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Good. Advertising is theft. Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if we a

Good. Advertising is theft. Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if we agree once my attention is captured it cannot be applied to something else at that moment; then unsolicited advertising is an act of theft. Unlikely legal conclusion I know, but damn, maybe I would like to sit on the beach and have my own thoughts rather than be forced by an airplane banner to wonder if I need a personal injury attorney...

viro 5y ago
> unsolicited advertising Advertising doesn't show up on site without the OWNER of the site wanting it to be there.
- Retric 5y ago
  Website’s can recommend showing me advertising all they want, but it needs my computer equipment to render. Auto playing video adds are both unsolicited and consume significant amounts of expensive cellular data. It’s quite simply theft of resources.
  - viro 5y ago
    Its not theft its you paying for the service of the website. What la la land do you live in.
    - Arthur8 5y ago
      Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the second? If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not justify the second (stealing). One could even argue, that If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change much. I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith. It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing… (1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.
  - dantheman 5y ago
    You're visiting the site - you agree to it. Words have meaning and it's not theft, just like a store requiring you to wear a shirt isn't stealing from you, you have to buy the shirt.
    - gpm 5y ago
      A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt. I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
    - Retric 5y ago
      By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except that’s not how contracts work. A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        It is not a contract and there exist a very similar arrangement that has existed for way longer: commercial radio
        Retric 5y ago
        Commercial radio doesn’t cause me to connect to third party services.
        lp0_on_fire 5y ago
        I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_ something and being forced to watch (and pay for the bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to several hundred megs of data. Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  It wouldn't be quite as bad if the owner actually chose the advertisements shown, suitable for the article or service shown (like they do in a newspaper or magazine). The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game. 1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
  - olegious 5y ago
    Sites have complete control over the types of advertising that appears on their pages, down to whitelisting only specific brands or even specific ads- but most sites don't care beyond, "no adult products."
  - jonas21 5y ago
    That's not how it works at newspapers and magazines (at least the ones with any sort of journalistic integrity). The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage. The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.
krono 5y ago
What really bugs me is that ADHD is completely ignored in the WAI-ARIA spec. I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads. Addendum: A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people who have difficulties understanding the content or how to mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the ability to block major distractions. It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-motion".
CPLX 5y ago
> unsolicited advertising The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity. You've solicited it. You could make some interesting arguments along these lines, for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps, or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work here that I don't think applies.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
> Advertising is theft. Please keep your meme activism to yourself. Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition. Attracting public attention is not theft of attention. You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire industry.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  What do you mean by meme activism and meme war?
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581343
    - jerry1979 5y ago
      Interesting. This blog post me think that the conversation has almost twisted around on itself in a 'slogan makers against slogans' kind of way.
      - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
        Yeah, the science behind some claims, on all sides of these recent public events, along the way were likely misunderstood which has led to an epistemological mess.
- textgel 5y ago
  *removed for being rude > Attracting public attention is not theft of attention. Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset worryingly common in other malicious groups.
  - 5y ago
tdeck 5y ago
Not sure I agree with that interpretation, but it brings up something I've always wondered. The advertiser pays $x to show me an ad, presumably because their expected ROI (from me) is greater than $x. So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.
- varispeed 5y ago
  There should be a legal option to pay Facebook or others a monthly fee to use of the service and they shouldn't be allowed to use any of your data.
  - teh_infallible 5y ago
    I think the amount of revenue generated per user is considerably more than anyone would pay.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 5y ago
      And considerably more than it would cost per user to host and maintain the service.
  - quantum_magpie 5y ago
    What the fuck? There should be a payment to me set by me for seeing an ad. In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair compensation €5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of €5 of business you have to filter me out of your advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a deposit for each impression. Or I would in a perfect world..
    - varispeed 5y ago
      Yes, it is possible to argue that users of Facebook are de facto unpaid employees. They produce the data that then Facebook sells, but does not pay any salary. It would be interesting to see Facebook getting Ubered.
skinkestek 5y ago
> Good. Advertising is theft. > > Hear me out. You are heard. I read it more than an hour ago and have though about it. I appreciate the initiative of Forbrukerrådet. And I think your comment is obviously wrong. You get free content for your loss of attention. Just like selling something more expensively on one place than another isn't theft. Maybe advertising is wrong, but please keep it somewhat serious.
- datameta 5y ago
  I think this sparks the discussion about if we are entitled to choose to let our attention be captured in a public area even if, let's say, there is an immediate recompense.
- thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
  Consent. Do you need it? Otherwise, I'll be happy to grant you free bricks for your loss of a bicycle. You're welcome.
axguscbklp 5y ago
By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit, and are probably not offering you anything that you want.
- jjulius 5y ago
  Why limit that to "attractive women"? What about attractive men? "Unattractive" individuals who wear something skimpy causing you to look regardless? Individuals you deem so unattractive or attractive that you can't look away no matter the attire?
  - axguscbklp 5y ago
    I am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits, and so on makes sense.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      But it's still a really terrible comparison. Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something. Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others. They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
gear54rus 5y ago
100% agreed.
systemvoltage 5y ago
It's an interesting thought but I am not sure if it holds up. What about advertising on road signs and even going to the mall? Surely, storefronts are stealing my attention and what about those fancy gold plated luxury items? Are flowers stealing bee's attention?
jensensbutton 5y ago
On the web you are explicitly choosing (i.e. clicking a link or typing a URL) to go places that show you advertising in exchange for providing whatever content or service you when there to see. This is why many argue (coherently) that using ad blockers are an act of theft. I actually think the latter is a much stronger argument than what you're putting forth.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Running ads on my computer, phone or TV has literal costs in terms of bandwidth, computational resources, time and energy.

viro 5y ago

> unsolicited advertising Advertising doesn't show up on site without the OWNER of the site wanting it to be there.

