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>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the s

>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys. The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate. There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever. Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.

sanswork 10y ago
It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.
- dumb-saint 10y ago
  They are not paying for anything. No one entered an agreement or signed a contract. They are trying to exploit the content in a certain way, and the receiver of the content is free to take counter-measures.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    They are paying the content providers who are paying you in content. They are free to take "counter measures". But that doesn't stop the fact that they are paying for both your time and the content.
    - dumb-saint 10y ago
      Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things. Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
      - sanswork 10y ago
        >I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. What I do with that data isn't up to you. That includes viewing all, parts, or none of the information I received from your server. That especially includes deciding about what code gets executed on my machine. If advertisers want to control what I am doing with the content I get, please find yourself a new protocol and DRM it to your hearts' content. Just leave the Web alone.
        sanswork 10y ago
        >What I do with that data isn't up to you. I didn't say it was.
        dispose13432 10y ago
        >The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. So Facebook says that the foundation of the web is sending data to the server (such as cookies) and receiving information back. Nowhere in the protocol does it say they can't track you. Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral. The foundation of the internet is that the server sends you data. Your browser happens to have a security hole and you got a virus. Totally ethical and legal. Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses.
        pdkl95 10y ago
        > Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral. It is currently legal, but that doesn't imply that it's moral. Legality does not define morality. > Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses. Correct. > Totally ethical and legal. Sending a virus is patently unethical regardless of the transport mechanism. as for legality, see a lawyer about 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  My attention is more valuable than that. It's /my/ attention, I get to set the price, and I don't accept their offer. They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads. It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment. >They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable. This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
    - Sir_Substance 10y ago
      >You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads. You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price". The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model. The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative. I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high. I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days. [1] http://www.dansdata.com http://www.dansdata.com
      - sanswork 10y ago
        Content creators have gone with not blocking blockers up until now because it's not an issue. As it becomes more of an issue you start seeing more and more anti-blocking scripts. Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators? You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Making the claim that you ad block because your attention is more valuable though is a joke.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, it's literally like that. I open a random webpage, wait a few seconds, and here they are. I visit my aunt, and don't even get to open the browser before BAM, ads everywhere!
  - sanswork 10y ago
    >I open a random webpage
- __jal 10y ago
  The facts are these. If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections. I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.) So pray-tell, if my browser is `wget | html2txt | more`, do you consider me in the moral wrong for failing to also send various bits of PII to whomever CNN considers a Trusted Sponsor today and retrieve images, flash cruft, malware, or whatever else those Trusted Sponsors choose to respond with?
  - sanswork 10y ago
    I didn't say I consider ad blockers morally wrong.
    - __jal 10y ago
      Ok. "In breach of implied contract?" "Failing to respect social mores?" "Doin' the wrong thing?" I'm vastly less interested in quibbling about word choice than the underlying concepts being discussed.
      - sanswork 10y ago
        I didn't imply any of that at all. I disputed their claim that they received no compensation for their attention.
- lvs 10y ago
  If I pass a street musician, I haven't implicitly signed a contract to pay her for the show -- either in currency or by transferring any other valued commodity. I don't have an obligation to support her business plan, even if I enjoy the music. She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like clicking on a link, it can't reasonably be claimed that I entered into a preconceived and negotiated contract where I agreed to payment for a service.
  - sanswork 10y ago
    Correct you took no action to interface with them besides walking. But if you walk into a room where just a musician is playing(and its advertised that this is whats happening in the room) you have now created a relationship where you've chosen to receive their art. And if they have a poster for their sponsor on the wall behind them you can't complain about it.
    - lvs 10y ago
      But nobody told me what was happening in the room before I walked into it. I saw nothing but a URL, or maybe I saw some text obliquely indicating what might be happening in there. I certainly didn't see the text of a contract before I walked in. If I walk in, not knowing anything, how can I have signed a contract? Similarly, if I have no binding contract, it certainly can't be required of me to observe or respond to everything within the room. There is no origin for the musician's claimed right to oblige me to any commercial action.
    - ucarion 10y ago
      Online ads also track you, and are often executed in poor taste. It's as though most of the posters had a camera and bright flashing lights.
      - CaptSpify 10y ago
        And then followed you home and wanted to know what you eat for breakfast, even though it had nothing to do with the musical performance.
k1m 10y ago
> There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever. Agree. I think it's unfortunate that so much of the debate around advertising, especially from many on the side of ad blocking, focuses only on the evils of tracking and privacy erosion. This project does it too. From their FAQ: "It is not advertising we are protesting, but advertising insofar as it represents a dominant means of tracking users without their consent." But advertising itself should be protested. I don't know why so many shy away from that. I've been working on a project to promote ad blocking. It's been discussed here on HN before, but I'll link to it anyway. https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I've hated ads since I was a kid. I never realized it until back around 2010 when I overheard my friends say, "he really hates advertising. Have you noticed that?" and I was like, "Wait, it's .. noticeable?" Modern advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response in order to buy a product. The mother/fathers of modern advertising are none other than Edward Bernays and Anna Freud. (Sigmund Freud's nephew and daughter). There's a lot of evidence that Freud resented both of these family members for using his psychoanalyst tools to help industry and government gain profit and power. At the same time, Edward was instrumental in promoting the English version of Freud's book, keeping Sigmund out of the poor house. I highly recommend watching The Century of the Self. It's a multi-part BBC documentary that goes into the history of advertising and consumerism as we see it in our current age.
  - sosuke 10y ago
    Oh oh oh, have you seen the advertisements by Sprint. I swear I hear fans kick on in my head to keep it cool when trying to unwrap their current marketing line. They have two Christmas trees (or haircuts) next to each other. One has twice the price because it has 1% more needles or 1% more cut hair. They say "would you pay twice as much for 1% more?". I think it is a genius framing of the data.
hedora 10y ago
Any time an industry declares war on its users (as ad tracking did years ago), it gets ugly. I thought the endgame would be manipulating analytics to get extremely specific, high mistargeted auction prices: I'm shopping for a $1.3M turbine part. It will look nice next to my hand made tibetan merino wool cat stand that I am also shopping for. Of course my eyeballs are worth $1000/minute. Why do you ask? As mean as these guys are, they could be a lot worse. Anyway, kudos to the extension authors!

