Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

Why can't the ad industry just accept that there are some people out there who don't want to see ads and wouldn't click on one to begin with? Then they can honor Do Not Track and those who choose to work in adtech can start working on things that are more productive to their business.

View on HN

That might have worked if Microsoft hadn't enabled Do Not Track by default.

Ads are not always for clicking. If you don't want to see ads than you should pay for content or leave.

I’ll take the third option: blocking every single ad and making my browser as untrackable as possible.

That's definitely true of the ones that hijack browsers and attempt to trick users into installing malware.

I have and do pay money for content. For those who don't offer that option I've got uBlock Origin as ads (alongside privacy) also present a security issue.

The ad industry was ready to honour DNT. MS killed it by going default.

Sure, they gave their pinky promise do not track those, who will set it.

You can opt out of ads, actually, and those will be respected. And companies in the industry knew they'd play by the rules or suffer.

I was in favour of DNT and made a little browser extension that would allow you to DNT some sites and not others. My hope was that eventually we'd be in a state where you could signal to the site right away whether you'd accept tracking or not and the site could paywall you if you didn't. That way it's a "pay with your data or money" loaded into the User Agent and I think I like that. It respects user choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com