They claim to refuse to draw any conclusion, but then in contradiction to that statement, state their personal belief that any connection number greater than zero is harmful elsewhere in a later paragraph; and present the appearance of taking the high ground by not making claims, in contrast to journalists that do.

This document as presented is only meaningful to two audiences: those who already agree with the author’s viewpoint on connections made by browsers when no user action has occurred, and those who have already formed viewpoints on the concerns around browsers and outbound connections.

This is theatrics. The author clearly has opinions, and has crafted it to be attractive and interesting solely to those who have already formed an opinion on these issues — as is evident from the context that leads to such a post existing at all, much less reaching the HN front page.

A less theatrical post could have stated why counting these connections matters to anyone, and plainly stated the author’s view that browsers with a count of zero are preferable.

Instead, they buried their opinion in a later paragraph, declared it absent when it’s present, and left things vague enough that any supporter of their viewpoint can argue to any detractor of their viewpoint that they never stated an opinion at all. Instead of supporting productive and nuanced conversation, they fan the flames of belief with data structured to promote their view, while attempting (and failing) to claim the neutral high ground.

A useful datapoint for evaluating their viewpoint here would have been, “Are all of the browser’s outbound connections first-party to the browser’s author and/or the site navigated?”. For many mobile browsers embedded in mobile apps, is wholly untrue: they monitor and report on your page views to themselves, which is a gross violation of privacy. Another would have been, “Do any connections occur before site navigation?”, to which a simple Yes or No suffices; either it’s Yes, or it’s No, as for tracking purposes it doesn’t matter whether it’s 1, 2, or many — only if it’s zero or non-zero. Those two questions would lead to productive discussion and debate, in a way that lists of hostnames with a statement of neutrality does not.