
Some ad-blockers are tracking you, shaking down publishers, and showing you ads - edward
https://boingboing.net/2016/03/02/some-ad-blockers-are-tracking.html
======
jrapdx3
Seems like the time for each of us to create a policy re: websites that try to
coerce us into turning off the ad blocker. Personally, I strongly dislike such
attempts to manipulate me, when a site makes demands of this kind, accordingly
my policy is just going elsewhere.

There's no site I have so great a need to visit that I will put up with it. I
can't think of instances where the content was unavailable elsewhere, or if
not available I couldn't live without it.

The sites insisting that I subject myself to their ad abuse are likely to find
their viewership evaporate. I can't see how how those enterprises will
survive, considering that the internet will very likely always provide
alternatives that visitors find more acceptable.

~~~
rhino369
I think it's totally fair game to coerce me into turning off my ad blocker.
That's how they monetize. That's how I'm supposed to "pay" for the content.

I choose to use a blocker because I don't like ads. But if someone wants say
"hey, the deal is ads or nothing" I think it's a pretty fair bargain.

Currently the ad blockers (my self included) are free loading off the system.
The internet only works because most people are willing to suck it up and
watch the ads in my stead.

~~~
Esau
I don't mind ads. What I do mind is autoplay videos, malware, popups, and
tracking.

~~~
blubb-fish
I don't even mind tracking too much - I despise text-based sites with animated
ads, though, for obvious reasons.

------
elorant
_Wired 's final prediction is that all the ads will disappear into sponsored
content within a decade._

I’m surprised that Wired made such a prediction because to me it sounds
awfully wrong. For starters, whatever is going to happen it will happen much
sooner than a decade. Ad blocking adoption has already reached 35% in some
countries. At 50%-60% the industry is doomed. Not to mention fake ad
impressions which already amount to one quarter of all traffic. I also find it
odd that the only outcome they see is sponsored content. We already have that,
it’s called native advertising and it sucks. If advertisers can have a saying
on the content then the quality will go south pretty fast. What about
micropayments? What about serving ads from the publisher’s domain? What about
stopping the damn profiling which is the root of the problem? It seems that
the online publishing industry is in a bit of a shock from the way things are
moving and can’t think originally.

~~~
belorn
Spam blocking on email is currently close to 100%, and yet there is plenty of
companies that do news letters and coupons. Stores and services send
recommendation emails to customers on a rather regular basis.

I would like to see googles number on how often such services get reported as
spam, but I suspect its actually quite low. It helps that you can unsubscribe
if you don't want to see it.

~~~
Falcon9
You have to keep your spam report numbers very low as the sender of such
things, if you want to be allowed to continue to legitimately send them.

~~~
samsolomon
I like this analogy. It would be interesting to see a similar mechanism to
banner ads. I'd imagine part of the responsibility would be on the ad network
and part of it would be on the publisher.

Showing a bunch of low-quality "1 weird trick ads?" the network gets flagged.
Trying to squeeze too many ads onto a single page? Publisher gets flagged.

I doubt we'll see such a thing. On the other hand ad networks like the deck,
carbon and yoggrt have done a good job filtering out bad ads. I generally
whitelist sites with those networks.

~~~
belorn
I too doubt that we will see explicit mechanism for users to manager/report
ads on a website, but I do predict that we will keep seeing ads on website
even if adblocking reach 100%. For example, online stores normally has a "if
you like this product, then you might also like this other thing", a
advertisement that I doubt will be blocked any time soon. Similarly, streaming
services like to recommend films and music, and that feature is something I
hear some people really want to have and would be upset if it went away.
Youtube dedicate a lot of page space for this, including the front page, the
top of the side panel, the top of the search result, and the end of every
video.

The upside of those kind of ads is that they are intended to be both a useful
tool for the user and a revenue source, and they must be designed carefully to
remain both.

------
dotrnd
I'm another uBlock Origin user because I don't like the compromise that ABP
has become.

What I'm thinking about doing is writing a bit of software external to the
browser that does something akin to what alot of us *nix users did before
HTML5, which was to symlink Flash, in particular .macromedia and .adobe to
/dev/null. This allowed the viewing of Flash content without the site being
allowed to "write" LSOs to your HDD. Worked beautifully. I'm thinking the same
sort of thing can be done with ads, tracking, etc., using a subscription model
similar to what most ad blockers use. To whit, you surf a given site, yet see
no ads and tracking, etc, is disallowed but the site doesn't notice. What say
you, HN?

~~~
ikeboy
You'd need to download scripts and run them in the background if they send
info back to tell if it's blocked.

That would defeat part of the purpose of the blocking. Tracking is easily
blocked by deleting cookies after you leave the site/browser.

