Well, since the original post is about Facebook… blocking megacompanies seems to be very much in the discussion here.
I turn off ad blocking on Boing Boing, for what it’s worth–I try to do that on sites I frequent–but wouldn’t hesitate to turn it on again if they filled 8/10s of the page with ads like the FB picture that accompanied Cory’s post. Or popped up ads, or flashed ads at me, etc. I have my limits.
But… I’m sure most people with ad-blockers don’t make an exception for Boing Boing–and yeah, if enough block the ads here, then they’d have to come up with some other way to make money, or scale back, or fold.
The last scenario would truly suck, but call it “the tragedy of the .coms” – people will act in their own individual self interest over the public “good”. You can complain about it all you want, or chastise individuals, call it unethical–but if current web profit models can’t cope with that simple fact of human nature, then it’s pretty much a given that if ad blockers become truly ubiquitous, those models will have to change or cease to exist.
It’s not just vulnerabilities. I’ve never yet had my computer attacked by going to a wikia but I have had to kill browser sessions because the impenetrable layers of ads rendered my browser a paperweight. I lost stuff I was working on because wikia doesn’t respect their visitors enough to make their pages useable past the ability to show however many ads they can before your browser stops scrolling.
You letting me borrow your LEGOs doesn’t entitle you to egg my house. I understand they need to make money. Trust me, I do. I’m not going to pretend adblockers are a bigger problem than ad-laden sites today.
If I decide to go to a site which does complex 3d rendering in my browser and it slows my session to a halt, that’s on me. If I decide to read a bit of clickbait on your site and your greedy ads halt my session and I don’t come back without an ad blocker, that’s on you.
As long as the ad companies (including Facebook and Google) insist on letting advertisers run resource intensive browser-side code, play sound without user intervention, load ten video ads simultaneously, obfuscate the destination of the ad, and disguise ads to look like real content, I’ll continue to have no sympathy for them when people block ads.
(Disclaimer: I don’t block ads but I have some domains blocked on the router level for misbehavior and some sites (including wikias) I won’t open except through Lynx.)
Um, yes? How is this a question? Most ad blockers already offer to block comment platforms and social media buttons too, because there are people who dislike the notion that those widgets can be used to track your movement around the web without your consent. (And besides, most comment sections are flaming dumpster fires anyway, so why bother loading them in the first place? Am I obligated to read the comments just because the website has served them to me?) I never use Facebook, but unless I block their stupid “share this article” buttons and ubiquitous comment service, they’ll fingerprint my machine and stalk me all over the internet. Why should I be obligated to let Facebook track me? What “unofficial deal” do I have with them that says they’re allowed to do whatever the fuck they want in my browser?
If they allow themselves to be hacked on a regular basis without doing anything to improve their security measures to prevent it, thereby putting the integrity of their customers and the security of the people who download content from their servers in jeopardy, you bet your ass I’m going to be adding that CDN to a block list. Why are ad networks getting a pass here?
I block ads for the following reasons:
They are a proven vector for malware. While this is less of a concern on my Macs at home, I am not running the risk of infecting my Windows box at work just because the New York Times (or Boing Boing, or 538, or Ars Technica, or Forbes, or Wired, or or or etc.) chooses not to vouch for the integrity of everything they want to send me when I load their site.
They use cookies and scripts which phone home to not only make sure that I’ve loaded them, they also fingerprint my machine and use that information to follow me around the internet without my consent. Whatever “unofficial deal” you think I have with a website to let them serve ads at me, I am not under any obligation to let arbitrary third parties violate my privacy.
They damage my machine’s performance. This is especially true on mobile devices, but even on my laptop, having a couple dozen tabs open without an ad blocker installed results in browser performance going into the toilet and CPU/memory consumption going through the roof. I’m actually really frustrated that my 1st generation iPad mini doesn’t support content blocking extensions, because there are websites that literally crash my device when I try to visit them, they’re so bogged down with bullshit. Sure, websites should be able to make money serving ads, but they do not have the right to trash my machine in the process.
