Adblock Plus Is “Unethical” and “Immoral”, Says IAB Chief | Hacker News Reader

Adblock Plus Is “Unethical” and “Immoral”, Says IAB Chief

mobilemarketingmagazine.com

8 pointselorant9 comments

I am so off-the-charts sick and tired of advertisers and "content" producers that feel entitled to dictate what I can and can't choose to see on my device.

In their hubris they have decreed that anyone who doesn't want to waste bandwidth downloading their ads is a thief, again because they feel entitled to turn a profit seemingly just because they exist.

The simple fact is that not everything on the web deserves to make money. A massive, massive amount of Internet content is simply inane drivel. If we were to see a great die-off of content producers due to lack of ad revenue I'm not convinced that the internet wouldn't be better off. Advertising is, after all, the business of manipulating me into buying something that I don't want to buy. Frankly I find that and the people who do it to be reprehensible.

As a counterpoint, I find it rather ironic that a lot of the things people complain about being "inane drivel" yet continue to consume every day. "This is shite, it doesn't deserve to make money" "So, why do you keep reading it?"

Exactly. Someone has to be keeping this inane drivel alive.

Ahh, you're going for that anti-advertising market, that's a good market! Very smart. A lot of people are anti-advertising right now - it's a huge market.

Sarcasm? I'm not going for any market.

The legendary Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMN8REGJXaA

Advertising was once the business of informing you about what you might want. Now fools and villains use it as a bludgeon. What did they think would happen?

It’s also unethical to track visitors without their consent but no one in the advertising industry seems to care asking for permission. They profile us, we block their ads. Simple as that.

It's simply wrong to assume people would gladly want to be exposed to ads in general. The only unethical thing here is to call people unethical who simply decide not to participate in ad viewing.

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