Performing the exact opposite of the stated and expected purpose of the application, for money, is a violation of trust. There is an implied belief that a product should do what it claims (and its name clearly states a purpose -- ad BLOCK), and the plain English reading of the title makes that pretty clear.
Imagine a virus scanner that only blocked those viruses that didn't pay up.
This is a conflict of values between users and the devs.
- Users want ads to just go away, period, the end.
- The devs want ads to be nice. So they swat down the nasty ones and permit the nice ones.
Ransomware was probably the wrong way to do that, but I can see why it was superficially appealing. "We check your ads for niceness, and then permit them. We won't give our effort away for free", being the idea behind it.
As a user, I do want ads to just go away. Since they started some 20-odd years ago, advertisers have abused the medium. If advertisers had had even a smattering of propriety, I wouldn't have been using an ad blocker since I first learned they were a thing.
If advertisers take a sudden "nice" approach, I'll keep blocking ads for another decade or so and see if the trend lasts. That's all I feel I owe them at this point.
I don't want ads to go away. I want ads that are relevant, or at least aren't insultingly stupid.
The utter shit people run on major sites these days is so patently offensive ("Single Mom's Weight Loss Trick!", "Get Government Money Tomorrow!") that I keep a blocker on for my own sanity. I'm consistently appalled at the extremely low quality advertising that supposedly reputable properties put on their sites.
Whilst I largely disagree with you on advertising generally (see Adam Curtis, Neil Postman and Jerry Mander for the long argument), I have to agree with you on the growing preponderance of low-quality ads.
I see few to none on Firefox, but even with a firewall hosts blocklist, Chrome/Android shows the bottom-feeder stuff on, again, supposedly reputable publishers' sites: TIME, CNN, Salon, Vox, and more. And the only impression it gives me is that thes companies have to be absolutely desperate to let that crap darken their pages.
You're right, it's absolutely insulting. To both the reader and the sites running the spots.
They are optimizing their ads for effectiveness. Patently offensive garbage ads weed out all but the most gullible of customers. Show them to enough people and the idiots come flowing in, cards at the ready to buy miracles and snake oil.
I have never trusted the ABP people. But this is not the "opposite of the expected purpose of the application." In fact ABP is working exactly as designed, by blocking other people's ads, and allowing ads that ABP profits from. From day one, the business model was shakedowns of large advertisers. This is just a slight evolution in technique.
Well, huh, they do state the purpose clear on their homepage:
Surf the web without annoying ads!
Can block tracking, malware domains, banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube
Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)
It's free! (GPLv3)
There's a significant difference between providing a tool to allow an end user to take an action and leveraging your position as a middleman to inject content. This is no different than the egregious behavior displayed by Verizon and others.
What gives Ad Block Plus the right or qualification to determine that my ad is a "bad" ad?
Why should ABP have the ability to suppress editorial or advertising content on my website, replace it with it's own advertising content and not share revenue with me?
Ad blocking itself may be considered a ethical issue as well, but it's a different ethical issue. With blocking, the decision is ultimately made by the end user. With ad injection, ABP is making itself a third party stakeholder.
Misleading to the user - any person who downloads a thing called "adblock" expects it to block ads. (A less charitable person may point out that a program that claims to do one thing and actually does another is known as a "trojan horse")
The same way a person who downloads an antivirus expects it to block viruses.
Well that's all ethics are anywhere. There's no concrete list of universally agreed ethics, by definition people pick and choose what they deem ethical for whatever reasons they want.
Blocking Ad is itself unethical. Ads are placed on pages to pay for the content. By blocking ads you are depriving the content creators of compensation for their work.
Replacing Ads with other ads is worse because you're not only depriving a content creator of revenue but then profiting off of their work. You could argue that it amounts to theft.
TV is paid on viewership numbers. Newspapers are paid on circulation. Gliding past ads on a site is factored into the CPM values. Books in a library are paid for and covered by the first-sale doctrine.
