ad blockers

Maybe Later

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Maybe Later

“Install update” Maybe later.

“Sign in to access this content” No.

“It’s better in the app!” Whose fault is that?

“We completely redesigned this thing you need to do your job for no good reason” Got it.

“Disable any adblocker.” Absolutely not.

…

Ian Eure

I don’t know if I’m supposed to read this as a poem, but I did, and I love it. It speaks to me. It speaks of my experience of using (way too much of) the Web nowadays, enshittified as it is.

(This toot about the evolution of videogaming seems almost like a sequel. Less like a poem, though.)

But yeah, I run a fine-tuned setup on most of my computers that works for me… by working against most of the way the Web seems to expect me to use it, these days. I block all third-party JavaScript and cookies by default (and drops first-party cookies extremely quickly). I use plugins to quietly reject consent banners, suppress soft paywalls, and so on. And when I come across sites that don’t work that way, I make a case-by-case decision on whether to use them at all (if you hide some features in your “app” only, I just don’t use those features).

Sure, there are probably half a dozen websites that you might use that I can’t. But in exchange I use a Web that’s fast, clean, and easy-to-read.

And just sometimes: when I’m on somebody else’s computer and I see an ad, or a cookie consent banner, or a “log in to keep reading” message, or a website weighed down and crawling because of the dozens of tracking scripts, or similar… I’m surprised to remember that these things actually exist, and wonder for a moment how people who do see them all time time cope with them!

Sigh.

Anyway: this was an excellent poem, assuming it was supposed to be interpreted as being a poem. Otherwise, it was an excellent whatever-it-is.

“Stop Thinking About Consent: It Isn’t Possible and It Isn’t Right”

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For a philosopher, Helen Nissenbaum is a surprisingly active participant in shaping how we collect, use, and protect personal data. Nissenbaum, who earned her PhD from Stanford, is a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, New York City, where she focuses on the intersection of politics, ethics, and values in technology and digital media — the hard stuff. Her framework for understanding digital privacy has deeply influenced real-world policy.

In addition to several books and countless papers, she’s also coauthored privacy plug-ins for web browsers including TrackMeNot, AdNauseum, and Adnostic. Nissenbaum views these pieces of code as small efforts at rationalizing a marketplace where opaque consent agreements give consumers little bargaining power against data collectors as they extract as much information, and value from this information, as they can. Meanwhile, these practices offer an indefinite value proposition to consumers while compromising the integrity of digital media, social institutions, and individual security.

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Scott Berinato (Harvard Business Review)

The thing about ad-blocker popups

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I’ve been, in the past, a firm distruster of ad blocking software. I still am, to a large extent. I don’t trust any company whose finance model is based on inserting exceptions for advertisers they like. But I installed Ghostery, whose model is to use the stats of what gets blocked to offer consultancy to companies to make their adverts less horrific. I like this idea, so I support it. My Ghostery install is fairly open, blocking only sites that offer page-takeover, popups, autoplaying videos, and other stuff that annoys me a lot. So I get a bit annoyed when I’m scrolling through a Wired article and get something like this:

Fine. I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I don’t read Wired often enough to care about being a member, so yeah, ad supported isn’t unreasonable. Do you know what’s unreasonable, Wired? This is what happens when I whitelist your site:

…

Nicholas ‘Aquarion’ Avenell

I’ve gone full-nuclear these last few years and I just keep Javascript disabled for most domains, most of the time (I’m using uMatrix). The Web is a lot faster, for it, and I can just enable it for domains that “need” it as-and-when. I also keep a userscript to-hand that I can tweak as-and-when to block anti-ad-blocker scripts, so that enabling Javascript on your domain (but not the domains of your dozen trackers/advertisers) doesn’t mean that I see your anti-ad-blocker popups either.

If your site nags gently (e.g. by mentioning where ads would be that they’re blocked, perhaps with a sad face emoticon) I’ll consider adding the ads, if your site has value. But more likely, if your site’s good, I’ll be looking for the donate link. You can make more money out of me with donations than you ever would be showing me ads: I’m more than happy to pay for the Web… I’m not happy to have 75% of the work my computer does when I’m reading your content be about your advertising partners tracking me nor about trying to “block” me from seeing your content.

The full article helps show how bad the Web’s gotten. When it starts to get better again, perhaps I’ll stop blocking ads and trackers so aggressively.