A Modest Proposal for Ethical Ad Blocking | Hacker News Reader

A Modest Proposal for Ethical Ad Blocking

nicolas.kruchten.com

I'd be fine to see nonintrusive ads, but some people (see: Google, and the ABP dev they pay bribes to) think 'nonintrusive' means 'text only' when I say 'text only, and doesn't track you'. I'm fine seeing text ads based on page keywords or purchased for a specific site/site category, but not based on google/whoever else spying on browsing history. That's why I ditched Adblock Plus for Adblock Edge. As it is, I whitelist a few sites, but the list is relatively small simple because AdSense is the furthest thing imaginable from 'nonintrusive'. Yes, flash/audio/popup ads are more intrusive in a purely sense aspect, but tracking of users is just as intrusive overall.

Exactly, thank you for posting that. The "modest proposal" assumes the problem is only "seeing ads", but has nothing to offer someone who objects to being tracked across the web.

And I just want to point out, this refutes, not just the ad proposal, but the whole micropayment scheme: you can't have micropayments allocated according to the user's behavior without snarfing the user's whole browsing trail.

Well here's another "modest proposal" for web advertising, which solves both problems: Site owners accept only static ads and hosts them on the site domain; users are not tracked and not annoyed by animations, noise or Flash. Then the ethical argument finally works. Ad networks would resist, but if the blocking is enough of a problem they'll have to settle for it.

That's a very good point, and not one which my proposal addresses at all: in order to do what I suggest, your browser still needs to communicate with various ad exchanges.

> the reason you get to use a website without paying for it yourself is that in exchange you see ads and website owners gets paid by the advertisers

I stopped reading after this sentence, because of the implied fallacy in it.

Everybody ends up paying when advertisers pay. Ultimately, all that "free" contents end up being reflected in the price of goods and services, so these ads ultimately contribute to inflating the prices of good and services.

To be clear, I'm not claiming to agree with this, I'm just trying to lay out both sides of the argument as I see them :)

Turning ads into a micropayment mechanism is a pretty clever idea.

I'd certainly pay $2 a month to get art instead of ads.

Kittens might be more popular though.

A technical challenge I see is: How would you target an individual specifically?

With cookies: this is done all the time for retargeting (those ads that follow you around the web).

When you visit website X, it gets ad-exchange Y to leave a cookie on your browser to tag you as having Y-id and associates your X-id with that Y-id.

When you then visit site Z, that site requests an ad from ad-exchange Y, which gets its cookie back, and sends out bid-requests for the user with Y-id, which can then be remapped by X to an X-id.

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