I don’t block ads. I block things that attempt to track my browsing across sites without my consent, using the EFF’s privacy badger extension. Curiously, that happens to block some ads and is detected by some sites as an ad blocker.
If a site wants to show me ads, that’s OK. If they want to track my browsing habits, I do not consent to that.
If my lack of consent to that breaks the site’s monetization model, then the site should detect that, (optionally) explain it, and refuse to show me content unless I agree to be tracked. That is completely fair; if they don’t feel adequately compensated, don’t show me content. Much the same way sites that want to collect a monthly subscription after the Xth article refuse to show me more articles unless I pay up.
The site should not attempt to circumvent my preference and track my browsing habits across sites anyway. That’s as wrong as taking a few dollars from me without my consent because I’ve seen more than X articles.
Especially in a world of ubiquitous (if obnoxious) link shorteners and other sources of redirection, expecting users to know exactly what sites they’re navigating to all the time (let alone their business models) seems more than a bit fanciful…
This is assuming the users are consenting to 500 ads before clicking the page. A couple unobtrusive ads are one thing but genuinely many ads can make a page unreadable. Not to mention the fact that some of these ads are criminal in behavior, it starts to make sense from a security standpoint to block them.
Ads are bad excuse of monetization model, they are lazy solution: “I don’t want to think about my users, their needs and monetization. Just slap ads on it.”
Also amount of exposure to ads outside computers varies around the world and through that (at least for my generation and older) does tolerance to online ads. US style advertisement model in TV and public areas is nauseating for someone from Nordic countries and getting to enjoy that experience online makes people angry. Add privacy issues on top of that and there is nothing acceptable in ads as monetization model.
The website’s monetization model is based on an a priori assumption that it’s okay to disrespect its users by tracking them and serving them ads at all, so the website owner has automatically lost any argument that hinges on them or their model being afforded respect. Get a better model, or accept the loss of some ad revenue to blockers.
Would you support a monetization model for a business that physically followed you around in the real world and documented everything you did without your consent?
As a user and a supporter of Free/Libre Software, I should be able to do whatever I want with the software on my computer, including a copy of a webpage. If the business model of the website owners cannot accommodate that basic right, then that’s their problem.
That may be true, but it’s self-defeating in the long term. Ad-blockers will only get better and adapt to become less detectable.
Right now an advertiser can detect ad-block and use that information to calculate their metrics. When ad-blockers become undetectable, the metrics will become meaningless.
If you want to “monetize” your “content”, find a way to do it that doesn’t involve poisonous fucking ads that are as likely as not to infect my computer with malware and will track me all over the Internet either way, and that I’m just going to block anyway.
Sometimes I feel like we’d be better off if walled-garden online services like AOL and Prodigy hadn’t opened up to, and eventually been subsumed by, the Internet; then content providers who are so worried about monetization could publish on those platforms and get paid from users’ subscription fees (as well as the ads that were also sometimes present on those services). Of course, I suppose it was probably inevitable: either online services would have opened up to the Internet or people would have quit them for ISPs, and we’d still be in this same situation, maybe just a few years later.
Deploy something like this and watch your site end up in one of the blocklists and your traffic disappear down a black hole. Good riddance, I say. One of the reasons for blocking ads is the deceptive practices which ad networks engender in, trying to add even more deception on top of this to get what you want is… counterproductive.
On the other hand you could just be up-front about wanting to collect statistical data. Don’t use Google analytics to collect it because there are many out there who go out of their way to (try to) keep their data out of Google’s grubby hands and you might just get the data.
Yeah, well, if your site doesn’t respect user defaults, I’m not going to respect your site. Load you once, shame on you.. load you twice, shame on me.
Ever notice how you can pi-hole www.reddit.com to 0.0.0.0, but Google Chrome will silently ignore that and somehow do its own DNS request.. and it loads? After I’ve gone through the trouble of setting the OS default DNS (to try to stay off reddit)? Not very respectful, Chrome. That seems like something malware would do, and frankly it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.
Firefox respects user defaults. Safari, too. What’s the story, they’re “protecting my privacy”? Please no.
Yeah… even before the paywall went up, I never really found that much value in most content posted on Medium. Right now I hope that authors there realize how large an audience they’re missing by posting there.
Done. With just a little bit of work, we can now bypass all pattern list based adblockers. As long as all proxied requests happen through HTTPS, third-party cookie goodies will be passed along to the tracker as well.
Cool, you’ve also created an open proxy for people to use.
More and more sites are starting to break catastrophically or display nothing but ‘JavaScript is required’ (which I find hilarious for sites that display primarily text) when using noscript. I find that this behavior is acceptable, it’s essentially an in-your-face warning that the site would like to abuse you but has been prevented from doing so. So I just move on.
Doesn’t this hack prevent Google from tracking you across sites? It prevents them from being sure of your IP (nginx sends it in a header, but we all know that this header can be forged anyway), and it means that their proxied google-analytics.com gets a separate cookie jar from regular google analytics.com.
It accomplishes for Google Analytics the same thing that camo.github.com does to shields.io.
the last line is the most important one:
The website visitors aren’t respecting the website’s monetization model, so why should the website respect the user’s choice?
I don’t block ads. I block things that attempt to track my browsing across sites without my consent, using the EFF’s privacy badger extension. Curiously, that happens to block some ads and is detected by some sites as an ad blocker.
If a site wants to show me ads, that’s OK. If they want to track my browsing habits, I do not consent to that.