They are overwhelmingly distracting and obnoxious. I will block or disable anything that gets in the way of my ability to read the content I went to the site for in the first place, whether or not it’s an ad. I’ve used Chrome’s web inspector tools to hide animated website logos, because I find them extremely distracting. Is that unethical?
They consume data that I didn’t consent to them using. Not content to merely serve animated GIFs and buggy Flash objects, ad networks are now automatically streaming video to my machine. No. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances is that an acceptable practice. Websites like The Verge go from downloading dozens of megabytes of data and making hundreds - if not thousands - of separate HTTP requests (all of which also drains my battery on a mobile device) to being just over a megabyte (big images still cost data, which is fine) and only making a handful of requests to their primary domain and their CDN.
The only websites I’ve ever whitelisted were ones that were proactively making an effort to manage their ad content to keep it safe, reasonable, and unobtrusive (farewell, The Toast). If everyone went back to the 90s-era style of ads with static images or text, served from the same domain as the rest of their content, I would have much less of a need for an ad blocker. But nobody does that anymore. Too bad.
Are those platforms somehow immune to malware? I understand your concern about content providers being payed, but the argument for ad-blocking seems a lot more nuanced in the security community these days.
Interesting discussion about ads and the ‘deal’ that we make with the vendors (the web sites) of the product, our eyeballs, to their customers, the advertisers.
The advertisers are buying a chance to influence us to buy their stuff. They feel that if only we’d not run ad blockers, then that chance would increase from zero to .00001. Sorry, Charlie, it’s going to be zero, no matter how many of your ads I’m forced to watch. https://cinemafanatic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/a_clockwork_orange_torture2.jpg
And there is that. I am going to mentally filter them all out if was safe to browse without a blocker. The more annoying and intrusive they make the ads, like pop ups with sound the less likely I am to return to a site.
Well, I was convinced by kwajkids Free Market Solutions solution to the bad practices that directly led to adblockers existing in the first place and turned mine off. How lucky it is that I did that because I now discovered that there are horny MILFs who want to fuck living near me. Wow!
Who knew?! I was so unaware of this that they had to use flashing text and pop-up windows to get my attention. My plans for the weekend are set.
And the other fun thing when I am interested the targeted ads hit AFTER I have made my purchase. I got ads for keyboards/mice for months after I got the ones I wanted.
You lay out a very thoughtful and reasoned position on why we should be wary of ad networks and, really, any 3rd party partners of any kind. Let’s say we agree that for the reasons you outline they present an unacceptable risk to your machines.
That said, do you have an opinion on ethics of causing cost to the publisher but blocking their source of revenue? Ignore, for the moment, the question of whether the publisher is being unethical in allowing dangerous vectors on their sites.
Second, do you have an opinion on the ethics of blocking ads from ad networks which are taking extraordinary measures to ensure the content they deliver is safe? e.g. If Facebook is scrupulous about inspecting 100% of the content on their ad network such that it is as safe to users as any other content on their site, do you feel it is ethical to block it? Do the bulk lists which ABP and others use whitelist “safe” ad networks by default?
You’re right for many sites, but not Facebook. Facebook doesn’t generate shit for content. It’s all user generated.
For sites like BoingBoing, NYT, The Atlantic, etc. I don’t really mind the ads. I don’t use Facebook because I find it overly time consuming and I’ve realized that knowing more about many people actually makes me like them less (here’s looking at you, most of my rural, Southern, Trump-supporting family). But if I did use Facebook, I wouldn’t think twice about blocking those ads.
Can anyone tell me how to find out which websites make that effort? I would certainly whitelist BoingBoing if I knew they were dependable with this. Are they? This is an interesting discussion, and I’ve read many similar discussions and articles, but the subject is complex and confusing. Currently I use NoScript and Privacy Badger (on Firefox Mac) but I don’t really have a thorough understanding of this subject.
