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> steal my time and attention.

Is all unsolicited incoming communication such "stealing"?

Unsolicited communication is generally referred to as spam. Spam is generally considered bad because of the demands it makes of you, cognitive and resource-related. So the answer to your question is of course.

But it's usually a price you willingly pay in exchange for a service. You gave your email out to get something in return. You're seeing those ads because you want to read something else on the website. You've entered into a transaction where receiving advertising is an implicit trade you've made to get something else.

I don't know about you, but I've never entered my email in exchange for anything knowing I'd get spam.

At the very least the transaction is unfair since the spam part is generally left very implicit.

An implicit trade that’s becoming more and more irrelevant as advertisers become more and more disrespectful of my time and attention. They were ramping up on the distraction long before ad blocking and skipping were widely used.

Yes. Thankfully companies aren't free to sell my data to the highest bidder so my phone number and email are not public for every salesman to use.

Unfortunately companies I do business with are allowed to try to sell me things. But the Outlook spam filter is pretty good.

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