The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate.
There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever.
Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.
I'm shopping for a $1.3M turbine part. It will look nice next to my hand made tibetan merino wool cat stand that I am also shopping for. Of course my eyeballs are worth $1000/minute. Why do you ask?
As mean as these guys are, they could be a lot worse.
Anyway, kudos to the extension authors!
It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
>They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.
This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price".
The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model.
The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative.
I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high.
I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days.
So would you suggest (or would you even use) AdBlockers identify themselves to the website (so I can write "if($_SERVER["AdBlocker]){echo "Sorry, see ads or leave}"?
Because there are adblock blockers, and people write _adblock-blocker-blockers_.
When you buy a magazine from Starbucks do you tell the clerk what part of the magazine you intend to read what what you intend to ignore? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. The clerk & publishers are well aware I may ignore or even rip out any or all of the magazine pages and the magazine is priced accordingly.
Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators?
You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Making the claim that you ad block because your attention is more valuable though is a joke.
It's not a joke. It's avoiding death by thousand cuts.
Time is literally the most valuable commodity we have. Anything you do to waste someone's time - like displaying obtrusive, annoying ads - is in my books an act of aggression.
>There's enough better content available for free and without ads
Surely you'd just stick with the better content that doesn't use ads all the time right?
Because I get linked to them. Also, social objects - other people are visiting those pages, so I have to check them out too in order to participate in the conversation.
Also, YouTube.
> Surely you'd just stick with the better content that doesn't use ads all the time right?
Yeah, and I mostly do.
So maybe that's the cost of not seeing ads, you don't get to participate in conversations.
It's like if Stallman would, instead of making GNU, hack into MS and put the source online because he "just has to".
Most of the time, taking a moral stand requires sacrifice.
Your analogy doesn't work, because this is about ownership. I own my machine, so I get to decide what will run and how.
You own your machine but not the text. Right now it's still somewhat hypothetical, but what would be your opinion if the major websites would put a T&C that you have to enable (Let's say it was safe JS) ads to view content. Would you still say "it's my machine and I view what I want when I want"?
How are adblock-blockers (which are counterbalanced by adblock-blockers-blockers by adblockers) different?
You don't get to own the text just because you can read it, see if you read this - it is still my text (because I wrote it!).
>what would be your opinion if the major websites would put a T&C that you have to enable (Let's say it was safe JS) ads to view content.
And how would I know it's safe? I don't even let the closest friends on the wifi because they don't run adblockers on their phone and I don't want my router to get pwned [1] just because someone like Forbes is making a buck using Ads.
> Would you still say "it's my machine and I view what I want when I want"?
It is still my machine, so long as I physically own it. If I run a virtual machine in the cloud it's not mine you see, because then I'm just renting it. If ad networks want to remove the ability to block ads they would have to own the machines and rent out those computers to users, they are free to do this.
[1] https://www.proofpoint.com/us/threat-insight/post/home-route...
You're free to do what you want, but not to read content.
YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?
See my point about social objects.
> YouTube offers a way to pay for an ad free experience. Are you a paying member?
They don't offer it in my country, so no. But I do am a paying subscriber of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime Video, FWIW.
That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/
Well, yes - that's life, basically :). Writing a comment here is also me trading time for feeling connected ;).
> That's a shame. They offer Prime video in Poland? I don't even think we get it in Australia :/
I'm surprised, I thought Australia is usually right after US in such things. As for Poland, they've started offering it something like a week ago. I signed up immediately after I learned about it, mostly because I wanted to watch "The Man in the High Castle".
There is a rarely discussed topic of access for people who don't have funds or means to obtain it - like myself 10 years ago. It's tangential to ad blocking discussion, but a reason why I'm not sure if a pay-per-view Internet would be a good idea in general.
Oh, and if it helps me look better - I'm not really "ad blocking" per se, I'm doing responsive administration of my secondary OS (i.e. the browser) resources by using uMatrix, which makes me put some up-front decisionmaking work about which requests are or are not allowed on any page I visit ;). But it's fun, and I get to see how more and more insane the web is becoming :).
Whether something is sustainable for content creators is not the users' concern, you don't go around worrying whether Walmart can make profit, why do you worry whether a random internet blogger can?
Their program (Server) may ask my program (Browser) to do things and my program may deny ANY request based on ANY criteria that I get to set. My program is under no obligation to do anything their program asks.
This is all perfectly reasonable and fair.
