Stop Medium Spying on You

As I state on a previous article “Why I never joined Medium”, I have never joined the content platform. Literally I don’t even want to create an account or use any social login like Google Account to login. The fact that many developers, especially new, use the platform and its affiliate sites, makes me want to keep reading the “stories” for as much as I want. Medium does not want that; they want you to login and they won’t let you read as many articles you want without logging in.

The solution to the problem is rather simple. We block cookies for the main site/domain and for each affiliate site/domain. But then we get that nasty sticky popper box saying something about that they log users data. We can use Greasemonkey for Firefox or Tampermonkey for Chromium based browsers to alter the CSS and Javascript of any site, so we can do the same for this one.

Select Cookies from the domain menu
Block everything related to the medium or affiliate site under the Allowed tab. Don’t block cookies from google or accounts.google.com else Google won’t be able to identify you.
Install Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey
Create a script and add the following CSS declarations using GM_addStyle

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Medium policy popup
// @namespace    http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version      0.1
// @description  try to take over the world!
// @author       You
// @match        https://medium.com/*
// @match        https://levelup.gitconnected.com/*
// @grant        GM_addStyle
// ==/UserScript==

GM_addStyle(`
#root ~ div,
[id^="lo-highlight-meter"],
.meteredContent > section { display: none; }
`);

Take a notice on @match header directive. There we can define on each line the domain of each site we want to disable the annoying blocks.

And that’s it! You can now read as many articles you want without anyone tracking you down and not logging in.

Keep in mind that if you have registered and subscribed for the email feed, clicking links directly inside from the email will track you by using URL parameters like:

https://medium/@paparias/how-to-get-laid-after-90-a1b2c3d4e5f6?source=email-a1b2c3d4e5f6-0123456789-digest.reader----0----0--00---------------a1b2c3d4_a1b2_a1b2_a1b2_a1b2c3d4e5f6-0a1b2c3d4_a1b2_a1b2_a1b2_a1b2c3d4e5f6----&sectionName=top

We just copy the link and paste it to a text editor not inside the browser address bar and we delete all URL params after the question-mark ?:

https://medium/@paparias/how-to-get-laid-after-90-a1b2c3d4e5f6