sanswork 10y ago

It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.

dumb-saint 10y ago
They are not paying for anything. No one entered an agreement or signed a contract. They are trying to exploit the content in a certain way, and the receiver of the content is free to take counter-measures.
- sanswork 10y ago
  They are paying the content providers who are paying you in content. They are free to take "counter measures". But that doesn't stop the fact that they are paying for both your time and the content.
  - dumb-saint 10y ago
    Nope, they are not paying me for anything. Again, I did not enter into any agreement. I just clicked a link. They are expending their resources in an attempt to capture and profit from my attention. Those are very different things. Many times they also payed to make it hard for me to get to the content that I actually wanted. This is commonly known as SEO.
    - sanswork 10y ago
      >I just clicked a link. Because you want to consume what they've produced. That is how they are paying you. You keep saying "I did not enter into any agreement" like it changes anything. It's juvenile.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. What I do with that data isn't up to you. That includes viewing all, parts, or none of the information I received from your server. That especially includes deciding about what code gets executed on my machine. If advertisers want to control what I am doing with the content I get, please find yourself a new protocol and DRM it to your hearts' content. Just leave the Web alone.
        sanswork 10y ago
        >What I do with that data isn't up to you. I didn't say it was.
        dispose13432 10y ago
        >The foundation of the Web - the Hypertext Transfer Protocol - is that I request a piece of data from a given address, while also providing relevant information about my capabilities and media I'm willing to accept, and then you send me back that data. So Facebook says that the foundation of the web is sending data to the server (such as cookies) and receiving information back. Nowhere in the protocol does it say they can't track you. Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral. The foundation of the internet is that the server sends you data. Your browser happens to have a security hole and you got a virus. Totally ethical and legal. Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses.
        pdkl95 10y ago
        > Ergo, tracking is perfectly legal and moral. It is currently legal, but that doesn't imply that it's moral. Legality does not define morality. > Nowhere in the HTTP protocol does it say not to send viruses. Correct. > Totally ethical and legal. Sending a virus is patently unethical regardless of the transport mechanism. as for legality, see a lawyer about 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5
Sir_Substance 10y ago
My attention is more valuable than that. It's /my/ attention, I get to set the price, and I don't accept their offer. They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.
- sanswork 10y ago
  You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads. It is your attention which you are agreeing to trade for information or entertainment. >They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable. This is more commonly happening now. Then we all have to deal with people complaining about that. Taking up /my/ attention which they are refusing to pay for. Pay me for reading your posts.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    >You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads. You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price". The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model. The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative. I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high. I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days. [1] http://www.dansdata.com http://www.dansdata.com
    - sanswork 10y ago
      Content creators have gone with not blocking blockers up until now because it's not an issue. As it becomes more of an issue you start seeing more and more anti-blocking scripts. Once or twice in all your years online you have agreed to an alternate funding method and you think that is sustainable for content creators? You can make a lot of arguments for ad blocking. I ad block because it slows my computer down. Making the claim that you ad block because your attention is more valuable though is a joke.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. Yeah, it's literally like that. I open a random webpage, wait a few seconds, and here they are. I visit my aunt, and don't even get to open the browser before BAM, ads everywhere!
- sanswork 10y ago
  >I open a random webpage
__jal 10y ago
The facts are these. If I connect to, say, port 80 on www.cnn.com and send some particular ASCII, then the machine on the other end will likely respond with some text. The owners of that machine invite these connections. I can then: pipe that to /dev/null; read it in a text editor; read it with a web browser; print it out; file it away somewhere. (There are of course other options.) So pray-tell, if my browser is `wget | html2txt | more`, do you consider me in the moral wrong for failing to also send various bits of PII to whomever CNN considers a Trusted Sponsor today and retrieve images, flash cruft, malware, or whatever else those Trusted Sponsors choose to respond with?
- sanswork 10y ago
  I didn't say I consider ad blockers morally wrong.
  - __jal 10y ago
    Ok. "In breach of implied contract?" "Failing to respect social mores?" "Doin' the wrong thing?" I'm vastly less interested in quibbling about word choice than the underlying concepts being discussed.
    - sanswork 10y ago
      I didn't imply any of that at all. I disputed their claim that they received no compensation for their attention.
lvs 10y ago
If I pass a street musician, I haven't implicitly signed a contract to pay her for the show -- either in currency or by transferring any other valued commodity. I don't have an obligation to support her business plan, even if I enjoy the music. She may perhaps claim that we entered into an implied contract. Or the musician could post a placard reading her terms-of-service. But in simply walking down the street, like clicking on a link, it can't reasonably be claimed that I entered into a preconceived and negotiated contract where I agreed to payment for a service.
- sanswork 10y ago
  Correct you took no action to interface with them besides walking. But if you walk into a room where just a musician is playing(and its advertised that this is whats happening in the room) you have now created a relationship where you've chosen to receive their art. And if they have a poster for their sponsor on the wall behind them you can't complain about it.
  - lvs 10y ago
    But nobody told me what was happening in the room before I walked into it. I saw nothing but a URL, or maybe I saw some text obliquely indicating what might be happening in there. I certainly didn't see the text of a contract before I walked in. If I walk in, not knowing anything, how can I have signed a contract? Similarly, if I have no binding contract, it certainly can't be required of me to observe or respond to everything within the room. There is no origin for the musician's claimed right to oblige me to any commercial action.
  - ucarion 10y ago
    Online ads also track you, and are often executed in poor taste. It's as though most of the posters had a camera and bright flashing lights.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      And then followed you home and wanted to know what you eat for breakfast, even though it had nothing to do with the musical performance.

