> I'm a thief for protecting my PC from malware?

Well, yeah. You're a thief for robbing content creators of their revenue. However, that's justified because you're trying to protect yourself from Malware. You're sort of conflating two separate things. You may not be trying to steal, it may not be your intention at all, but you cannot deny that it is the end result of your actions. Actions which are indeed justified.

Though, I suspect ad companies will find a way around adblock programs soon. It wouldn't surprise me if they came up with some sort of package an owner of a website could download, then install into their web directory. The ads would then be served locally instead of from easy-to-block 3rd party networks. This would make blocking ads infinitely harder, especially if you've never visited the site before. Your adblocker wouldn't know if the ad is a regular image file or if it's an ad since it's being served up locally.

I'm troubled by the usage of terminology that have legal definitions that do not necessarily follow your usage. Specifically, "thief", "robbing content", "steal", etc.

Those words seem to me to imply depriving someone of something with monetary or otherwise significant value.

I am sure that copying bits is not equivalent to stealing because it does not take something away from someone.

Even ceding that point, I do not believe the publisher stating terms linked from publicly available documents binds me to a contract, ethically or legally. If it's a site that I've signed up for, and require an account to access the content on, then I am more sympathetic to the argument.

But the internet works because things are open. Publishers know this -- they know they cannot paywall their content (generally). So they want the benefits of the open community (discoverability, traffic, etc.) but they want it on their terms.

Pretending that one implicit contract (I serve content you will also request the ads I tell you to look at) is more important than another. If you want openness on the internet, you have to accept it when things don't favor your business interests.

That's a small rationalization. Yes there are lots of shady ad networks out there because it can be so easy to start one that's used by all the long-tail small sites.

There are also several high quality ad networks that don't do this and the entire industry is doing it's best to fight back against ad fraud, but it's not an easy problem. If someone mailed you something you didnt want, do you blame the post office? There are only so many checks that are possible and we're doing our best.

I'm sorry you experienced this and but you're blaming the wrong party and depriving the publisher of their revenue.

Actually yeah I do blame the post office for sending me spam. Who wouldn't?

And as you have just demonstrated this is a problem even with the top tier ad networks. Mind you I would have blocked ads anyway because with the exception of Twitter the ads aren't worth reading (Twitters ads are split about 75%/25% ads I need/want to read and junk which is astonishingly high).

Instead of whining about implicit deals (no such thing among strangers) and the difficulty of doing your job, make the ads worth actually seeing and your problems will tend to go away.

If you're actively admitting to blaming the wrong party... I'm not sure what anyone can do for you.

The ad companies aren't whining, the users are. We do try to show you better ads and its not to be nice but because they would naturally perform better. Showing you stuff you want is good for you, for the ad companies and the advertisers. However people also complain about being tracked and tracking is required to know about your interests and show you the right stuff. You can't have one without the other.

Using adblock means denying publishers any revenue for their content that you're reading for free and stops ad networks from learning more about your interests to give you better ads.

So, which would you rather have? Or do you have a better solution?

I don't mind tracking for about 99.9% of what I do (and the rest I use incognito) but that doesn't give better ads - I unblock Facebook just to laugh at how incredibly badly targeted their ads are. They know more about me than I do, yet they can understand that I am not interested in dating sites, cheap scams or various "brands" not to mention free-to-pay games. At one point I even saw ads for the exact degree I hold from the exact university I already told Facebook I graduated from - is that a well targeted ad?

Sturgeons law applies to products too, but because the market is now international only the best products are worth buying so most ads are either for crap, trying to get you to buy products that aren't the best bargain or brand awareness ads which can't be made to be worth seeing.

If you want better targeting why is there no place where I can select the kind of things I am interested in? Why can't I take an ad and say I have no interest in that kind of product (In online dating the only thing that matters is traffic, so I would never go to a pay site)? It is valuable information to you, allows better targeting and a better chance I will buy the product.

Why is it that when I search for "apartment in <city>" I get 3 months of ads for the same apartment listing site, rather than for sites that will mail me curtains, which would be something I wanted?

Make ads worth watching and I will, but this is a 3-way road now - you are going to have to make the ads worth it for both the publisher, the client and the user because as a user I now have options if you don't.

> If you want better targeting why is there no place where I can select the kind of things I am interested in? Why can't I take an ad and say I have no interest in that kind of product (In online dating the only thing that matters is traffic, so I would never go to a pay site)? It is valuable information to you, allows better targeting and a better chance I will buy the product.

You can do that with Facebook ads, can't you?

>and the entire industry is doing it's best to fight back against ad fraud

This includes fighting back against the tracking of users across multiple sites, right? That's one of the more direct ways that people categorize 'good' and 'bad' ad networks.

Tracking is necessary to show you better ads and is also anonymized. Most networks don't track anything about you but rather general things you might be interested in. Visiting a travel site might put you in the "interested in travel" bucket for about 30 days but that's it.

The social networks and Google know far more about you then the other ad companies.

Label them "shady" if you want but all the big ad networks have linked to malware at some time.

I'm curious, how do you rationalize protecting yourself while supporting it done to others?