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Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

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Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#131

Post by CodeMage »

cletus wrote: post #86

The essence of this is you need to decide the answer to two questions: 1. What are your personal ethics? 2. Who do you trust? To put (1) in context, the content on the Internet is largely provided free but is ad-supported. When it comes to display advertising, it's sold almost entirely on a CPM basis (it may be resold on an eCPC or eCPA basis). It is at best only partially sold on an intent basis (meaning it's entici…

I don't think the personal ethics issue is that simple and clear-cut. For example, I use both an ad blocker and a readability tool (in my case, it's Evernote Clearly). I started blocking ads long before stuff like Clearly was invented, but the motivation is the same: I want to read the stuff I came to read and all the other crap on the page is making it difficult to do so. If I stop using an ad blocker, I would still use Clearly.

My point is, would your ethics also preclude you from using a readability tool?

Now, one can argue that a tool like Clearly is okay, because it requires you to click on it and it gets rid of the stuff that distracts you, but the ads still get displayed in the first place. What if someone made a tool that downloads the ads, as if to display them, without ever displaying them? By using such a tool, you wouldn't be denying publishers income while consuming their content, but you would still be gaming the system. How ethical would that be?

Again, the hard line would be to either a) suck it up and consume both the content and the crap together, or b) refrain from consuming the content altogether. But the hard line approach doesn't really solve anything, except giving you the moral high ground.

There's a real problem with the ad-supported content and the problem is the conflict between what the advertisers want, which is to force you to pay attention to their ads, even at the cost of breaking your experience, and what the content consumers want, which is to consume the damn content without being distracted or even badgered.

Even most of the so-called non-intrusive ads are annoying, because they're inserted where they're supposed to draw your attention.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#132

Post by throwaway10001 »

bad_user wrote: post #45

I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them 2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease a…

I use mainly so I can search with Google. Without adblock, it's a nightmare on many searches, the first screen of my laptop is all ads (not including youtube, maps, Google local etc.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#133

Post by skue »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #129
ianlevesque wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you pay to subscribe to a service that paid the sites you use instead of them showing you ads?

No. Not because I won't pay certain sites for their content (I subscribe to LWN, for instance), but because I don't want to pay some aggregating middleman service that by necessity can then track across all the sites I visit. In principle I like the concept of paying a fixed amount per unit time and splitting that across the sites I care about. In practice I don't see any obvious privacy-respecting way to do that.

That is an excellent point about micropayments. Creating a system that pays sites without a middleman that tracks visits would be challenging (though I imagine it's technically feasible).

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#134

Post by pavel_lishin »

citricsquid wrote: post #62
bad_user wrote: post #45

I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them 2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease a…

Plus a huge number of people that adblock have been doing it for years and are basing the continued usage on the assumption that adverts now are similar to the adverts in 2006 - 2009. I use a lot of different websites with advertisements and I can't think of the last time I've seen an advertisement that auto-played sound or caused lag, whereas in 2008 it was a daily occurrence. The value that advertisements provide (…

Your comment has convinced me to turn off AdBlock; we'll see how it goes.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#135

Post by WickyNilliams »

JonnieCache wrote: post #24
asb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghostery users should be aware of: http://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to... (no judgement on the practice implied, just flagging it as something for potential users to consider).

Ghostery alternative: https://disconnect.me

And open source apparently! https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#136

Post by Osmium »

bad_user wrote: post #45

I cannot verify the claims, but I'll state the reasons once again about why I'm not using ad blockers: 1) free websites and web services need revenue and as long as the ads are tasteful, I don't mind them 2) I actually want websites to annoy me with lots of stupid ads, as I want to stop using such websites, because I want to reward publishers that don't do that Ad blockers are trying to fix a symptom of the disease a…

Conversely, three very practical reasons to use ad blockers:

1) You save battery life

2) You save data

3) Pages load quicker

And you lose no content in the process. So why wouldn't you? If you're using a fast machine hooked up to fibre broadband, perhaps it's a different matter, but as a mobile user it's a no brainer. And that isn't even mentioning the content of ads or privacy concerns...