It works fabulously as supplemental income for talented artisnal content creators who make their content because they care. They'll probably still need a day job like the rest of us, but there's a good chance people will hire them for those same skills that make them great content creators, whether they write interesting blogs or make neat-o electronics projects or produce great art or whatever.
I'm all about supporting inspired human creation. Maybe we'll implement basic minimum income and some of these people can safely dedicate their life to their talent, and inspire others along the way?
It can't possibly sustain content farms like buzzfeed. I consider this to be a great positive, and wish buzzfeed as swift and impactful a cratering as possible.
You strike me as a standup chap who would not resort to such techniques, so I'm sure you'll now be willing to explain to me how you came to such a conclusion, so I can help dispel your misconception?
The fact is a lot of great content is expensive to produce.
I'm afraid to inform you that the facts you have stated do not contain sufficient information to make such an inference. You cannot know with any certainty based on these facts alone whether I understand the costs involved in making good content.
You complain about the cost of your attention while suggesting people spend their time building free stuff for you.
That seems incredibly tone deaf. Advertisers should be working on fixing the problems. Get rid of tracking, get rid of scripts, make promises about acceptable ad size and latency and every year reduce those numbers.
And when a network ad-spots start drying up, the advertisers will have to switch.
at least, that's how I'd hope it would work.
Ads aren't going away.
Fine by me. I'll simply mark it as the malware that it is and never return to that domain again.
> b) they will start including ads in ways that make ad blockers ineffective.
This technology already exists but its ignored because harvesting and selling user data is a cash cow. This is perfectly possible today...
<a href="someplace.com"><img src="/somead.png" /></a>
Many of us hope for option c - that publishers work with ad networks to fix some of the problems that drive people to ad blockers in the first place. Some people object to advertising no matter how it is done, but I think that's a relative small number of people. Most people will accept well-behaved ads.
Give me a advertisement network which takes legal liability for what they advertise and follows local law, and we could start talking about what implicit deal exist when I visit a website. This mean no recording (data protection laws), no malware (anti-hacking laws), fair representation of the product, clear pricing, no alcohol, tobacco or advertisement towards minors, clear indication that its an advertisement, and the other rules that exist in advertisement laws here in Sweden. Tax laws involved are also always involved If there is a deal where service is provided in exchange for goods.
How do I know this without viewing ads that I don't agree to view?
> It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment.
The ego required to tell people who are explicitly not agreeing to your terms that they are implicitly agreeing to your terms is appalling. Surely we can believe people when they tell us what they agree to.
> This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
You loaded this hacker news page with the intent of reading other users' posts.
I've never once loaded a page with the intent of viewing an ad.
If you don't want to view my posts, I'd be entirely fine with you writing a browser plugin that strips my posts from your page. Consume the content you want to consume, that's your prerogative.
Yeah, it's literally like that. I open a random webpage, wait a few seconds, and here they are. I visit my aunt, and don't even get to open the browser before BAM, ads everywhere!
They are free to take "counter measures". But that doesn't stop the fact that they are paying for both your time and the content.
Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you.
You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.
What I do with that data isn't up to you. That includes viewing all, parts, or none of the information I received from your server. That especially includes deciding about what code gets executed on my machine.
If advertisers want to control what I am doing with the content I get, please find yourself a new protocol and DRM it to your hearts' content. Just leave the Web alone.
So Facebook says that the foundation of the web is sending data to the server (such as cookies) and receiving information back.
Nowhere in the protocol does it say they can't track you. Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral.
The foundation of the internet is that the server sends you data. Your browser happens to have a security hole and you got a virus.
Totally ethical and legal. Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses.
It is currently legal, but that doesn't imply that it's moral. Legality does not define morality.
> Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses.
Correct.
> Totally ethical and legal.
Sending a virus is patently unethical regardless of the transport mechanism. as for legality, see a lawyer about 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5).
I know. The examples were still factually incorrect straw-men.
> it must be legal and ethical to block them
That's the point; it is legal and ethical to use data that was voluntarily given. If you want control over how things are used, stop sending to everybody freely and require a contract.
> harass those who spend money on them.
Clicking a link isn't harassment.
You are making people lose money (not the malware adnetworks, not the trackers, but the guy buying advertisement) to prove a point to the ad-network (which is actually making money off this), I consider it close to harassment.
So now when you run this program, the two entities you're most against (Google for not having safe-ads) and the content website (for not working for free) are actually getting payed!
