I'm very happy to share that we've just published our User Technology Recommendations , which help our users understand privacy and security issues, and presents tools and techniques you can use to help keep yourself protected from surveillance and other online harms.

We're able to publish these recommendations because we've built our news operations and business opportunity on creating good-faith, pro-privacy relationships with our readers, members, subscribers, customers and users. In contrast with too many publications, we treat you and other users as actual people who are our customers: not a set of "eyeballs" to be captured and scraped for personal data.

This unquestioning exploitation of users and their personal information is part of the sickness in journalism and the news industry today. It's a telling example of how news publications have turned away from serving readers, aided and abetted by exploitative and monopolistic standards pushed by Big Tech and their sycophants in academia and the non-profit industrial complex.

Most odious are those who trumpet the social and charitable good their news outlets support, all the while purposefully or thoughtlessly exposing their users to online harms.

Fortunately, you can take steps to protect yourself with tools and techniques like we spell out in our User Technology Recommendations .

Lastly, I'd note that it's taken us a while to get to this point of aggressively supporting and advocating for user privacy and security, even though this has always been a primary goal. These issues have been paramount as we've upgraded our platform , established policies and terms of use , and excised common, but harmful, tools peddled by third parties .

Although a solopreneur-driven enterprise, the McKinley Park News is still able to publish an online news and local information service that respects users and their privacy and security. We are tiny: If we can respect reader privacy, there's no reason others can't either. However, too many aim low and make the dark choice to profit and benefit from predation and exploitation of their readers and users.

We offer something different, and something that you can trust.