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Comment by jshen | Hacker News Reader

Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.

Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.

And google is entitled to infer that you're using it and serve you different content, or none at all.

And I'm entitled to publicly shame software engineers who implement this kind of stuff for Google.

Best of luck. I actually hope it works, but I'm not optimistic.

I'm pretty sure it won't, given that it hasn't worked so far for much worse stuff (like people implementing the panopticon at Palantir).

It's not possible to shame a group of people who can't even agree on baseline ethical issues around their profession. For every engineer who refuses to work on guided missiles or the Torment Nexus and would feel shame to do so, there's another engineer who would find it an interesting technical problem.

When such things work, it's not because people who do it feel ashamed, it's because the society ostracizes them so much that it becomes actually inconvenient to function in it.

Oh, and it is an interesting problem. In the abstract.

You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.

They are if you use their service. You agree to their terms when you want the services they provide. Of course, you can violate the terms of service, but that puts you in the wrong legally and potentially morally, depending on your specific moral values.

You aren't entitled to their service, but they are entitled to your data (as allowed under the relevant jurisdiction) if you choose, of your own volition, to use their service.

Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it.

I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time.

I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I should feel bad for some company with billions of dollars in profits that doesn't care about me or any of my privacy. I go the extra step further and use the banned from Chrome store extension, Ad Nauseum, to click on nearly every single blocked ad.

I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.

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