Why I Work on Ads

That's not at all justification for practices that harm society, especially when that harm takes fewer resources to achieve than charity donations can make up for. It's like saying "I'm willing to work for a company with massive pollution because I donate some of my salary to Greenpeace."

Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but the fact that the author put this justification first is an implicit admission that they feel what they do is wrong in some way and try to offset it with donations.

The thing is, I think advertising is positive

It is difficult to think otherwise about something attached to your paycheck

I think advertising is positive... if I'm causing harm through my work I would like to know about it.

One really great example of harm is propaganda delivered via political attack ads that polarize the population by provoking anger, fear, and hatred.

Ads. You pay with your attention.

You aren't given a choice in most cases to choose attention or $$. You also pay with more than attention: your privacy, personal data, and tracking of online actions. Many off-line actions can also be tracked by purchasing data from other sources and matching to the data collected online.

Non-regressive

This would be a better point if many media outlets didn't still use paywalls and ads together

The “alternatives” are not paywalls vs. ads, the alternative is to be a less awful ad provider.

Unintrusive text is fine. Static images without flashy animations are fine. Even watching something like a funny TV commercial is great because it seems worth the time.

Yet somewhere along the line, somebody decided it was “fine” to shove overlays in my face, stubbornly keep things in place during scrolling, auto-playing sound, etc. And all that crap is before even factoring in the gigabytes of bandwidth stolen from me to download and run JavaScript that ultimately serves to be a creepy stalker around the Internet.

So feel free to work on ads without shame as long as the ads you work on aren’t shameless.

> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.