The Ad Blocking Wars

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.

I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.

I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.

A few years ago, Mozilla Labs was prototyping a client-side API called "User Personalization" for users to express their interests or purchasing intent:

https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization...

Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers.

It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."

Ironically, Mozilla solved this in a privacy-respecting way, and the internet went apeshit over it and demanded its removal from the browser.

That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed:

* Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc.

* Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target.

* The browser periodically downloads bundles of tiles and client-side, the browser decides based on browsing history and bundle metadata which tiles to display.

Nowhere in this process did advertisers or even Mozilla get to know the browsing history of the end user. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or Mozilla get to know which sites in the browser history caused the decision to display a particular tile. All storage of history and decision-making on what to show was done client-side-only.

The more I think about it, the more I think something like that needs to be discussed as a real alternative to how things are done now.

re: content

There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation.

Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question.

One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content".

If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today?

I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993.

So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription?

For the novelty of it?

To jumpstart the www?

To entice people to use the www?

Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle.

The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew.

Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider.

Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users.

(Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.)

It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing.

With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage.

The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it.

What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated.

There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.