If you think ads are necessary for the health of the internet, then they need to be presented a way that doesn't actively harm the experience of using the internet.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#137

Post by ianlevesque »

lifeformed wrote: post #128
ianlevesque wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Everyone needs to offer the option to pay in some way. If we could pay for a bundle of all sites even better.

Someone should make a paid adblocker service that shares revenue with site owners. Site owners can opt in to get a share of the revenue, so that each time a visitor using the adblocker visits their site, the site owner gets paid an amount equivalent to the potential ad revenue from that visit. That means they could serve up a custom ad-less page that's designed to look nice sans ads. Users get a good adblocker that t…

Yep I'd buy it.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#138

Post by antoviaque »

For Firefox users, there is Adblock Lite, a fork created after the "Acceptable ads" story on AdBlock Plus a few months ago:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock_lite/

"Adblocklite is a fork of the Adblock Plus version 1.3.10 (classic UI) extension for blocking advertisements on the web. This fork will provide the same features as Adblock Plus 2.X and higher while keeping the old UI but without "acceptable ads" feature."

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#139

Post by hnha »

SifJar wrote: post #19

I'm struggling to fully understand the article due to the poor Google Translation. Anyone offer some concise clarification as to what ABP is actually doing? Is it "just" that they are changing Amazon referral links on websites to their own referral links so they get money instead, or is there more to it than that? Are they even actually doing that? (Or is it just that they aren't blocking referral links made with sof…

that paragraph is difficult to understand even in german, to me it sounds like not apb, but another addon ( http://urlfixer.org ) is the one with the amazon link tampering.

Re: Adblock Plus “typo correction” feature adds affiliate IDs to links

#140

Post by fhd2 »

(Edit: The headline used to be "Adblock Plus is changing Amazon refs", but it has been fixed. I commented on the new one below [6].)

I'm a developer at Eyeo, working on Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is not changing Amazon links. TFA is ripe with FUD, but it doesn't even go this far.

Maybe this was a major misunderstanding of the typo correction feature [1], which is opt-in, only implemented in Firefox and merely corrects typos in URLs, always telling what it corrected. I was never really sure how it fits into ABP, but I fail to see how this could be considered shady.

Other than that, the only thing Adblock Plus does is block content. Which content that is depends on the filter lists you use. There are defaults, but you're free to use any you like, or create your own. It's usually ads, but ABP is also pretty good at blocking any kind of tracking [2].

Back to TFA. The main allegations are:

1. The CEO and the angel investor at Eyeo have ties to the ad industry

2. Adblock Plus is letting ads through if sites pay for it

3. Adblock Plus is burning money

One at a time:

1. This is true. Eyeo was founded to find a middle ground between users blocking ads and sites monetising from ads. The idea is that there are decent ads that most people wouldn't want to block, in the sea of horrible ads - "acceptable ads" [3]. "The ad industry" is not a single evil entity that wants to blind us all, some people in it actually want to make ads better. Hence Wladimir joined forces with them.

2. Every site can have their ads whitelisted, and ads that violate the criteria [4] will not be whitelisted. Some sites are supporting us financially, others don't. I think the main controversy is that this feature is opt-out rather than opt-in.

3. I disagree. More than half of the employees on the payroll are working remotely, deliberately. We wouldn't even all fit into the office, which is nice, but cheap (it's a building that's going to be demolished in 1-2 years). We're barely profitable, nobody's getting rich. We manage the infrastructure that delivers the filter lists - which are used by literally every other ad blocker out there, for free, and that's fine. Everything we create is open source [5], everything can be forked, and that's fine.

[1] http://adblockplus.org/blog/typo-correction-feature-in-adblo...

[2] http://adblockplus.org/en/features#tracking

[3] http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

[4] http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria

[5] https://hg.adblockplus.org/

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5947553

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