Retric 5y ago
Website’s can recommend showing me advertising all they want, but it needs my computer equipment to render. Auto playing video adds are both unsolicited and consume significant amounts of expensive cellular data. It’s quite simply theft of resources.
- viro 5y ago
  Its not theft its you paying for the service of the website. What la la land do you live in.
  - Arthur8 5y ago
    Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the second? If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not justify the second (stealing). One could even argue, that If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change much. I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith. It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing… (1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.
- dantheman 5y ago
  You're visiting the site - you agree to it. Words have meaning and it's not theft, just like a store requiring you to wear a shirt isn't stealing from you, you have to buy the shirt.
  - gpm 5y ago
    A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt. I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
  - Retric 5y ago
    By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except that’s not how contracts work. A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      It is not a contract and there exist a very similar arrangement that has existed for way longer: commercial radio
      - Retric 5y ago
        Commercial radio doesn’t cause me to connect to third party services.
      - lp0_on_fire 5y ago
        I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_ something and being forced to watch (and pay for the bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to several hundred megs of data. Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.
Freak_NL 5y ago
It wouldn't be quite as bad if the owner actually chose the advertisements shown, suitable for the article or service shown (like they do in a newspaper or magazine). The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game. 1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
- olegious 5y ago
  Sites have complete control over the types of advertising that appears on their pages, down to whitelisting only specific brands or even specific ads- but most sites don't care beyond, "no adult products."
- jonas21 5y ago
  That's not how it works at newspapers and magazines (at least the ones with any sort of journalistic integrity). The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage. The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.

krono 5y ago

What really bugs me is that ADHD is completely ignored in the WAI-ARIA spec. I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads. Addendum: A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people who have difficulties understanding the content or how to mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the ability to block major distractions. It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-motion".

CPLX 5y ago

> unsolicited advertising The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity. You've solicited it. You could make some interesting arguments along these lines, for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps, or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work here that I don't think applies.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago

> Advertising is theft. Please keep your meme activism to yourself. Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition. Attracting public attention is not theft of attention. You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire industry.

jerry1979 5y ago
What do you mean by meme activism and meme war?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581343
  - jerry1979 5y ago
    Interesting. This blog post me think that the conversation has almost twisted around on itself in a 'slogan makers against slogans' kind of way.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
      Yeah, the science behind some claims, on all sides of these recent public events, along the way were likely misunderstood which has led to an epistemological mess.
textgel 5y ago
*removed for being rude > Attracting public attention is not theft of attention. Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset worryingly common in other malicious groups.
- 5y ago

tdeck 5y ago

Not sure I agree with that interpretation, but it brings up something I've always wondered. The advertiser pays $x to show me an ad, presumably because their expected ROI (from me) is greater than $x. So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.

varispeed 5y ago
There should be a legal option to pay Facebook or others a monthly fee to use of the service and they shouldn't be allowed to use any of your data.
- teh_infallible 5y ago
  I think the amount of revenue generated per user is considerably more than anyone would pay.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 5y ago
    And considerably more than it would cost per user to host and maintain the service.
- quantum_magpie 5y ago
  What the fuck? There should be a payment to me set by me for seeing an ad. In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair compensation €5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of €5 of business you have to filter me out of your advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a deposit for each impression. Or I would in a perfect world..
  - varispeed 5y ago
    Yes, it is possible to argue that users of Facebook are de facto unpaid employees. They produce the data that then Facebook sells, but does not pay any salary. It would be interesting to see Facebook getting Ubered.

skinkestek 5y ago

> Good. Advertising is theft. > > Hear me out. You are heard. I read it more than an hour ago and have though about it. I appreciate the initiative of Forbrukerrådet. And I think your comment is obviously wrong. You get free content for your loss of attention. Just like selling something more expensively on one place than another isn't theft. Maybe advertising is wrong, but please keep it somewhat serious.

datameta 5y ago
I think this sparks the discussion about if we are entitled to choose to let our attention be captured in a public area even if, let's say, there is an immediate recompense.
thrwaeasddsaf 5y ago
Consent. Do you need it? Otherwise, I'll be happy to grant you free bricks for your loss of a bicycle. You're welcome.

axguscbklp 5y ago

By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit, and are probably not offering you anything that you want.

jjulius 5y ago
Why limit that to "attractive women"? What about attractive men? "Unattractive" individuals who wear something skimpy causing you to look regardless? Individuals you deem so unattractive or attractive that you can't look away no matter the attire?
- axguscbklp 5y ago
  I am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits, and so on makes sense.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    But it's still a really terrible comparison. Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something. Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others. They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.

gear54rus 5y ago

100% agreed.

systemvoltage 5y ago

It's an interesting thought but I am not sure if it holds up. What about advertising on road signs and even going to the mall? Surely, storefronts are stealing my attention and what about those fancy gold plated luxury items? Are flowers stealing bee's attention?

jensensbutton 5y ago

On the web you are explicitly choosing (i.e. clicking a link or typing a URL) to go places that show you advertising in exchange for providing whatever content or service you when there to see. This is why many argue (coherently) that using ad blockers are an act of theft. I actually think the latter is a much stronger argument than what you're putting forth.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Running ads on my computer, phone or TV has literal costs in terms of bandwidth, computational resources, time and energy.