------
bediger4000
You know what? I don't care. I'm going to continue to use ad blockers like
uBlock and Privacy Badger that are non-corporate. I will set up any network
I'm in charge of with a DNS that has doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also
many others.

The web was better in the early days, when it wasn't full of corporate dreck.
If all the ad-supported BS websites fail, then so be it. I'd rather have just
a few websites run by people for their own motives, than have a plethora of
websites run by marketeers, propagandists and corporate executives.

~~~
yyin
"I will set up any network I'm in charge of with a DNS that has
doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also many others."

You mean doubleclick.net? Alas, that's a typo that would let the ads in.

Like you I redirect doubleclick and "many others". But not to localhost. I
like to log all the requests either via pflog or a socket logger. Useful for
examining what apps are trying to do from my device over the network.
Sometimes I redirect certain domains to my own httpd and serve my own "fake"
resources (placeholders for in-app ads, etc.).

You say "any network I'm in charge of".

What if there were a DNS caching server reachable from anywhere that blocked
these ad servers for you? That is, what if there was a "public DNS" like
8.8.8.8 or 208.67.222.222 except not run by a company that sells ads or
"security services"?

What if there was a turnkey ad-blocking DNS caching server solution that one
could run on any suitable hosting provider virtual machine instance?

Would anyone be interested in such a thing? I have had this personal DNS idea
for many years, ad blocking is becoming much more popular only recently.

I think users controlling their own DNS is a key step toward taking back the
www from the "corporate dreck". Maybe blocking ads is the stimulus for such a
change.

~~~
phunehehe0
Awesome idea. Please please please if you are going to do it first look for a
business model. I guess the people coming to you to avoid ads won't be too
eager to pay. Myself included :) Maybe have a data mining or statistics
service to pair with it. A curious search brings up an interesting QA about
OpenDNS [https://www.quora.com/How-does-OpenDNS-make-
money](https://www.quora.com/How-does-OpenDNS-make-money).

~~~
bediger4000
Wait, what? It's _my_ responsibility to invent a new business model for
someone else? Or is it my duty to watch (possibly malware-infected) ads? I'm
not sure what you're saying here.

If you're advocating for imposition of a legal duty to watch ads, then I
demand the legal imposition of a duty for advertisers to frequently
acknowledge that there is no "free" market any more.

------
ruipgil
uBlock Origin (and uMatrix) are the only ad blockers that I trust and that I
advise. The developer has strong ethics and, needless to say, they are open
source.

ABP made a name for themselves as one of the first and best players, but they
have turned too shady.

~~~
smonff
>uBlock Origin (and uMatrix) are the only ad blockers that I trust and that I
advise. The developer has strong ethics and, needless to say, they are open
source.

It makes the difference. Ghostery was interesting in it's first days, ,
especially with the [http://knowyourelements.org](http://knowyourelements.org)
site (now offline) as an educationnal item about trackers, but when you learn
about it's business model, it is quite scary...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery)

~~~
rpgmaker
_The company that owns Ghostery, Ghostery, Inc. (previously Evidon), plays a
dual role in the online advertising industry. Ghostery blocks marketing
companies from gathering website user information, but it makes money from
selling page visit, blocking and advertising statistics to corporations
globally, including corporations that are actively engaged in collecting user
information to target ads and other marketing messages to consumers.

Customers include advertising industry groups like Better Business Bureau
(BBB) and the Direct Marketing Association, parts of the Digital Advertising
Alliance (DAA).[9] These agencies then use those reports to monitor how Online
Behavioral Advertisers operate and, when needed, refer them to the Federal
Trade Commission.[10] Ghostery also offers data to university students,
researchers and journalists to support their work.

According to some journalists, Ghostery is not transparent in how it collects
data from users or what that data is used for. Other journalists have claimed
that Ghostery sells user data to advertisers to better target their ads.[11]
Ghostery, Inc denies this, asserting that Ghostery does not collect any
information that could be used to identify users or target ads specifically at
individual users. To support their assertion, the company made the source code
open for review in 2010, but after 2010 further source have not been
released.[12]

In February 22, 2016 Ghostery, Inc released new EULA for Ghostery browser
extension, as proprietary closed-source product._[1]

Very shady indeed. Looking for alternatives now...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model)

~~~
seanp2k2
Try PrivacyBadger:
[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

Depending on settings, it'll break some sites that rely on e.g. Facebook login
by default. I'm OK with this and trust EFF.

------
efaref
The ad-blocker-blockers are annoying, and my usual response is to just go
elsewhere. I'm not turning on advertising for anyone.

That being said, I'd happily pay a small ($5-10/mo) subscription if it enabled
all (or a large number of) these sites again. Alledgedly my eyeballs are work
millicents to advertisers: I'd like to buy all the advertising space I'm being
shown at that price.

