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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#81

Post by elindbe2 »

giobox wrote: post #68
elindbe2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.

Not saying you are wrong, but which European states is this common in? I’ve never noticed this, and many public spaces in Europe have a great deal of poster/bill board style advertisements. I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.

It's possible I'm mistaken about the commonness, I'm just repeating hearsay. That said, I still think it should become the norm everywhere.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#82

Post by zcid »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

Even disregarding the many questionable aspects of consumerism, think about how many developers you know that have dedicated their entire ability to creating better advertising. The amount of brain power that has been spent on marketing (largely) unnecessary products to consumers is staggering. I hesitate to suppose where we could be if those abilities had been directed elsewhere, but I expect the world might be a much better place.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#83

Post by wutbrodo »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

This line of thought is complete nonsense. When you get a product in a transaction, you get something from the other party and you give them something in exchange. When you buy an iPhone, what you're giving is $700. In the case of non-paywalled online content, what you're giving is an ad impression. It would be ludicrous to say after an iPhone purchase "I didn't get anything out of the part of the transaction where I paid $700? The government should ban it".

I'm not dismissing the possibility of conversations about whether advertising for services is a type of transaction that's difficult to reason about, and that users need to be protected from themselves by regulation. But looking at only the outflow half of a transaction and asking "I don't benefit from this part, we should ban it" is utter gibberish.

"Did anyone ever investigate what benefits payment systems have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, since payment systems cost money to operate and in the end all they do is reduce the amount of money a user has. While payment systems may allow you to 'buy' services, we are still paying for these systems directly and indirectly

Why then, doesn't the government bring currency and bank accounts and credit cards to a halt?"

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#84

Post by eterm »

danShumway wrote: post #31
gergles wrote: post #3

Regrettably, nobody bothers to mention that JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this. If unnecessary use of JavaScript earned the same sort of derision that "best viewed in IE 6" banners did, we wouldn't be where we are today. That genie is too far gone to put back in the bottle, but that's the real problem with the online advertising 'ecosystem'. JavaScript enabled pop-up ads, it enables tracking, it ena…

> JavaScript is really what's to blame for all of this Along with CSS, cookies, external images and fonts, redirect links, referrer headers, browser caches, and IP addresses that don't change over time and that can be linked to physical locations. Javascript certainly doesn't have its hands clean, and there have been some frankly stupid decisions in how it was designed -- but stopping dedicated trackers is more compl…

No, the law is to blame. Digital surveilance should be considered separate to advertising and should be regulated or made illegal.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#85

Post by AJ007 »

amelius wrote: post #55

Did anyone ever investigate what benefits ads have to a population? It seems like a net loss to me, because ads are used to make people consume more than they need; ads make people buy the product with the biggest advertising budget instead of the best product; and while ads may make the internet "free", we are still paying for those ads indirectly. Why then, doesn't the government bring advertising to a halt? At lea…

There are countries that ban ads, but they also ban a lot of other things.

My presumption is that if advertising was banned, and you were still dealing with a relatively free society, that many more resources would go in to PR and marketing. At least an ad you know is an ad.

A good exercise is to go back and look through magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, especially Playboy. The advertising seems much more transparent in its shallow promises and we actually know what the long term outcomes were from following them -- e.g. alcohol, tobacco, and cars no one gives a shit about anymore. The editorial bridges between advertising and content glaringly stick out. These things aren't necessarily no longer true, but the obviousness of time shines a bright light on it.

To me the biggest story in ads isn't ad blockers or Google, it is Facebook getting consumers to spend gargantuan amounts of money creating content for free and then making tens of billions of dollars from it. Youtube/Google at least has revenue sharing.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#86

Post by jplayer01 »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

Yes, agreed. Ads are a great way to finance things where there is value in being accessible by everybody - I'm not happy about seeing podcast episodes locked behind Patreon walls, for example. While it's great these creators are gaining an additional revenue stream, it still means I or others are priced out of accessing their content. I don't have any natural right to access it, of course, but I prefer the open access ad-driven model over a marketplace where I have to pay every single podcast I listen to $5 a month. And hell, podcast ads weren't tracking and profiling me.

I'd be happy to not use an adblocker, but the abuse of ads for tracking users and as a potential attack vector for malicious content means I'm leaving my adblocker up, no matter how much sites might beg.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#87

Post by cblum »

ori_b wrote: post #25

Something is different in the arms race this time. Browser development is almost exclusively funded by advertising. Chrome, in the obvious way. Mozilla is funded entirely by Google. Safari is the only surviving exception.

> Mozilla is funded entirely by Google.

Do you have a source for that?

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#88

Post by tlibert »

When I loaded the BoingBoing version of the article my browser contacted 53 third-party domains and a grand total of 373 cookies were set. The BoingBoing privacy policy does not mention "Do Not Track", usually a signal it is ignored, and it discloses nearly none of the third-parties. The cookie opt-out link goes to the NAI site which does not work on Safari because Safari won't allow the third-party cookies required to opt-out by the NAI. BoingBoing's privacy policy lists nine types of advertising, none of which are behavioral.

The author of this article, Cory Doctorow, is an editor of BoingBoing and has some level of control of this.

In contrast, I got zero tracking from the EFF site. Exact same content, completely different privacy experience.

I'm not an absolutist that you can't criticize a system you benefit from (it's ok to criticize Apple's labour practices if you own an iPhone), but there is a big difference between admitting participation in a flawed system and passing yourself off as an objective critic of a system you benefit from.

Doctorow knows where his paycheck comes from.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#89

Post by deanc »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

Agree. I’d go as far as forbidding embedded JS altogether which removes the attack vector for malware within advertising networks. The networks have proved time and time again they are not able to prevent distribution of malware, and this is the primary reason I use an adblocker.

Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum.

The problem is it’s not in Google or Microsoft’s interest to implement this. This has to come from legislation at US gov level. So it’ll never happen.

I’ll continue ad blocking.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#90

Post by davidgay »

giobox wrote: post #68
elindbe2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the first place to start implementing ad bans is in public spaces, which I hear is common in Europe. I don't have to watch TV so I don't see TV ads. I don't listen to the radio much so I don't listen to radio ads. I can use an ad blocker on the web, yet for some reason the public spaces I inhabit (and help pay for) are full of ads.

Not saying you are wrong, but which European states is this common in? I’ve never noticed this, and many public spaces in Europe have a great deal of poster/bill board style advertisements. I remember reading Paris tried this, but that’s a long way from “common in Europe”.

There aren't any billboards along freeways in Switzerland, e.g.
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