and to all site owners moaning about people using adblock : this is why we can't have nice things. as long as policies like this exist, I'll block anything remotely able to track me.
They're the wrong tool for the job. They're for blocking ads. So they'll block ads that are not leaking your info (for your use case, a false positive) and will not (not necessarily) block other means by which you're being tracked (for your use case, a false negative).
Use something like RequestPolicy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...) or PrivacyBadger (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) instead. That way, you're not blocking ads per sé — though a side effect of using RequestPolicy is that you won't see much ads — you're blocking the leakage of information to third parties instead.
Using blanket ad blocking sends the wrong signal to site owners, and creates little incentive to do the 'right thing' — it lets the "bad apples" (which I imagine to be something like 99% of the online ad businesses) spoil it for the one percent that does value your privacy, with no way for anyone to improve. Using ad blocking for privacy reasons is not completely effective (false negatives) and worse, it's punishing individuals for the behaviour of the flock.
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Edit: Found the perfect example of the false-positive and false-negative I'm talking about above: http://www.gentoo.org . Harmless ads — just images inside html <a> anchors, loaded from the domain in the site URL. Not leaking anything. The ads help an organization I support.
So what does AdblockPlus do (default settings)? It blocks them. What does RequestPolicy do? It lets them through.
(disclaimer: I run a 5k DAU social network with no ads).
The problem [for me] is not the advertising as long as it's reasonably done (static, textual, non-invasive). It's the fact that every third party has their own behaviours, and I have no idea what any of them are. I instead must rely on the judgement of the person running the site - and most of them appear fairly unaware of the privacy implications associated with both advertisements and analytics services.
I agree that ad-supported is terrible. But how else? I'm hopeful for donation-crowdfunding and simple, liquid micropayment options online. But I don't know that that could significantly displace ads.
Very true. This says something about how we as a society values those works and how our economic organization discourages some kinds of work/content.
maybe site-owners should pressure ad-providers to provide a track-free service ?
Of course you could argue the moral and inconvenience cases as sites make these judgements when choosing advert networks already but "a bit of tracking" does not have the same moral weight to most as "porn and gambling" or "the annoyance of pop-ups/unders and drive-by install attempts" when deciding where they are comfortable to take money from.
Without the latter the ads being compulsory is just enforcing advertising on your users without knowing if they even want it.
Also it is much easier (for a non-technical user at least) to just skip the ads on the web using browser plug-ins, than it is to get around them in an app, so to an extent this extra work may be wasted and the number of people who take up the "pay for no ads" option might not be enough to warrant the work that goes into maintaining it.
There are some sites that offer the "ads or pay" option so it presumably works out worthwhile for some sites, but I've not seen it often.