k1m 10y ago

> There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever. Agree. I think it's unfortunate that so much of the debate around advertising, especially from many on the side of ad blocking, focuses only on the evils of tracking and privacy erosion. This project does it too. From their FAQ: "It is not advertising we are protesting, but advertising insofar as it represents a dominant means of tracking users without their consent." But advertising itself should be protested. I don't know why so many shy away from that. I've been working on a project to promote ad blocking. It's been discussed here on HN before, but I'll link to it anyway. https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html https://blockads.fivefilters.org/acceptable.html

djsumdog 10y ago
I've hated ads since I was a kid. I never realized it until back around 2010 when I overheard my friends say, "he really hates advertising. Have you noticed that?" and I was like, "Wait, it's .. noticeable?" Modern advertising is specifically engineered to evoke an emotional response in order to buy a product. The mother/fathers of modern advertising are none other than Edward Bernays and Anna Freud. (Sigmund Freud's nephew and daughter). There's a lot of evidence that Freud resented both of these family members for using his psychoanalyst tools to help industry and government gain profit and power. At the same time, Edward was instrumental in promoting the English version of Freud's book, keeping Sigmund out of the poor house. I highly recommend watching The Century of the Self. It's a multi-part BBC documentary that goes into the history of advertising and consumerism as we see it in our current age.
- sosuke 10y ago
  Oh oh oh, have you seen the advertisements by Sprint. I swear I hear fans kick on in my head to keep it cool when trying to unwrap their current marketing line. They have two Christmas trees (or haircuts) next to each other. One has twice the price because it has 1% more needles or 1% more cut hair. They say "would you pay twice as much for 1% more?". I think it is a genius framing of the data.

hedora 10y ago

Any time an industry declares war on its users (as ad tracking did years ago), it gets ugly. I thought the endgame would be manipulating analytics to get extremely specific, high mistargeted auction prices: I'm shopping for a $1.3M turbine part. It will look nice next to my hand made tibetan merino wool cat stand that I am also shopping for. Of course my eyeballs are worth $1000/minute. Why do you ask? As mean as these guys are, they could be a lot worse. Anyway, kudos to the extension authors!