If you want to hurt Google, just block ads.
Yes, that is one of the intended goals.
> not the trackers, but the guy buying advertisement
Targeting the source of funding is often an effective strategy.
> {,malware} ad-network
> trackers
> guy buying advertisement
All of these are responsible, so they are all intended targets.
> I consider it close to harassment
If following a website's href suggestion to load a URL is "harassment", then advertising is also harassment.
I didn't say it was.
That is not how the web works, and that is not the social contract that it was built on. Sorry if it doesn't fit advertisers' needs, but that is really not my problem. Maybe advertisers and payed content could go to some other medium that accommodates all the restrictions you desire, and then we can all be happy?
No such relationship exists.
You want something, they have something. You communicate your desire and they provide you with something. That is a relationship.
When I click a link, there is a relationship between me and some entity in the same sense that the term is used in computer science to describe relational databases.
This is not a relationship in the legal or ethical senses. By clicking a link, I did not agree to anything at all. All I did was react to an announcement that there is some resource somewhere, and deciding to take a look at it. If I decide to do it from a terminal and read the HTML directly without rendering, that is no one's business and my actions are not unethical in any way.
The advertisement industry is starting to behave like the music industry in the early days of the web. They are willing to destroy the best tool ever created for global human communication and knowledge sharing for the purpose of protecting an obsolete business model.
So I'm agreeing to the contract before even seeing the content? I guess you're fine with me having 30 days to return the content under the Consumer Rights Act (UK) if it's not as described and they'll refund me the advertising money they made from me, right?
Particularly, if you say it's a trade of content for attention, then:
For goods and services bought online, your rights are the same as if you'd bought them from a shop.
You can make a claim for a refund, repair or replacement when the digital content you've bought doesn't meet these three standards: [..]
Fit for purpose: You should be able to use it for what the seller says it will do (its purpose), whether that's their statement when you buy it, or an answer to your question. For instance, an audio track should play, and a game shouldn't infect your computer with a virus.
As described: It should match its description when you bought it. For example, a film should be in the format you chose when you bought it.
So an advert from CNN shouldn't infect my computer with malware, and a link which claims I "won't believe" something [2] should leave me in disbelief.
[1] http://www.rica.org.uk/content/consumer-rights
[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/02/world/gallery/astonishing-...
Yeah?
I get payed for my attention in euros, after signing a contract or entering an agreement. Maybe that sounds silly to you, but that is how I roll.
I assume that you are implying that I have some moral obligation to the people publishing publicly accessible content. If you are not implying that, then we are all in agreement and there is nothing further to discuss. We both agree that ad blockers are fine, case closed.
If you are implying that, you are wrong. The WORLD WIDE WEB was not built on that premise and we were here before the marketeers and advertisers arrived. If the former manage to make some money while providing people with something they want, that's fine. I have nothing against honest business. But don't try to pretend that I have any obligation to do anything just because I accessed a resource that you made public. If you want to charge for your resource, name the price and make it private. Maybe I'll buy it. I buy books all the time. But it's not my fault or moral failing if your business model doesn't work.
And I'm disagreeing, by analogy. That's how it's relevant.
Should the site be able to ask for a refund on their content since you didn't provide what they expected(ad views)?
Also valid, and also leads to the same conclusion: it's a nonsensical idea. Therefore one thing is not 'payment' for the other. There's one protocol that making a HTTP request returns content at the discretion of the server, and there's no advance agreement that the content has value, or that the client is agreeing to trade anything at all for the alleged value.
I didn't say you were legally bound to watch the ads at any point.
I didn't say you said I was, only that content is not payment for watching adverts - and that it would be daft if that was the case.
She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like clicking on a link, it can't reasonably be claimed that I entered into a preconceived and negotiated contract where I agreed to payment for a service.
these two are not even close to the same thing. clicking a link is a very specific action "show me this stuff". Your analogy would be more apt if it involved going into a venue where music is performed.
The web equivalent is a paywall.
Now, bars put on free music. And you can go to them and not buy a drink regardless that the landlord puts on the music to get you to buy.
The landlord might get paid to have advertising up, like on a toilet vending machine. But me choosing not to look at it isn't morally wrong.
Arguably, even if I never buy a drink I can benefit the establishment socially.
The problem comes when the establishment not only needs pay the workers and buy the beer but also pay the breweries management and return dividend to share holders.
