Update: Mint’s website doesn’t actually seem to be using Adsense. It might be a mention that hasn’t been removed from the privacy policy.
The Linux Mint website uses google Adsense to sell your browsing data to google so they can better track your preferences and deliver personalized ads…
They state they do it for the money. Pretty scammy from my opinion. They should remove all the google things from their website (including analytics) and use their own solution instead.
Source: https://www.linuxmint.com/privacy.php
Google Adsense
Authorized third parties such as Google Adsense place cookies as described in our Cookies Policy. We use this information to serve you certain advertising content.
Advertising
We use Google Adsense to provide advertising and help fund our project.
On all websites using Adsense, including Linux Mint’s, Google use cookies to track your web activity and to guess what commercial products you’re most likely to be interested in. This information is then used by Adsense to provide personalized adverts to you.___
Between the wide prevalence of ad-blockers, the multitude of privacy-enhancing extensions and options, the absolutely minimal useful marketing data to be gleaned from a visitor to their site, and their need to keep the lights on while supplying the world with the fruits of their significant work for free… I’m fine with that.
It’s not like they’re injecting stalkerware onto your OS installs.
Sure, but « better than nothing » doesn’t make it the best. In the end, it’s a much worse look when wording it this way: « they sell your visit’s information to google for profit »
It’s a bit odd for a « for privacy » distro to have this on their website