Context

Data-intensive advertising is frequently described as the unavoidable price of running a free digital service. A competing queer platform offers a useful counterexample.

Scruff and Jack’d operate in the same technical ecosystem and serve users exposed to many of the same risks, yet their owner chose to remove third-party advertising software rather than normalise it.

Argument

Perry Street Software, which operates Scruff and Jack’d and reaches a reported thirty million members, removed third-party programmatic advertising from its products in 2018 and stripped other companies’ software development kits out of its applications at what its chief executive describes as tremendous cost in time and money. The company does not sell user data and does not use third-party ad networks. Eric Silverberg’s stated reasoning is jurisdictional rather than ethical in the abstract: the community is sensitive to data sharing because there are countries that criminalise same-sex acts. The same conclusion was available to every company in Part Two.

This does not prove that Perry Street has no privacy risk or commercial motive. It proves that a particular extraction mechanism was a choice. When one company can reject third-party ad networks, “industry standard” stops functioning as a complete defence for competitors that retain them.

Evidence

Key finding

Perry Street Software, which operates Scruff and Jack’d and reaches a reported thirty million members, removed third-party programmatic advertising from its products in 2018 and stripped other companies’ software development kits out of its applications at what its chief executive describes as tremendous cost in time and money.

Implication

Third-party advertising and data-sharing infrastructure are commercial choices, not necessities.