The web has moved to that stage where the capitalists have moved in - like large breweries owning pubs. Forums aren't run by the admins they're owned by media conglomerates, etc.. I'm really not sure it's made the web a better place.
Now, get off my lawn.
Is a fish obligated to swallow a hook that is cast into the ocean?? No reasonable fisherman would think this.
I'm not a personal fan of ads but when it comes to things I find important enough and have the option, I pay to remove them. The difference however is that the die-hards tend to not accept paying or viewing ads as acceptable. If they did, this wouldn't keep coming up.
Similarly, if I have no binding contract, it certainly can't be required of me to observe or respond to everything within the room. There is no origin for the musician's claimed right to oblige me to any commercial action.
If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections.
I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.)
So pray-tell, if my browser is `wget | html2txt | more`, do you consider me in the moral wrong for failing to also send various bits of PII to whomever CNN considers a Trusted Sponsor today and retrieve images, flash cruft, malware, or whatever else those Trusted Sponsors choose to respond with?
"In breach of implied contract?"
"Failing to respect social mores?"
"Doin' the wrong thing?"
I'm vastly less interested in quibbling about word choice than the underlying concepts being discussed.
Agree. I think it's unfortunate that so much of the debate around advertising, especially from many on the side of ad blocking, focuses only on the evils of tracking and privacy erosion. This project does it too. From their FAQ: "It is not advertising we are protesting, but advertising insofar as it represents a dominant means of tracking users without their consent." But advertising itself should be protested. I don't know why so many shy away from that. I've been working on a project to promote ad blocking. It's been discussed here on HN before, but I'll link to it anyway. https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html
Modern advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response in order to buy a product. The mother/fathers of modern advertising are none other than Edward Bernays and Anna Freud. (Sigmund Freud's nephew and daughter). There's a lot of evidence that Freud resented both of these family members for using his psychoanalyst tools to help industry and government gain profit and power. At the same time, Edward was instrumental in promoting the English version of Freud's book, keeping Sigmund out of the poor house.
I highly recommend watching The Century of the Self. It's a multi-part BBC documentary that goes into the history of advertising and consumerism as we see it in our current age.
Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable.
There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud.
I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn't make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally.
As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That's why I don't do it anymore.
If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about looking at consumers.
FTR: I don't use AdNauseam because I'd prefer to nuke trackers and ads alltogether, but I'm supportive of the project.
So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, because many of the content producers and curators won't waste their time for no return.
I don't like ads, but I like my free content, and ads are an acceptable way of financing it.
Edit: I get that some of you really don't like ads, but the quality of comments here is abysmal. You guys are living in some kind of dreamland if you think you can just kill of advertising and not lose something in the trade off (PS imagine a world with no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) I honestly expect more intelligent commentary from HN, consider both sides of your argument.
Good. Let it die.
There's enough better content available for free and without ads. Somehow, it so happens that people who have something interesting or meaningful to say tend to say it anyway, and either pay for it themselves or ask nicely for something in return.
I honestly do believe the content quality is inversely proportional to the amount and obtrusiveness of ads on the page.
Sure, Wikpedia will stick around post adblock, and so will big conglomerates (they can afford to put up paywalls, like WSJ and others).
Many content-farms will just stick to being a "review for hire" gig.
The problem is that the small shops will close down.
All the guys with cheap hosting accounts making web pages like the 1990's. Ironically they seem to be the only ones with content worth reading...
Great! I'd personally love it if they went away. If it's good content, people have definitely shown to be willing to pay for it.
"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" - https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...
So, no reason why other content couldn't make money.
Kill advertising and you'll take a lot of lame, average content with it. Or even desirable, culturally meaningful content that doesn't quite do enough. Sports news? Forget it, people may find their favourite vlog-commentator and pay for comedy, mash-ups and creativity. A decent article that makes you think for a bit? Not good enough, chances are they'll follow a popular author and his movement and put some money down for the cause they believe in.
(Ok that last thing is a bit scary but it's where things are going anyway...)
Oh yes. Besides the small money drain Netflix and Spotify are, I've lost count on just how much money I spent buying e-books - legal, official e-books - just because of the convenience factor.
> A decent article that makes you think for a bit? Not good enough, chances are they'll follow a popular author and his movement and put some money down for the cause they believe in.
