers in their privacy policy? (Relevant text from this link: "Substack takes a 10% fee on all paid subscriptions. Substack will never run ads or sell user data.")
posted by 2 cats in the yard to Computers & Internet (2 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: It's been a while since I've worked with internet ads, but I'm pretty sure they're talking about remarketing pixels. This is an advertiser-focused page about Facebook's offering and here is the Google documentation. I don't know enough (really anything) about the law in this area to know whether "we won't sell your data" prevents them from charging Company X for the ability to place their pixel on Substack pages or if it just means they won't sell your email address explicitly. Certainly, they could sell off-site advertising ("pay us to advertise your product to our userbase"). On the page where they say they don't run ads, they say that they support importing content from MailChimp and whatever else, as well as affiliate links, all of which will surely have their own tracking.

The privacy policy pretty clearly allows them to run ads, though they (apparently) aren't.

This is about par for the course, though saying "we don't run ads", while true, strikes me as kind of obnoxious when they're clearly participating in the online advertising ecosystem.

You may be interested in Privacy Badger from the EFF.
posted by hoyland at 5:38 AM on July 25, 2020


Response by poster: Thanks, hoyland, for the feedback/info and the link to Privacy Badger. I wrote to them over the weekend to ask this question - no reply yet, no surprise. I will let you know if I ever do get an explanation from them.
posted by 2 cats in the yard at 7:01 AM on July 28, 2020


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