A Public Apology

In the mid-1990s, Ethan Zuckerman worked for an early social media business that hosted web pages. To earn revenue, the firm targeted advertising at its 18 million users. It didn’t want to place ads directly on users’ web pages, because it didn’t know what content they contained. So Zuckerman wrote some Java code that would open a new window containing an ad, essentially inventing the pop-up ad. Some 20 years later, he wrote an article for The Atlantic in which he took responsibility for his small role in shaping the Internet as a place where advertisers vie for users’ attention and where surveillance is the norm. As a result, he...