Ads will exist until people are empowered to block them.
To stretch the analogy, ad blockers are people who drive in the HOV lane without paying. It isn't so bad that you do it, but if everyone did it the system would break. I personally block ads out of principle because I believe we can transition to a micropayment model and blocking ads forces the issue.
That being said, can anything really ever save us from ads? From my logic in the first paragraph, Patreon et al will eventually be as ad-infested as anything else. Maybe the fundamental answer is to consume less content.
If you don't want to see ads on a given site, your moral option is to stop visiting the site.
Glad we finally resolved that once and for all. /s
Want to see less intrusive business practices? Get rid of quarterly earnings reports.
Example:
> "Guess what, Jimbo 'forgot' to pay his share of the rent again.
It's not just the internet. Every industry that sells anything uses direct marketing, and that requires collecting information about people. Until you eliminate all advertising and marketing, you will be tracked in some way.
Target famously predicted a teenage girl was pregnant before her father even found out. They did it by tracking and analyzing her purchases, not by digging into data from Facebook. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...)
Privacy violation is a symptom, but the cause is capitalists trying to sell as much crap as humanly possible. I'm honestly surprised there isn't an app that pays you to tell advertisers about your friends.
Sort of. There is an acceptable amount of tracking.
For hundreds of years billboard, newspaper, television, and radio advertisers tracked if their ads were working by measuring sales. That was acceptable.
Facebook and Google trying to watch my every move is not acceptable.
I believe that ad networks as they currently exist are actively destroying the internet.
Please don't do this.
Have you found a viable alternative or removed analytics from your blog altogether?
Depending on your needs, it's pretty easy and interesting to hack something together yourself though.
I just want to know the number of daily unique visitors and where they are located (geographically).
May you elaborate on that?
I feel like until we have an internet that isn't dependent on ad-networks, this is an inevitability. Targeted ads perform better, and you cannot expect these giant megacorporations to act ethically when it will cut into their profits and while they're technically not violating any laws.