Press

“loved the tone, typography and disclosure.”

Founded GNOME. Created Mono. Founded Xamarin. Former Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. FSF Award 1999. Time 100 Innovators 2000.

“Oh my. This is spectacular.”

Design strategist, Floate Design Partners (Melbourne). 25-year career; host of The Nudge podcast.

“Tremendous. A real public service, genuinely.”

Adjunct fellow, American Security Project. Consultant, Ernst & Young Cyber Economics. From someone whose day job is cyber-defense strategy.

“Great idea: a web page that simply shows you the info your browser sends about you and your system whenever you open a web page.”

Foundational figure of the Open Access movement. Formerly Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. Author of Open Access (MIT Press, 2012).

“I'll put it in an upcoming edition.”

Pluralistic, EFF Special Advisor, author of Enshittification (2025). Featured /taken as the first link in his May 11 Bluesky linkdump.

“Even if you reject every cookie and hide behind a VPN, there's a flood of other information harvested from your device every visit.”

Contributor at BoingBoing. Opens with the broader argument that cookies and VPNs aren't enough, then reaches for /taken as the artefact that lets a non-technical audience feel the rest of the iceberg. BoingBoing's reach exceeds Pluralistic's; the piece drove 34 referrals in its first hour.

“A great advertisement for running a VPN, because I can delight in what it gets wrong.”

Made Fray in 1996, one of the earliest webzines. Worked on Blogger pre-Google. Wrote Design for Community (2001).

“The way you presented the information was some fantastic storytelling.”

GM, Global Consumer Business at Malwarebytes. From the consumer-privacy industry, about the editorial argument for what it builds.

“Why was the web designed so a website gets so much information about its visitors?”

Co-Director, Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen. Lead PI, AI STORIES (ERC Advanced Grant). Blogging at jilltxt.net since 2000.

“A Black-Mirror-esque zine based on data.”

Writer at Shortform. The framing that travels best: an entire genre named in five words.

“Everyone should know this.”

Editor-in-Chief, BMJ Medical Humanities. Simon & Schuster author. Host of Peculiar Book Club.

“Taken: this is a web page that shows how much data your browser can collect that websites can use to “fingerprint” your device, even without cookies.”

kottke.org, “home of fine hypertext products since 1998.” The foundational figure of the personal-curation-blog tradition. Twenty-eight years of finding the good stuff.

“This is basically an Ian McKellen impersonator doing a dramatic reading of your HTTP request headers and IP address.”

From the MetaFilter thread. The funniest line of the entire launch, and structurally correct.

“This series of websites is a remarkable effort to capture a moment. Vol II rather poetically paints the picture you might not have seen last night as the sun set, and is my favorite. Great website authorship, through and through.”

Poet and writer (andystevens.name). Bookmarked the full series via indieweb h-cite microformat, engaging with the work as a series rather than a single volume.

“How easy it is for companies to be creepy and build a fingerprint on you, using information the browser happily hands over.”

Co-founder of Set Studio with Heydon Pickering. Author of Every Layout and CUBE CSS. Founded Piccalilli in 2018 — indie design publication, anti-hype, anti-AI-slop, pro-craft.

“If you really wanna get a sense of how creepy this all is, check this out.”

Journalist and broadcaster. Host of For Tech's Sake and Connected AI Podcast. Recurring RTÉ contributor. The broadcaster, not the page, reached for /taken to make the data-brokerage argument feel concrete to a non-technical audience. First broadcast-media surface in the record.

“A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission.”

Daily design-link curation since 2012, founded by Sacha Greif. Catalogued /taken under the UX category, framing the page as interaction design rather than a privacy demo — a lens no other voice on this page uses.

“This is what free costs.”

CTO of SPS Commerce. Founding CTO of BigCharts. Writes Weekly Thing every Sunday — a 348-issue consecutive run. Issue #348 themed Agents as Collaborators; the heading itself links to /taken and bridges into a privacy-legislation argument: exhibit A for the case being made in the room he is in.

“We give away reams of information about ourselves online and don't even know it.”

Business / Innovation columnist at The Irish Times. First Irish national-newspaper article on /taken, distinct from the RTÉ Drivetime broadcast. Writes for mainstream readers, not the privacy community — translates the page into ordinary internet-hygiene terms. The non-HN audience /taken was built to reach.