Reddit updating privacy policy to honor Do Not Track; CEO Huffman urges users to consider privacy browser extensions that block third-party scripts, cookies
Steve Huffman / reddit :
Context & Ripple Effects
In late 2015, Reddit moved to honor browser-level Do Not Track signals in its privacy policy, with CEO Steve Huffman pointing users toward extensions that block third-party scripts and cookies. It was a period of policy housekeeping at the company — months earlier Huffman had also floated a revised content policy with vaguely worded decency rules.
The stance looks different against what came later: by 2023 Reddit had removed the ability to opt out of ad personalization based on Reddit activity outside select countries (rolling back personalization opt-outs), and by 2024 Huffman was demanding payment from Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for scraping Reddit data (the pay-to-scrape fight). The 2015 DNT promise is the baseline against which that trajectory reads.
First-order effects
- Users who send a Do Not Track signal get their preference honored in Reddit's updated policy, and Huffman is explicitly steering them toward extensions that cut off third-party scripts and cookies — reducing the tracking surface on Reddit pages immediately.
- Advertisers and third-party script providers embedded in Reddit lose some behavioral signal wherever DNT-enabled or extension-armed users browse.
Second-order effects
- A platform publicly validating blocking tools puts pressure on peers' privacy policies to match DNT support or explain why they don't, since Reddit can now be cited as the counterexample.
- The same user-data control Huffman endorsed in 2015 sits awkwardly next to the 2023 narrowing of ad-personalization opt-outs — an internal tension between the privacy pitch and the ads business.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform control over user data hardens into control over all data leaving the platform: the 2015 willingness to honor browser signals gives way to a licensing regime where access to Reddit's corpus itself must be paid for, as Huffman demanded of Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity.
- Regulators and standards bodies watching whether voluntary signals like DNT are honored gain evidence both ways — a major site adopting it early, then later restricting user-facing controls — feeding the case for enforceable rules rather than browser-level opt-ins.
The trend: Platforms' posture toward user data has drifted from honoring browser-level signals like Do Not Track to treating the data itself as a metered asset, with Reddit moving from both ends of that arc.