Is Ad Blocking Piracy?
Date:
[]
Categories:
[Tech]
Tags:
[Software],
[Internet],
[Advertising]
Manu Moreale has an article on whether ad-blocking equals piracy. I agree with his arguments, and wanted to add a few thoughts.
Ad-blocking is not piracy. It’s an essential service that gives us some control over the content we’re exposed to and the software that runs on our computers.
I have no problem with simple, static ads, integrated tastefully into a page, like print ads in quality newspapers and magazines. I don’t care for flashy, intrusive ads, autoplaying videos and popups that distract, annoy, slow website performance and make it more difficult to read anything.
But there are other issues aside from ads being annoying. Modern Internet advertising uses surveillance infrastructures to collect and sell our personal data. It uses dark patterns to harass and trick us. It allows criminals and scammers into the ad networks and it profits from fraud. It’s becoming harder to distinguish between “legitimate” advertising and criminal scams, because the techniques used are the same for both.
We have a right to protect ourselves from this as much as possible.
I don’t have a good answer for how to make money on the Internet without advertising. I subscribe or donate to a few sites that I enjoy but I can’t afford to support as many as I would like. In the past, advertising was accepted as a necessary evil. But today it’s getting just a little too evil.
Maybe advertisers could stop using surveillance-based, ad broker networks and go back to old-fashioned methods. Intentionally place ads on sites that prospective customers might use. Make the ads tasteful and integrated into page layouts. Stop using dark patterns. Stop collaborating with scammers.
But that would reduce profits, so I don't think anything will change without government regulation. For now, ad blockers are a necessity.
So what do I use myself? I don’t use ad blocking browser extensions although I know some products have good reputations. I’ve been using Vivaldi as my main browser for a few years now, and I find it does an excellent job of reducing ads just by itself. Some ads still get through, and I’ve found a few sites that are unusable even with Vivaldi, but in general Vivaldi helps tame most sites quite a bit.
I recently decided to revive an old Raspberry Pi 1B to run the pi-hole ad blocker for another layer of protection, and that has helped even more. It was easy to install pi-hole, and I’m impressed with how well it runs on this old, slow RPi. I plan to write a separate post about my experience with it.
See: Eight of the Best Tools and Techniques for Blocking Internet Advertisements. I would add Vivaldi to the list.