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Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

There are two things wrong with this article.

First, it doesn't even mention that without an adblocker your being tracked all over the place by advertisers. (A practice that is btw clearly illegal in many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.)

Second, but this is more subjective, I have a rather different experience with turning off adblockers. Almost every website becomes several times (!) slower, and is full moving distractions trying to get my attention. Sorry, I can't read that way offline, and I won't read that way online. Only when advertising stops disrupting my experience and is only passively present (like it is in old-fashioned dead tree publications) will I turn off the adblocker.

I the mean time, I only make exceptions for sites that a) understand I have no obligation to download their ads, and ask nicely, and b) are very careful about the ads they put on their site.

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Opt-out here:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

Or disallow cookies from ad networks, so they can't track.

Firefox addon that does the same thing, albeit on a superset of advertisers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beef-taco-tar...

I use an ad-blocker mostly for self-defense, but also because corporations generally play hard-ball with the populous and so I generally enjoy passively disrupting their systems.

There's no other way to deal with zero-day exploits that are delivered via ad networks. I also wouldn't mind seeing ad-supported services mostly die off, unlikely as that seems :)

I agree. For me the moving ads are the worst. It makes it impossible to concentrate on anything.

Anyone know what percentage of browsers are running ad blockers?

> A practice that is btw clearly illegal in many countries, even if they haven't explicitly wrote it into the law yet.

How is something illegal if it's not written into law?

There are data protection laws in lots of countries. It's written into law.

According to the post to which I was responding, it is not. At least that's what he said, and that's what I am questioning.

Apologies for the late response. I wrote "explicitly". What I mean by that is that privacy laws already very likely make it illegal, but those laws don't mention "new" technology, so it's kind of open to interpretation until it's tested in court.

Politicians looking to score will often introduce new laws that explicitly make certain practices illegal instead of waiting for jurisprudence.

In this particular case: if you were to register people's visits to a wide range of locations IRL and sell that information, that would be a clear violation of privacy in many countries. It doesn't take a brilliant lawyer to argue that principle also applies online.

I see; thanks for the clarification.

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