This is what we get for letting companies like Google decide what technologies win and reshape the landscape. We have become so dependent on javascript blobs and server side rendering that blocking ads will be an uphill battle. Honestly I think Google could shove ads down our throats if they wanted to, but they are holding back, for now.
The bulwark against this encroachment was Mozilla Firefox, and the OSS community. Firefox was supposed to provide a legitimate alternative vision for the web. But Mozilla decided to let Google define what was normal, and what features a web browser should and should not have.
Can't people see that Google's vision is box canyon?
I'm speechless, I just want to put some emphasis on this.
I wonder what other kinds of evil practice they push to this demographic. Perhaps more malware, because they are "less likely to understand them" too?
You're implying the creator of the website is okay letting you receive the service or content on your terms. They are not. Ads and tracking are there because they earn the creators some amount of money.
One day when our tech will limit you to a binary choice of ads+tracking versus paying money, which way are you going to swing once your hand is forced?
I’m actually happy to pay for the media I consume, I actually do pay for some things, but nobody gets their advertising/trackers let through because the whole industry is patently untrustworthy. If publishers want ad revenue from me, they can remove pervasive tracking, it until then, they get nothing.
Because people who pay for these ads need to justify that the ROI is there. They need to know how many views, clicks, and other stuff. Just like you need to know many things in different areas.
I'm not defending terrible offenders like Google, but people don't just say "Yeah sure, let me just spend thousands of dollars on an ad and HOPE it gets clicks and views like you claim it will"
Literally how marketing worked from the invention of the printing press right up until 2002 or so. It's obviously a sustainable business model.
> One day when our tech will limit you to a binary choice of ads+tracking versus paying money, which way are you going to swing once your hand is forced?
Easy, paying money. I already do where it's an option.
This is precisely my objection. The narrative that blocking ads and trackers breaks an agreement with site owners makes no sense to me when I can't see the terms of that "agreement" until after I've landed on the site. Shrinkwrap contracts didn't become a reasonable practice when they turned into browsewrap, and indeed courts consistently hold that those contracts are valid only after presenting proper notice of terms to the user. Visiting a webpage is certainly not assent to allow third-party tracking or code execution.
If the site host wants to object to my continued use while blocking ads and trackers, fine. They're welcome to do so; sometimes I reduce my blocking and sometimes I leave the site, depending on the nature of the tracking and the value of the site. That's an agreement, blindly accepting whatever someone cares to serve is not.
I love when people throw this argument out there. I made no such agreement. I signed nothing. My device will behave exactly how I tell it, not how advertisers tell it.
What I don't understand is why they insist in fighting against people who hate excessive ads. Adblockers don't install themselves, users install them, which sends the message they're resistant to advertising, so why embarking in this endless war costing them even more money to show an ad to people who wouldn't buy the service or product anyway? If a company screws with my adblocker and manage to show me an ad for something I need at 100€, I swear all divinities in the Universe I'll go buy that thing elsewhere for €150 rather than them. Been there, done that.
I would rather go for a much nicer alternative: "You using an adblocker? Fine, you get the content anyway but your traffic get the least priority so that users seeing ads will get some precedence over you". To me that would be nicer to all users while giving some advantage to those without adblockers, and to the company as well since adblocking users would never be able to clog the network. Would it be so hard to implement?
The creator is sending the content to my machine for free. Whether my machine displays the ads (aka cancer) attached to that content is my decision.
Also regarding paying money, don't forget in pretty much any case you still end up tracked. If anything, you get tracked less by the ad-supported version because at least you're not giving them any billing information and are not consistently logging into the same account (which you'd have to do for your subscriber benefits to kick in).
> One day when our tech will limit you to a binary choice of ads+tracking versus paying money, which way are you going to swing once your hand is forced?
I'd love such a choice as it will allow me to say no to cancer & stalking once and for all. However it will have to be implemented in such a way that it's technically impossible for anyone to track me through the subscription system.
PS: Data transmission is not free. Servers cost money and bandwidth costs money too. CDN costs money. Anti-DDOS costs money. etc.
Also, you can turn off any of that blocking after you first visit the site. I don't understand how the narrative of "you agreed to use this site, then went back on your part of the deal" is supposed to work when the only way to discover what you're agreeing to is to land on the site and let it happen. Do Not Track was supposed to be a (partial) solution there, letting you state your conditions for use on arrival, but we all know how much respect those conditions got.
Whats with this entitlement that you shouldn't have to endure ads but also get to have the content too?
Should a user be forced to NOT mute the commercials? I'm clearly in the "NO" camp on this issue.
Hell even TV networks track you. They know how many viewers are on certain shows and that. That's how they're able to garner high prices too.
Advertising is just something we always had to deal with. You don't have to watch commercials. You do that by not going to channels that have commercials, or using different services that you pay to not see commercials.
My point is, you are entitled to not be tracked. You're entitled to not have to see ads. But you are _NOT_ entitled to the content without those if the website decides the trade-off of you getting that content for free is by enduring those ads.
Close your window. Go somewhere else for content if the site you're visiting displays ads.
The inflated sense of entitlement in surveillance capitalists is palpable.
And also it will probably be ads+tracking+various levels of paying money.
An ad blocker is no different except being automated. And the analytic spying it fights is automated too.
Fine, but this cuts both ways. They're wrongly assuming I'm okay accepting arbitrary content on their terms.
The no-blocker system holds that by navigating to a URL, I accept whatever the domain owner cares to serve me. We had one attempt to embed user conditions in the request, that was Do Not Track, and the most common outcome was that sites neither honored it nor put up walls against users; they simply disregarded it and kept tracking. In fact, they started to fingerprint users based on their request to not be tracked.
If, prior to using a site, I want to see what it asks me to give up in terms of privacy and security, I don't know an alternative to visiting the site with blocking in place. The creator can put up a wall and tell me to turn it off, in which case I'll make a site-specific decision to leave or disable blockers just like I do for cookies. This isn't hypothetical, I do it regularly.
If I bypass a wall or ignore clear notice that I don't have permission to browse with blockers, then sure, we're both lying to each other about our usage conditions and it's just an arms race. But I reject the idea that an initial visit to a site constitutes consent to accept some unknown pile of privacy intrusions and security risks; the moral burden there really is on the site owner who's circumventing a clear refusal to accept those things.
Well companies should aks themselves what they did to users in first place that everyone hates these ads so much now! How they pushed too far!
They have to look into the root cause of it.
But instead, most of them are making it even more annoying.
Nevertheless, the content quality is dropping as well. everyone is making unnecessary long content and a lot of click-baits.
What do you expect? It is called consequences and humans are really bad to understand it.
They are not allowed to simply track me and serve me ads regardless, though. I pay for an email provider specifically to avoid this, and I pay for magazines and books as well.
> If we're going to use ad blockers, at least let's admit to what we're doing and not claim a moral high ground.
If we are going to use psychological warfare to part people from the fruits of their labour in exchange for cheap crap they don't need by exploiting human weaknesses and insecurities, just so we can keep an unsustainable and highly damaging model of growth going; and also serve malicious software to those people, then let's not pretend we have any moral standing at all.
Adblocking is has a hell of a lot more moral substance to it than advertsing does.
I think the noscript solution offers less data collection but can still be reverse proxied (try for yourself on the page).