Goodbye Brave

There's a couple of issues with this line of thinking, but I'd also just observe that this split is technically an additional tangent. My point up above was that of course people understand why people don't like advertising, and that most people don't like advertising themselves. It's not some unknown or alien thing on which to feign ignorance. Indeed it borders on universal human experience. Like the old quip about "everyone understands atheism, I just believe in one less god than you", practically everyone understands an inherent distaste for advertising, some just want less advertising than others and some actively want to produce and push it on others while not having it forced upon themselves. After we've established that, now we get into if or when it's ok or justified.

Firstly, I'd urge everyone to deny the initial premise. The right or desire to be free of or avoid advertising has nothing inherently to do with the act of paying money or being able to amass or claim property rights over things. That's not why i hate junk mail. That's not why I don't want to be proselytised to. That's not why i shouldn't have to view propoganda. Of course, the addition of private property rights issues is one more barrier that advertising would have to overcome in order to be deemed acceptable, but on the contrary, i think a better premise is to start with WHY or WHEN advertising should be allowed, given that it is almost universally loathed or objected to. I wouldn't want to live in a world where people are subjected to advertising because they haven't payed for things or own things or content. That's dystopian.

At the very least, I think people should have the ability to say no, and for that desire to be respected and not interferred with. I think there's good grounds for advertising, or at least many types of advertising, to not be allowed in many public areas or via many public resources. I have no problems with companies or organisations not delivering material or allowing access to general consumer goods as a consequence of saying no to advertising, but that's different to users saying "no i don't want ads and I don't want to be tracked" and having the companies go "but I'm gonna do it anyway and you shouldn't be ad blocking".

Finally, I always come back to what the web is, or at least what it was, in that I deny the underlying unspoken premise that the web is there to run business models or pay money for content to be put on it. If businesses can make it on the web, good for them. But if they can't, the web is more important than business.

To be clear, the internet and web and content came first, then the businesses arrived and co-opted it for their purposes. Now the narrative is trying to be rewritten so that you can't possibly let people consume material on the web for free without people paying for it via advertising.

So let me be clear: I pay for my computer. I pay for the bandwidth of my ISP. This allows me access to a public network of computers where I can make requests to other computers on the network to send me information. People can also pay to put content up on that network to be requested by others, but no one forces them to do so, AND, no one forces them to answer my computer's request for content. When i use an ad-blocker, the main activity is for me to determine client-side that there are certain computers I don't want to talk to, and certain content I don't want to see. In an ideal world I wouldn't be tracked also, but that's just an additional abuse or manipulation of the system.

Several years after this whole system had been operating just fine, companies arrived and started trying to make money, and today we have a feigned victim-complex retcon narrative about how people not paying for content should view ads.

On the contrary, if companies do not want me viewing their content: don't put it up on a public open network that's publicly searchable, publicly addressable, and that responds to my requests for that content. Put it behind a paywall, put it behind authorisation, put it on your own intranet or network.

Keep the open web as the web. Keep it open. Keep it in good faith and respect user's explicit preferences. The hosting computer decides what content it wants to make available and who it wants to talk to. And my computer decides who it wants to talk to and what content it wants to see.

And in an ideal world, advertising should be delegated to the bare minimum of places because the starting assumption should be that most users, rationally, justifiably, and understandably, don't want it.

Disclaimer: I work for Ghostery. I respond to protect my own name, not my employer.

Ghostery is not selling user data.

Let me point out a few facts:

All browser-side code is open source https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension and https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-dnr-extension.

Yes, Ghostery has a subscription based business model and that another reason to great care in protecting users privacy. Take a look on how we use blind tokens to authenticate subscribed users while searching on glowstery.com https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-search-extension (notice that even when you are a subscribed user there is no session cookie so queries cannot be linked).

Hope this sheds some light on the accusation. If that’s not enough, I do sincerely recommend uBlock Origin or AdGuard on Apple’s platform.

As far as I am aware ipv6 and webrtc are privacy regressions, so one should enable them only if necessary.

I think so, yes.

There's no reason for him not to consider Firefox, since installing extensions reliably led him to become exasperated with Brave relying on backend servers, which then led himto the decision to stop using Brave. So since most if not all of the extensions he's looking for are very likely either ported to Firefox, or have (often better) equivalents, why not switch?

I'm not trying to be pedantic, just using the opportunity to promote switching to Firefox, because it's great :) and there are less bumps on the road than people make out.

When I switched back to Firefox after quantum hit, I actually discovered I didn't even need a few of the extensions I needed in Chrome.