It has been less than a month since the New York Times bought Wordle, but it is already ruining everyone's favorite word game. You guessed it, your daily puzzles are being loaded with ad trackers. Most of us assumed that this would happen eventually. The Times dropped a seven-figure sum on a game that is still free to play, so those profits would need to be recovered from somewhere. There were a dozen different trackers shoved into places where there had been zero before.
Some of the trackers were from the New York Times, but most were used to send data to third-party players.
Gross? It is also banal as hell. Before you comment, we know Gizmodo has a lot of ad trackers. We know that we are wrong. The Times pulls in tens of millions of ad dollars every quarter, and that bank makes a lot of money by promoting subscriptions and people who aren't already paying. Wordle players might be targeted with ads for Times merchandise or subscriptions to the Times in the future.
I'm sure for most people, all of this is fine. It's fine! It's at odds with some of the reasons people came to Wordle in the first place, turning the most pure part into something that's just another cash grab. Wordle looks and feels the same way it did before the Times acquisition: fine.
The New York Times didn't comment on the trackers.
I immediately thought too hard about it. Ad trackers were created to put t-shirts and mugs on our timelines, but they can also be used for more sinister purposes. There are many cases of cops using the data from those shitty ads to track people. Two of the companies that officers tap on the regular for this work are tied up in Wordle's shiny new trackers. Every time you open the page to see the day's puzzle, the page gives details back to those companies and the data it shares can be very detailed. At the very least, it is sending broad strokes to say that you were on the site at a certain time.
Adtech players can pull a lot of shady tricks to share more data on the regular. If a cop wanted to set ageofence around your neighborhood, they could easily use BlueKai's ad data to get those wheres. One of the reasons that you ended up on the feds' watch list for a crime you didn't commit is the fact that you were at a coffee shop on a Tuesday.
This nightmare is not happening on Wordle right now. This scenario applies to most of the sites you visit every day, not just Wordle. The scariest part about all of this is that it can. The digital ad industry is barely regulated at the best of times, and there are literally thousands of players out there, each with their own labyrinthine way of routeing your data from an app, a site, a fun little puzzle, to... well, wherever they want, as long as
They haven't come for Dordle yet.
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