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The Moral Question of Ad-Blocking
- bediger4000 7y ago"However, the advertising industry is certainly not morally neutral." If advertising were other than 99.5% falsehoods, I might feel a little bad about running uBlock, Privacy Badger and NoScript in Firefox (which you should do, too!) as well as running dnsmasq as a proxy to filter out a lot of well-known ad networks. But the way it stands, with "caveat emptor" essentially being the law of the land, I feel I have to do this. Caveat consumer, advertisers! Also, criminy, it makes a huge difference. When I use a PC or Mac at work, I'm shocked at how intrusive and overwhelming the advertising is. Dial it back several notches, you untruthful scallywags!
- a3n 7y ago> People use ad blockers for a number of reasons: they find ads annoying, invasive, and distracting; ads can use large amounts of data, especially video files; and they can slow down page loading time. People are also increasingly worried about misuse of personal information. In the transition from print to digital media ads have become more invasive. The prevalence of ad blocking appears to be a response to this. It has especially increased with targeted advertising, suggesting people don’t like being followed around by ads. And thus I have no moral problem with running an ad blocker. I don't mind ads. What I do mind is the resource consumption, the person tracking, and the potential malware vector. Modern online ads are just too risky to let into my environment. And if you subscribe, most sites are still going to serve ads. There is another solution besides turning off ad blocking. If a site detects that I'm ad blocking, then block me. I have been so blocked. Or erect a paywall, and don't allow visits after more than zero to N visits. I think that's fair, and they've lost nothing by blocking me, a non-ad-consuming visitor.