The current system is vastly more invasive of reader privacy than the alternative suggested.<p>The publishing site, numerous third-party metrics providers, advertising providers, ISPs, and any MITM listener has access to the full metadata, at a minimum, and potentially full data.<p>You&#x27;d need to disintermediate via Tor (blocked or disabled by a great many sites -- Cloudflare and Google are particularly culpable here), or other means, to avoid this.<p>I&#x27;ve made a habit of using Tor extensively for a number of reasons, tab management among them (opening trivial articles in a Tor browser and having them wash out helps, very slightly, in managing my tab explosion in Firefox&#x2F;Android).