Hacker News Reader

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs." - Banksy

Thank you for taking the time to explain this in a careful and thorough manner. You are absolutely correct to say:

> Attempting to claim the combination of these optional user choices is 'ad swapping' in a nefarious, unethical sense is simply dishonest.

...

(For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN's quotation style unpleasant, here is the gorhill quote:

"That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft.

Don't fall for this creepy idea.

The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy. ")

> For the benefit of anyone else on mobile who finds HN's quotation style unpleasant...

Code blocks are definitely not HN's quotation style and not recommended for quotes. They are often used for that purpose by mistake. It is an understandable mistake considering the lack of formatting options here.

A common quotation style that works on all devices is what I used above, a leading '>' followed by the quoted text enclosed in asterisks, like this (with code formatting here to show the special characters):

  > *For the benefit...*

  > *Blank line between paragraphs*

> Do you believe it's ethical for a user agent to block ads, or that it's unethical and a form of theft?

It's ethical if the user chooses to do so due to privacy concerns or other related reasons.

It is NOT ethical if the maker of the user-agent is profiting from it, being essentially copyright infringement.

Projects like uBlock Origin are very different from Brave, because the company behind Brave directly profits from blocking ads. Without ads and ads blocking, Brave doesn't have a business.

Thank you for the explanation. It has solidified my view that Brave's actions are unethical. The ethical problem with ads is that they are distracting, overly promote particular things over others for reasons of questionable buyer benefit (such as that the promoter has more money to spend on ads than competitiors), and subvert normal human behaviours (such as attention to colourful or moving things, familiarity and learning through repeated exposure, and so on) to channel money to someone.

Thus it is ethically justifiable to block ads on the grounds that we should come up with a monetisation model for content that is not ads. Blocking ads and then offering your own ads is not ethically justifiable in the above context (and in fact is a bit tacky). Personally opting to replace ads with different ads is also not ethically justifiable in the above context (and is a bit defeatist). It's nice that the replacement ads pay you money, but this is unrelated to the ethical argument (and obviously the advertiser comes out ahead even in this scenario, because otherwise they wouldn't run the ads).

Ads suck, no doubt, but ads also enable a lot of free content which is great for the open sharing of knowledge. An ad model that can preserve free content by reimbursing the content creators while still respecting user privacy would be ideal, agreed?

If you agree, how would you disrupt the existing ad models in an effective way?

> Separate to this, Brave has a rewards system users can choose to enable which can show OS-level notifications of advertiser content in a privacy-respecting way.

Can somebody expand a bit on how the ads are shown in privacy-respecting way? Are they not personalized? That seems unlikely.

If the matching is done locally, is Brave downloading hundreds of ads on the device, and then showing only the one that were picked by local ML algorithm?

See this comment in an HN thread from about six months ago, where Brave developer Jonathan Sampson explains the system (as it worked at that time, at least):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20831014

For convenience, I'll also quote it here:

> The user opts-in to Brave Rewards/Ads. This kicks off a machine-learning model that begins to study the user's habits and interests.

> On a daily basis, the user downloads a regional ad catalog (as to other Brave users in their region). This catalog contains numerous ad options, which your device studies for relevance.

> If/when your device identifies an ad within the catalog that might be of interest to you, it displays the ad as an OS notification. At this time, 70% of the ad revenue is deposited into your in-situ wallet.

> At this point, the user has made absolutely no contact with an advertiser. If the user chooses to click on the ad, it is opened in its own tab in the Brave Browser. This tab, like all others, is subject to Brave's default security/privacy settings. No third party trackers, etc.

> The advertiser will know that you are interested in their product/service, because you clicked the ad. But no other information about you is given to them; only what can be inferred from standard first-party browsing online.

I went from using AdBlockPlus to uBlock because of the latter's soliciting fees from advertisers in their Acceptable Ads program, so yeah I'm uncomfortable with the conflict of interest from the same party being on both sides and profiting from it.