I rarely see such articles published in an ad-sponsored context anyway. An occasional mainstream journalism article, maybe. But as far as I can tell, most interesting/thought-provoking pieces now are being published by bloggers, which can successfully be funded by patronage, or even pay for hosting themselves (it's peanuts).
It's actually better this way, because if your writing isn't directly tied to your income, you're not incentivized to write for exposure. This breeds higher quality.
Micropayments also don't work because no one has done it well, not because it's inherently not going to work.
Even if you know the totals are going to be tiny, being on a meter just adds mental overhead to every click. And moreover most of the time people don't know if something is worth paying for until they've seen it, and they probably resent paying for some things.
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Same for micropayments. No one wants to think about if they should pay for an article even if it is only 1c.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...
I would love that world. Of the things you listed the only one I have an account with is Twitter, and who knows how long that'll last.
When looking at that tradeoff most people seem to agree with you (or don't care to think about it), and some people disagree with you.
A note: So if you just feel like you don't care to make this same choice, I'm not talking to you and am just using your comment as a jumping off point. But you seem to be defending the advertising status quo on HN, and if you are then I am talking to you.
I've never found "But if people start making these choices my business model stops working!" be a particularly defensible argument to make. This is maybe the single place online where it is least needed for me to make this point, right?
But apparently not, especially when it's the so-called disruptors who are making it. This is a potentially popular service to provide people at the moment, the ability to protect themselves from their online habits being used to build profiles of them, and it would destroy the incumbent business model (advertising supported content using click tracking). This sounds like classic disruption to me, doing something good for the consumer [1] while opening up a huge gap for a new and inventive business model to fill the gap.
As everyone is no doubt aware at this moment, there is no ethical argument to be made to save this "content" as a whole. The fact we call it "content" at all means no one really needs to say this do they? It is not saving journalism, that is still dying. I'd put better odds on the next business model that emerges saving investigative journalism, because corporate sponsorship was the stupidest idea for saving it possible anyway.
[1] If you think that using personal information built on surveillance in order to influence purchasing decisions is pro-consumer you are lying to yourself. It is effective and profitable. As is combining it with fake reviews and lifestyle marketing using shame and FOMO.
Yes there is. Many creators successfully support themselves entirely based on Patreon.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-f...
What is your preferred method of paying people on the internet for their content? Do you think that micropayments would be a valid way to deal with this compensation gap?
Most other services I use are paid via subscription fees, or are run ad-free by people as hobby projects.
Almost all the ad-supported services I use are monopolies anyway, have strict network lock-in effects, and shouldn't be in private hand anyway, instead they should be run by a cooperative, foundation, or government. (For example, web search, maps, phone books, etc).
This leaves us with a few ad-supported pages which likely couldn’t directly survive in this new environment, but which rely on content creators for their business anyway – such as YouTube.
For such cases, something like Flattr, but paid out by view, would be useful – something like the Datenträgerabgabe for the GEMA and VG Wort, but paid per month, not per empty CD bought.
There is absolutely no criminal or civil statute nor legal principle in any American or European jurisdiction that binds users to respond to advertising in an accurate or forthright way.
To have such a law on the books would be utterly ridiculous: how could you ever prove in court that I did or didn't properly reflect my forthright intentions when I clicked on a "one weird trick" advertisement? And under what possible principle could I have implicitly contracted to give you an honest assessment of my interest in your advertisement?
Your proposition is perhaps one of the most insane ones I've ever heard argued about advertising, because it claims that you not only have a contractual right to knowledge of my consumerist tendencies, but -- amazingly -- that you believe that contract is with society writ large (i.e. where breach is a criminal fraud) rather than with you (i.e. civil breach) as a service provider.
There isn't a god-given right to make money via your chosen business model. Ads are a sleazy way to make money, and if you choose that, you should pay the consequences. Appealing to "people we know" as if that makes their behavior better? Ugh.
> 3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.
I can't speak to the goals of everyone who is anti-advertising, but my goals here are:
1. Users should be customers, not products, so that companies act in the interest of users, not in the interest of other companies.
2. Users' attention should be respected, only giving users content they ask for.
3. Companies should create products users value enough to pay for, and compete on quality, rather than competing on how many users they can shove idealized presentations of their product (often outright lies) in front of.
> 3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.
(Now, generating new links with a for loop would be a crime, at least in the US, so I definitely won't do that.)
And yet, there you are anyways, with your ad blocker.. hard to take the high ground I think..
