Fine. BUT sites should be responsible for the ads running on their site and held financially or criminally responsible. Adtech is infested with intrusive tracking which is legally dubious in my jurisdiction. To say nothing of the security implications of allowing random unvetted transient 3rd parties to run code. At this point I see a good content blocker as a security measure more than an ad blocker.
I have to agree. We're way beyond blocking 3rd party cookies for safety. As long as ad tech continues to be a source of malverts and intrusive UX practices, ad blocking is now a best practice.
Companies/publishers/advertisers probably already see that the writing is on the wall as users become better informed about the often shady practices of ad tech.
They could deal with advertisers themselves and manually approve and display text/image ads from their own domain (as it was done in printed newspapers), but isn't it easier to just leave a div+javascript and have the right of arbitrary code execution in a chunk of your page get auctioned off to the highest bidder by several shady ad network?
Just go to www.bbc.com and look at what domains your ad-blocker denies: edigitalsurvey.com, chartbeat.com, googletagservices.com, scorecardresearch.com, effectivemeasure.net, iperceptions.com, krxd.net, optimizely.com... now imagine if your printed newspaper shot at you a GPS receiver with a mic, a cam, etc. Surely it wouldn't be morally wrong to duck and avoid that bug?
Same here - I'm not that concerned about targeted ads, but if it means significant consequences for my bandwidth, security, performance or simply being able to use the site as intended, well, then I don't seem to have a realistic choice.
That said, I think there's room for an adblocker that focuses on ads that are too intrusive and whitelists decent, static ads automatically. Currently I do that manually on a per site basis.
Not really, just use a real adblocker and move on with your life. Adtech has plenty of problems but this kind of silly abuse is easily caught and filtered out with no effort. You might even cause yourself more annoyance with fraud and spam prevention tools used with common services.
I disagree. DOSing a site is bad behaviour, regardless of how you do this. But accessing it in an automated way instead of a browser? Not really. The deal on the Internet is like this: a website owner can provide whatever they want, and a visitor can read it however they want. Discriminating visitors based on whether or not they seem to be bots instead of people is going beyond what the site provider should do. So is detecting and blocking people using adblockers.
Sometimes I want to write an ad blocker that actually goes on the offence. Every time it blocks an ad, it should download a few hundred megs of ads from the offending server and drop them in the ethernal bitbucket in the sky. It would either cost them money or get me banned from seeing ads, both are fine by me. Then drop it in an app store, get a few thousand users, and see them squirm. I'd call it Do Not Track, with a mind diseasing number of exclamation marks after it.
Alas, this would probably violate some real laws, plus messing with shady businesses might make them search out other than legal means for getting redress. At the very least, Baron Google would banish me from their land.
If sites just hosted their own ads, blockers wouldn't stand a chance. I wouldn't trust a third-party, centralized, site (users should have demanded that their browsers block third-party content from the begining of the web) and it wouldn't stop the host from doing their own on-site tracking. Self hosted ads are the only that will ever be allowed past my blocker, and I've seen about 3 sites in the past 10 years that do it.
Theoretically, if the ads that were whitelisted were flagged enough or enough complaints were raised to ADP, this would be a financial signal to both ADP and the sites that the ads are unacceptable. I am not saying this is exactly how it goes as I haven't the slightest what goes on behind the closed doors at ADP (and use µblock0 myself); nor do I endorse the idea of using one company to coerce another, but I would imagine that it allows for at least a channel for more direct responses as to why an ad is not acceptable.
That is, I do not believe that other solutions have a very clear way for advertisers to determine what is and isn't acceptable; for the sake of argument, this puts aside the fact that some unacceptable aspects of ads should be common sense (loud noises, pop-unders, fake download links, etc). Basically when an adblocking user reaches the site, they have no means of communicating why they dislike the ads on that site - most of the time, it's just a blanket block that users never think about. So even if you really like a website and would love to support it through the ad revenue, your current options don't send a very clear signal as to what was disruptive and dislikable.
Again, I'm not saying I fully agree with this, but I think it's an argument that has some value, and reflects the greater difficulty with advertising in general; it's a one-way communication venue, and the few times that we as viewers are able to get a signal back to the other side, it's usually ignored until legislation gets involved. (See the CALM Act and it's overall ineffectiveness [1]) Basically there isn't really much control over what advertisers actually do, and even Truth in Advertising laws basically have no teeth except for extremely blatant falsehoods.
Adblocking is the first major way that viewers have been able to push back against advertising, and I'm with that 100% since I just think it's pointless in and of itself - it's wasteful in my opinion how much infrastructure exists out there just for the sake of providing advertisements. But I also understand that likely advertising isn't going away, so having some method to signal back clearly and directly to advertisers what is wrong with an ad is good in my mind. Said signal having some teeth to make sure they get the message is also important, else it's not much better than before. But not giving any indication as to what's wrong doesn't really help either. (I'm not blaming anyone but stubborn advertisers here, but I think it helps us as activists if we can make it 100% what we don't like about specific advertisements instead of just doing a blanket block).
Thing is an ad-blocker is merely a content blocker that happens to block ads. making ad blocking illegal would not make content blocker illegal.
You could still use those to block trackers which are the underwater part of the online ads iceberg. Making an anti-tracking-blocking law would be a different beast because now you're attacking a fundamental human right to privacy and advertisers would still be mad because they lost their ability to upsell their ads that can't be targeted or retargeted anymore.
Alternatively just go back to using the system hosts file, or replace ad blockers by whole website blockers, use a vpn to a country that does not have this law. There are options around such a nonsense piece of legislation
Every site doesn't do that, though. Almost B2B (non-consumer) sites sell their ads directly to clients (major companies) and don't have malware come through. It's only the ad networks that really are guilty of selling ads to people they don't know and getting the bad creative. If ad blocking software was really about stopping malware they would recognize this and have a way of certifying sites that do business directly and don't allow ad networks.
I'd have zero problems with ads embedded in the page where the topic is inferred from the content of the page.
But as long as these companies unneccessarily track my browsing habits in order to serve ads, I'll continue using a tracker blocker like uBlock Origin with the sad side-effect that the ads disappear from the page.
And that's fine for generic website developers IMO - however, governments should be held to a higher standard. I mean people fill in some really sensitive, fraud sensitive information - do you really want a 3rd party's JS on there?
Mind you I don't even want to know how much information browser addons have access to. Are there any APIs that forbid any addon from accessing the page? Probably not, that would thwart adblockers.
It would be another bit for the fingerprinting, that's an important caveat.
The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.
Setting aside the rewards program, people can and will use ad-blockers. Even if those were illegal for some reason, there are lists available (such as hosts, https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts) where you can make known tracking/advertising/etc hostnames non-routable
Are you saying that site owners should feel violated by folks installing ad-blockers (or using host files)?
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