You don't think people who change channels to avoid ads/who use DVRs is factored into the price per viewer for TV ads?
Your individual impact might be harder to track than with ad-blockers, but on the aggregate you are driving down the price per viewer by switching on channels during ads, using DVR, etc.
(Imagine a world where 100% of people used a DVR and skipped ads. Obviously the price of TV ads would plummet. By using a DVR you are contributing to making our world, that world).
Suppose someone offered you a free TV to sit through a 2 hour presentation about a timeshare. Does that entitle you to just take the TV and leave without sitting through the presentation?
You chose a particularly interesting example: as far as I can tell, to a first approximation, all timeshares are scams designed to separate a fool from their money.
So if I had the free time, I would consider attending in order to ask pointed questions and warn other people away.
You could also make the argument that ads or ad networks are potentially dangerous. That doesn't make Ad Blocking ethical, just justified. The ethical thing to do would be to either not use an Ad Blocker or not visit sites that are ad supported, neither of which is realistic if I'm being honest.
I think we're at a very Napster moment for content websites.
That's a choice for the individual to make but lets stop pretending that Ad Blocking is ethical. It's about as ethical as Napster was, but given the alternatives it's the obvious choice.
Additionally you can use things like Patreon or Google Contributor.
counter point: blocking ads is self-defense and defense of others, including one's family. it is everyone's ethical duty to block all ads, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of ads contain hostile, abusive, invasive and/or subversive content. this can lead to loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
> it is everyone's ethical duty to block all ads, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of ads contain hostile, abusive, invasive and/or subversive content
It is everyone's duty to burn all books, because a non-trivial and unpredictable portion of books contain hostile, abusive, invasive, and/or subversive content.
They meant it in terms of malware/viruses/tracking and probably could have phrased it better as "hostile payloads" or something similar. Books generally don't contain malware and those that do don't contain malware that will run on your computer when you open the book.
This is made apparent by:
>loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
> loss of data, loss of time, loss of money and loss of privacy.
Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
More importantly, if the sole concern is "hostile payloads" then the acceptable ads program should be exactly what you support. I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup, and I support ABP in pushing more publishers towards acceptable ads.
>Not really. There are certainly plenty of books which will lose you money and time.
But what about data or privacy?
>I'm fine with ads on sites like Facebook where I know it's not going to take over my computer or launch a massive popup
The concern there would be privacy/tracking via advertisements. I readily admit that is a silly argument if one is already using Facebook. I do not have a Facebook account. I do not know when, if ever, Facebook will extend their advertisements to be used on partnered sites instead of internal-only. I can block them in advance even if I may never see them at all.
Ads are placed on web pages in the hope that people will click on them and make them money. It's not unethical to instruct my browser not to download them any more than it is unethical to avoid the lady giving out free samples at the grocery store.
If it means we go back to the days where people spent their own money to create pages because they were passionate about a subject, I'm fine with that. I miss that era. It sure beats advertisers thinking they are entitled to know where you go when you browse around the web.
> It's not unethical to instruct my browser not to download them any more than it is unethical to avoid the lady giving out free samples at the grocery store.
The difference is that you're not having someone sweep the grocery store and remove all free sample ladies before you enter it. Ignoring a free sample lady is akin to ignoring an ad on page.
The primary difference though is that the lady doesn't take a photograph of you, follow you around the store noting everything you stop to look out or put in your cart, and then follow you out to the parking lot and go to the next store with you.
I'm not saying that what content owners or advertisers do is right or ethical, just that at it's core blocking the ads is unethical as well.
I'm not having someone alter the web page on the server. I'm declining certain files. The original analogy is much better than your version. At most I have an assistant declining for me. But I didn't damage the displays or affect anyone else.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, before it was possible or commonplace for ads to track whether they were being shown, plenty of web sites included text like: "Support this page by clicking on our ad banners!" Would you have argued back then that it was unethical to view a web page and not click on all of the ads displayed on it?