Indeed they should. In most cases, they still send the page when requested. The problems start when authors decide they don't just want to control what they serve at their website. The advertising model also requires control of the client to guarantee that the ads are shown.
That kind of control is possible with a contract (e.g. a paywall or similar controlled access). Instead, a lot of "content creators" want to have the benefits of a contract but only from one side.
> And yet, there you are anyways, with your ad blocker
So stop sending them data when they ask for it. In the meantime, ad blockers are going to show exactly how little some "content" was actually worth. If your content is worth so little that nobody is willing to pay for it in money or time, don't be surprised when attempts to force payment (in time or attention) results in blowback.
> hard to take the high ground I think
It isn't unethical to use as desired data that you were freely given. The only people that are ceding ethical high ground are "content creators" that want to control how people use their website. Delusional beliefs about what they think contract law ought to be is no substitute for a business model that understands what the internet actually is.
--
TL;DR - We aren't ethically obligated to prop up your business plan that relies on artificial scarcity. If you don't want people to read your web pages, stop sending those pages without pre-{payment,authorization}. I suggest finding a better business plan.
Analogy time. A guy sits outside my house with a camera, making pictures through a 10cm slit between the curtains. I come out of the house, take his camera and smash it. Vandalism? Don't think so. Activism? Not really. Basically, this is just self-protection. Preventing this from happening in the future (or at least making a good attempt at it).
I'm all for helping fellow startuppers, but no part of me feels that startups that buy ads are an endangered species worth nurturing. The whole ad model leaves the world worse off, and it sucks that startups are left with no option but to participate in it.
Legally, you might get Tortious Interference pass the laugh test, but who is interfering? The author (if they're cautious) isn't running it, so you're likely looking at RIAA-style fishing for IP addresses for random people who installed the plugin and contributed a tiny amount, and we've seen that show already[1].
2) It could. Things have hard-to-predict effects. I see no reason why I should weight small startups as more important than the set of everyone disgusted by the invasion of every metaphorical orifice with surveillance tentacles.
3) Good on ya.
I don't know if I'm going to run this plugin or not. But this is exactly the sort of thing needed to level the playing field between the commercial surveillance shops (Facebook, Google, the other ad shops, on down the spectrum to phishers and other outright criminals) and actual humans.
We know that any form of legal or illegal online surveillance that has a chance of being commercially self-sustaining will be at least trialed. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. Legally, this is difficult to address sensibly because of the mismatch between the legal system speed and the tech-landscape speed (not to mention the inevitable unintended-consequence shakeouts, and the slowness of general wisdom in times of change). And that's even if assuming the Powers that Be want to address them, which is unlikely in the U.S. while a con-artist setting the agenda.
So that leaves making as much of the surveillance business model untenable as possible. I don't know what the right approach is, but it will likely be one that involves feeding the watchers lies.
I really don't like pissing on other people's work. But if that work is dedicated to things that make my life worse, I retain a right to, among other things, lie to their creation out of self-defense. It is that simple.
Random, related aside: I'm unlikely to have time to make this happen, but one thing I've thought would be fun is to see about how tricky it would be to repurpose some test equipment to be, say, a whole herd of Bluetooth phones[2] taking a walk by those iBeacons. Being more subtle would likely be a lot more fun, depending on the target, and would serve as a useful reminder of what 'unlicensed spectrum' means.
[1] Spoiler, here's the ending: https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal...
[2] What's the collective noun for phones?
I suppose it wouldn't. You probably wouldn't even need to leave home more than once - to read beacon data with a BLE debugging tool like nRF Connect. BLE beacons are broadcasting devices - they don't talk with your phone, they're just shouting "I'm here"! All data the vendor can get must come from an application on your phone. Hence, just capture what it's sending, fire up a VM cluster and have fun.
Hell, I might try doing that one of these days.
Internet advertisers are almost 100% reprehensible and fully deserving of what happens to them. They've spent years pissing in the pool, there is zero reason they shouldn't be force-fed the results.
The key moral argument in play in this entire matter is: "fuck these people and fuck everything about them." I owe advertisers nothing. They are loathsome abominations and have turned the Internet into surveillance capitalism malware soup. Causing them pain is pretty much an ethical obligation.
(BTW, I was surprised and pleased AdNauseam didn't act against Project Wonderful, the closest I've seen to a non-reprehensible advertising network and one I unblocked specifically in uBO. But the rest can frankly go and get fucked.)
1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it.
2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take a hit. People we know.
3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.