Is using fast-forward on your DVR unethical?

Is skimming past the ads in a newspaper or magazine unethical?

Is it ethical to let your eyes glide past the ads shown in a browser?

Is it ethical to read books from a free library rather than buying the right to read a copy from a store?

TV is paid on viewership numbers. Newspapers are paid on circulation. Gliding past ads on a site is factored into the CPM values. Books in a library are paid for and covered by the first-sale doctrine.

You don't think people who change channels to avoid ads/who use DVRs is factored into the price per viewer for TV ads?

Your individual impact might be harder to track than with ad-blockers, but on the aggregate you are driving down the price per viewer by switching on channels during ads, using DVR, etc.

(Imagine a world where 100% of people used a DVR and skipped ads. Obviously the price of TV ads would plummet. By using a DVR you are contributing to making our world, that world).

So if I had the free time, I would consider attending in order to ask pointed questions and warn other people away.

I think we're at a very Napster moment for content websites.

Additionally you can use things like Patreon or Google Contributor.

It is everyone's duty to burn all books, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of books contain hostile, abusive, invasive, and/or subversive content.

This is made apparent by:

>loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.

Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.

More importantly, if the sole concern is "hostile payloads" then the acceptable ads program should be exactly what you support. I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup, and I support ABP in pushing more publishers towards acceptable ads.

But what about data or privacy?

>I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup

The concern there would be privacy/tracking via advertisements. I readily admit that is a silly argument if one is already using Facebook. I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know when, if ever, Facebook will extend their advertisements to be used on partnered sites instead of internal-only. I can block them in advance even if I may never see them at all.

If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.

The difference is that you're not having someone sweep the grocery store and remove all free sample ladies before you enter it. Ignoring a free sample lady is akin to ignoring an ad on page.

The primary difference though is that the lady doesn't take a photograph of you, follow you around the store noting everything you stop to look out or put in your cart, and then follow you out to the parking lot and go to the next store with you.

I'm not saying that what content owners or advertisers do is right or ethical, just that at it's core blocking the ads is unethical as well.