The Observer Says It Cares About Your Privacy — While Sharing Your Data With 161 Partners
Few phrases on the modern internet have become as hollow as "We Care About Your Privacy." You have seen it plastered across cookie banners, embedded in privacy policy footers, and prominently displayed on news websites that simultaneously harvest your personal data at an industrial scale. The Observer, one of the world's oldest Sunday newspapers, has managed to turn this contradiction into something almost breathtaking in its audacity: the publication shares your personal data with no fewer than 161 third-party partners — and lists those partners directly beneath the heading "We Care About Your Privacy."
That is not a typo. One hundred and sixty-one partners. And they want you to know they care.
What Does It Mean to Have 161 Third-Party Trackers?
To understand why this number is staggering, it helps to think about what a third-party tracker actually does. When you visit a website like The Observer, you are not just loading content from one server. Embedded within the page are dozens — sometimes hundreds — of tiny scripts, pixels, and tags that report your behavior to external companies. These trackers record which articles you read, how long you spend on each page, what device you are using, where you are located, and much more. That data is then packaged, sold, and traded across an ecosystem of advertisers, data brokers, and analytics platforms.
Now multiply that by 161 separate entities, each with their own data retention policies, their own downstream partners, and their own commercial incentives. The moment you land on The Observer's homepage, your browsing session becomes the raw material for an entire economy you never agreed to participate in — at least not in any meaningful sense of informed consent.
As writer Bharat Iyer put it pointedly: "Imagine if, upon purchasing a copy of the Sunday newspaper in 1791, you were followed around town by 161 men, taking note of everything you do throughout the day." The Observer was founded that year. Back then, buying a newspaper was a genuinely private act. Today, reading one online is anything but.
The Insult Wrapped Inside the Injury
There is a meaningful difference between a company that quietly collects your data and one that actively tells you it cares about your privacy while doing so. The former is troubling. The latter is a form of manipulation. When The Observer places the phrase "We Care About Your Privacy" above a list of 161 data-sharing partners, it is not informing you — it is performing transparency while banking on the fact that almost no one will read far enough to feel the full weight of what is being disclosed.
This is the modern consent theater that has flourished in the years since the EU's General Data Protection Regulation came into force. Companies discovered that they could satisfy the letter of disclosure requirements without ever genuinely respecting the spirit of user privacy. The result is an internet littered with cookie banners engineered to confuse, consent dialogs designed to exhaust, and privacy statements that run to thousands of words specifically because brevity would make the truth too legible.
Telling someone "We care about your skull" while hitting them over the head with a baseball bat is not care. It is a performance of care designed to defuse the very anger that honest disclosure would provoke.
Online Tracking Would Be Unacceptable in the Physical World
One of the clearest ways to grasp how abnormal pervasive online tracking really is involves transposing it onto everyday physical life. John Gruber made this point memorably back in 2020, and it remains as relevant as ever. Imagine walking into a pharmacy, picking up a bottle of sunscreen, deciding against it, and walking out. Now imagine that the moment you stepped back onto the pavement, a stranger appeared at your elbow offering you a discount on sunscreen — having somehow known exactly what you had been looking at inside the store.
Most people would find that deeply unsettling. The instinctive reaction would not be mild discomfort but something closer to alarm. Yet this is precisely what happens every time you browse a news website that runs third-party advertising trackers. The only reason we have become desensitized to it online is that the surveillance is invisible. You cannot see the 161 observers following you. That invisibility is not a feature of good privacy practice — it is the condition that makes the data extraction possible in the first place.
Why the Number 161 Actually Matters
It would be easy to dismiss this as a problem inherent to the entire online publishing industry, and there is some truth to that framing. Digital advertising has long depended on invasive tracking, and The Observer is far from alone in participating in this ecosystem. But specificity matters here. When a publication reaches a number as extreme as 161 named partners, it moves beyond routine industry practice into something that deserves specific scrutiny and specific accountability.
- Each additional partner represents an additional point of potential data breach or misuse.
- Each partner may have their own network of downstream data-sharing arrangements, multiplying the exposure exponentially.
- Each partner operates under their own privacy standards, which may be considerably weaker than those of the original publisher.
- The cumulative profile that can be assembled from 161 data streams is qualitatively different from anything a single tracker could build.
The scale is not a detail. The scale is the point.
What Genuine Privacy Respect Actually Looks Like
A publication that genuinely cared about user privacy would not need 161 advertising partners to sustain itself. Several well-regarded outlets have demonstrated that reader-supported models, contextual advertising — which targets content rather than individuals — and minimal data collection are all viable paths. These approaches require rethinking revenue models that have been optimized over decades for surveillance-based advertising, which is genuinely difficult. But the difficulty of doing the right thing does not transform the wrong thing into an acceptable alternative.
Genuine privacy respect starts with honesty: not hiding the scale of data sharing behind reassuring language, not designing consent flows to maximize opt-ins, and not treating user data as a commodity to be distributed across a network of 161 commercial relationships. It means building a business model that does not require readers to sacrifice their privacy as the implicit price of access to journalism.
The Broader Lesson for Digital News Consumers
The Observer's tracker count is an extreme case, but the underlying dynamic is widespread. If you read news online without a tracker-blocking browser extension or a privacy-focused browser, the odds are high that dozens of third parties are watching every article you open, every headline you hover over, and every page you abandon mid-scroll. Your reading habits — which are intimately connected to your political views, your health concerns, your financial anxieties, and your personal interests — are being monetized continuously.
The least that publishers owe their readers is honesty about this reality, delivered without the cynical reassurance that everything is fine because they care. One hundred and sixty-one partners is not care. It is the opposite of care wearing care's clothing.