Suggesting Something Perliously Wrong With The Universe, The Register has both a more informative story and a far more sober, and accurate, title than Forbes:
It might be interesting to "weigh" certain websites negatively (e.g. Forbes), especially when they continuously use click-baits and other dishonest techniques to deceive their audience.
AFAIU that is done, though I'm not sure Forbes makes the list.
I have no idea if it's a list per se or of all sites get some weighting factor, starting with 1, and falling (or possibly rising) from there.
In terms of general reputation / link-worthiness, this is an interesting question/problem online. Also the general problem of assigning reputation on a site-wide or domain-wide basis. There are more and less reputable parts of, say, "facebook.com". I don't think all of "google.com" should be treated similarly (more a problem when "plus.google.com" was an active member of that domain, and not even a proper subdomain component). Wordpress would come to mind.
Which means that when you're assigning reputation(s), the assignable handle is an issue. Does it map sufficiently well to what it is you want to give a high or low reputation.
The problem even exists for individual people. I have friends I'd trust for book recommendations but not food suggestions, and vice versa. Scientists, philosophers, and politicians notoriously are highly reliable in some domains but not others.
Is there a serious discussion of the privacy implications of this feature somewhere we can read instead? I'm not completely understanding the scenario. The one given is that you can probe a page for text (e.g. "cancer" in the example) by looking at resources requested. But doing that naively seems to require access to the unencrypted HTTP traffic between the endpoints, which would give you that data anyway.
Who would have predicted that over the course of ~10 years, Forbes would pivot from a respected elite business publication into a sluggish clickbait "contributor" website junked up with high ad load + low-quality self-promotional articles?
How are they even profitable? Who in their right mind can go to Forbes.com, stomach the absolutely crap user experience tossed at them, and tolerate it enough to keep returning?
Maybe "ScrollToTextFragment chrome browser capability to worry users" would have been better?