Creator of pop-up ads apologizes for inventing ‘internet’s original sin’
Pop-up advertisements seem to have been irritating users online since the dawn of the World Wide Web. Now the man responsible for creating the code that ushered in an age of internet whack-a-mole is apologizing for the lack of privacy he brought about.
“I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and principal research scientist at MIT’s Media Lab, wrote in an essay for The Atlantic.
"Not only did I deploy what was probably the first popup, I wrote the javascript and the server-side Perl to launch it," Zuckerman told the magazine’s Adrienne LaFrance in a follow-up. "I'm old."
But the former designer and programmer for Tripod.com is not just apologizing for the annoyance of the pop-ups or how the ad-based business model came to dominate the internet. What he’s really expressing remorse for is the online surveillance and lack of privacy that the business model has brought about. “The internet spies at us at every twist and turn not because Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page are scheming, sinister masterminds, but due to good intentions gone awry,” he wrote.
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