Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.

And google is entitled to infer that you're using it and serve you different content, or none at all.

And I'm entitled to publicly shame software engineers who implement this kind of stuff for Google.

Best of luck. I actually hope it works, but I'm not optimistic.

I'm pretty sure it won't, given that it hasn't worked so far for much worse stuff (like people implementing the panopticon at Palantir).

It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.

When such things work, it's not because people who do it feel ashamed, it's because the society ostracizes them so much that it becomes actually inconvenient to function in it.

Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.

You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.

They are if you use their service. You agree to their terms when you want the services they provide. Of course, you can violate the terms of service, but that puts you in the wrong legally and potentially morally, depending on your specific moral values.

You aren't entitled to their service, but they are entitled to your data (as allowed under the relevant jurisdiction) if you choose, of your own volition, to use their service.

If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it. If you don't want to serve content without a login, you have the option to not do so. That's the way the internet works. You don't get to have your cake - free and public access to content - and eat it, too, by imposing your own requirements on the technology, introducing an adtech gatekeeping system.

YouTube or any of the others could simply put up a login gate, and then nobody could access any of the content unless they're logged in, and have agreed to additional terms of use.

As it stands, all the content is free and public. In legal terms, as per the Supreme Court of the US, the gate is up, and they are not entitled to impose additional restrictions except where allowed or required by law, such as age restriction, moderation, or copyright situations.

You are entitled to get those videos for free unless or until YouTube decides to lower the gate. That's how the internet works, and it's a wonderful, good thing.

Fuck ads. Block them all. Eventually they're going to be regulated and companies will be forced to stop mass commercial surveillance under threat of fines and hopefully prison time. Absent surveillance and mass data harvesting, adtech becomes much less lucrative, and maybe we'll see markets develop that compete on product quality, and value to the consumer, instead of the endless cycle of enshittified garbage and attempts to derail the open and free public internet.

> If your internet server serves content, I'm entitled to connect to it.

Nope

As far as I can tell, this case went nowhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Department_of_Element...

I'm curious if you know of any court cases that back up your position. I've connected to a lot of servers today and downloaded all the information they sent me.

I think that's a different issue. I can serve content behind a paywall, that doesn't make you entitled to it.

The OP explicitly called out logins. Are you being intentionally misleading or just dense or what?

The issue is about preventing users from watching if they block ads. Talking about logins is being intentionally misleading.

No, talking about logins is the fucking point. The internet works a particular way, with technical requirements and protocols and conventions. It exists in the real world where laws govern our behaviors and rights and those with the biggest stick or bank account don't get to dictate terms. According to the technical protocols and the legal regimes in and by which the internet exists, if you serve or broadcast or publish information without restriction, it's considered Gate Up, meaning the public is entitled to interact with it, because that's essentially what you're announcing to the world.

Connecting to the Public Internet, serving content to any and every connection, without login, means you are effectively broadcasting your content and have no legal basis to impose terms. This is why scraping is legal; the only defense against scraping is to put up a login wall - Gate Down. If the gate is down, you can impose your own conditions and agreements with the binding legal force of a contract.

"By continuing to use this site you're agreeing to blah blah blah" is cute fiction and has no legal bearing in the US. The internet works the way it does because it's empowered and protected by law and convention.

I have the right to manage traffic to and from a device I own. If your server sends me traffic, it's communicating something. If it sends me content on request without my having entered into a contract, then the default case is that I'm entitled to that content, full stop. It's up to you, the provider, to decide and manage how your content gets served, and whether you want to participate in the default mode of public access. By not incorporating a login on a server you connect to the internet, you are choosing, defacto, to participate in the public access mode of content serving, and are responsible for doing so. You are expressly granting anyone connected to the internet permission to download that content, making them entitled to it by the mere fact of connecting to the world wide web, in the same way that projecting a photograph on a public wall is expressly granting the public permission to view said projection, or by speaking in public, thereby granting the public the right to hear what you say, and so on, and so forth.

I'd hazard that a vast majority of users of the internet are completely ignorant about what servers and clients are doing, and the laws and systems which govern them. I can choose to block signals from ad servers, and i can choose to access content from a server over protocols which it's prepared to serve. Youtube does this; it's too valuable for them to remain gate up, thereby leaving third party clients and other methods of access on the table. It's perfectly legal, respectable, ethical, and moral to skip ads. I'd even go so far as to say it's immoral to participate in adtech, so by avoiding it, you're actively making the world a better place, even if it's only yourself.

You can gate it behind watching ads.

What if you serve it to me from behind the paywall without me paying?

My client: "Hey, I didn't pay, but can I have that data?"

Your server: "Sure! Here it is!"

Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.

I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.

I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.

I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.