If my lack of consent to that breaks the site’s monetization model, then the site should detect that, (optionally) explain it, and refuse to show me content unless I agree to be tracked. That is completely fair; if they don’t feel adequately compensated, don’t show me content. Much the same way sites that want to collect a monthly subscription after the Xth article refuse to show me more articles unless I pay up.
The site should not attempt to circumvent my preference and track my browsing habits across sites anyway. That’s as wrong as taking a few dollars from me without my consent because I’ve seen more than X articles.
Especially in a world of ubiquitous (if obnoxious) link shorteners and other sources of redirection, expecting users to know exactly what sites they’re navigating to all the time (let alone their business models) seems more than a bit fanciful…
Because a website runs code on my machine, which makes them a guest on my computer. I kick out annoying and obnoxious guests.
This is assuming the users are consenting to 500 ads before clicking the page. A couple unobtrusive ads are one thing but genuinely many ads can make a page unreadable. Not to mention the fact that some of these ads are criminal in behavior, it starts to make sense from a security standpoint to block them.
Ads are bad excuse of monetization model, they are lazy solution: “I don’t want to think about my users, their needs and monetization. Just slap ads on it.”
Also amount of exposure to ads outside computers varies around the world and through that (at least for my generation and older) does tolerance to online ads. US style advertisement model in TV and public areas is nauseating for someone from Nordic countries and getting to enjoy that experience online makes people angry. Add privacy issues on top of that and there is nothing acceptable in ads as monetization model.
The website’s monetization model is based on an a priori assumption that it’s okay to disrespect its users by tracking them and serving them ads at all, so the website owner has automatically lost any argument that hinges on them or their model being afforded respect. Get a better model, or accept the loss of some ad revenue to blockers.
Would you support a monetization model for a business that physically followed you around in the real world and documented everything you did without your consent?
As a user and a supporter of Free/Libre Software, I should be able to do whatever I want with the software on my computer, including a copy of a webpage. If the business model of the website owners cannot accommodate that basic right, then that’s their problem.
That may be true, but it’s self-defeating in the long term. Ad-blockers will only get better and adapt to become less detectable.
Right now an advertiser can detect ad-block and use that information to calculate their metrics. When ad-blockers become undetectable, the metrics will become meaningless.
This arms race ends in a bad place for users, and a worse one for web hosts.
If you want to “monetize” your “content”, find a way to do it that doesn’t involve poisonous fucking ads that are as likely as not to infect my computer with malware and will track me all over the Internet either way, and that I’m just going to block anyway.
Sometimes I feel like we’d be better off if walled-garden online services like AOL and Prodigy hadn’t opened up to, and eventually been subsumed by, the Internet; then content providers who are so worried about monetization could publish on those platforms and get paid from users’ subscription fees (as well as the ads that were also sometimes present on those services). Of course, I suppose it was probably inevitable: either online services would have opened up to the Internet or people would have quit them for ISPs, and we’d still be in this same situation, maybe just a few years later.
Deploy something like this and watch your site end up in one of the blocklists and your traffic disappear down a black hole. Good riddance, I say. One of the reasons for blocking ads is the deceptive practices which ad networks engender in, trying to add even more deception on top of this to get what you want is… counterproductive.
On the other hand you could just be up-front about wanting to collect statistical data. Don’t use Google analytics to collect it because there are many out there who go out of their way to (try to) keep their data out of Google’s grubby hands and you might just get the data.
Yeah, well, if your site doesn’t respect user defaults, I’m not going to respect your site. Load you once, shame on you.. load you twice, shame on me.
Ever notice how you can pi-hole
www.reddit.comto0.0.0.0, but Google Chrome will silently ignore that and somehow do its own DNS request.. and it loads? After I’ve gone through the trouble of setting the OS default DNS (to try to stay off reddit)? Not very respectful, Chrome. That seems like something malware would do, and frankly it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference.Firefox respects user defaults. Safari, too. What’s the story, they’re “protecting my privacy”? Please no.
Doesn’t Chrome also index your hard drives?
I don’t think it does. What lead you to think that?
Ah, I’m wrong. It doesn’t index it, it scans it. Sorry about the Vice link, I hate that about as much as I hate medium: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wj7x9w/google-chrome-scans-files-on-your-windows-computer-chrome-cleanup-tool
Could be DNS over HTTP, which pi-hole doesn’t provide?
Ironically I cannot read this without paying Medium $5 a month.
I habitually can circumvent that using a private tab and pure rage.
Yeah… even before the paywall went up, I never really found that much value in most content posted on Medium. Right now I hope that authors there realize how large an audience they’re missing by posting there.
There’s an excellent pun about ‘medium’ articles being neither rare nor well-done.
clear cookies ; get another “free sample”
Cool, you’ve also created an open proxy for people to use.
Block my noscript.
I find ad blockers aren’t remotely enough anyway, so many sites do just awful things with scripts.
More and more sites are starting to break catastrophically or display nothing but ‘JavaScript is required’ (which I find hilarious for sites that display primarily text) when using noscript. I find that this behavior is acceptable, it’s essentially an in-your-face warning that the site would like to abuse you but has been prevented from doing so. So I just move on.
“Challenge accepted. Let the arms race begin.” – the adblocker developer community
Doesn’t this hack prevent Google from tracking you across sites? It prevents them from being sure of your IP (nginx sends it in a header, but we all know that this header can be forged anyway), and it means that their proxied google-analytics.com gets a separate cookie jar from regular google analytics.com.
It accomplishes for Google Analytics the same thing that camo.github.com does to shields.io.