I don't think an adblock company could do it, as it would be too much like a
protection racket, but surely someone could set up a subscription-based
service for "ad-free content", where sites that took part got a slice of your
flat subscription fee. A bit like microtransactions, except not
microtransactions.

------
kazinator
> _Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers
> fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size
> and placement._

Lie. Adblock Plus is a FOSS ad-blocker.

It has a whitelist of "acceptable ads" that is enabled by default.

You can turn it off, and since the thing is open source, you can clone your
own version in which that is the default.

I haven't heard that anyone has to pay ABP (or _can_ pay) to be on this list.

There was/is some controversy, see here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_ad_filtering_and_ad_whitelisting)

~~~
djur
I'm curious if any evidence has ever been offered that the "Acceptable Ads"
program is corrupt. It seems to me that literally the moment it was announced
people characterized it as an offer to be bribed, but _as described_ I don't
see anything wrong with the program.

~~~
lost_name
Granted, it's unlikely that they would say anything if they were extorting
people as you describe... but from just the other day:
[https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-explained-
moneti...](https://adblockplus.org/blog/acceptable-ads-explained-monetization)

Discussion (somewhat lacking):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182174)

------
adwf
I tend to think of ABP a bit like the Advertising Standards Agency in the UK.
They essentially enforce a minimum standard upon advertisers, whilst
collecting administrative fees in exchange.

Long-term this is actually better for advertising agencies and websites
supported by ads, as it'll help stop people just blocking ads completely. But
people rarely think long-term anymore...

------
PhasmaFelis
Boing Boing runs "native advertising"\--ad copy barely disguised as legitimate
reviews to bypass ad blocking--every day, under the byline "Boing Boing
Store". It's depressing to see them pretending they still have any moral high
ground here.

~~~
cbd1984
So does the New York Times, and Fox News, and any number of legitimate news
sources.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
First, appeal-to-authority doesn't make "native advertising" any less shitty
or deceptive; and second, neither of those currently has a front-page article
denouncing something that they themselves do every day.

------
skybrian
This could be done in a legitimate way. Suppose there were an AdFixPlus plugin
with the mission of cleaning up advertising on the Internet by making sure
every website conforms to an acceptable advertising policy that forbids
intrusive ads. Users install it for free and advertisers pay for it.

It seems like that should be fine so long as both the users and the
advertisers know what's going on, and there are alternative plugins with
different policies out there.

Websites can forbid to serve users who turn off too many ads and users can
refuse to visit websites that serve too many ads. But both sides would gain if
some compromise can be reached. So it seems like a competitive market should
evolve towards something that looks quite like this, with a middleman of some
sort setting some reasonable rules, rather than one side deciding by fiat how
it's going to be.

Of course ad networks and publishers do some of this already. They have
policies about not accepting all ads. The constant negotiation about which ads
are okay to show is part of the reason why Internet advertising is so
complicated. But they are less focused on what the user wants since the user
can't choose between ad networks; only the advertiser and publisher can.

~~~
forgetsusername
> _forbids intrusive ads. Users install it for free and advertisers pay for
> it_

This is a great idea, but eventually comes full circle. Advertisers will pay
more to have more access until they push it too far. Then someone builds a
meta-AdFixPlus.

~~~
skybrian
Or alternatively, competition for users (or the threat of it) from some other
plugin that does the same job, but better.

------
Confiks
I'm using Disconnect from [https://disconnect.me](https://disconnect.me),
which is working alright for me. While not marketed as an ad-blocker (but
rather as a tracker-blocker), I effectively see no ads at all. As far as I
know, it doesn't track you in any way.

------
bsder
Um, is AdBlock Plus not obeying the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising"
checkbox? If so, _that 's_ a scandal.

However, if they only show ads to people who leave the box checked, I really
don't see the problem.

------
downandout
The shakedown model just seems so scummy to me. There has to be a better way
to monetize ad blockers. I suppose it doesn't matter though, as most
advertising will simply become sponsored content/native advertising anyway,
which will negate the need for ad blockers.

We see it today on the web, but we have also seen it on TV for even longer as
their answer to DVR-based commercial skipping. Take a show like Nightline,
which is just an infomercial for every project that ABC and its parent company
(Disney) want to promote, masquerading as a news broadcast. That format is
likely a sign of things to come both on TV and the web.

~~~
13thLetter
> The shakedown model just seems so scummy to me. There has to be a better way
> to monetize ad blockers.

Is it necessary to monetize them at all? An ad blocker isn't so complex that
it couldn't be run as a free-as-in-beer software project.

------
officialchicken
Didn't Mondo 2000 -> hotwired -> wired "invent" the once-ubiquitous 468x60
format ad-banner? And now they're complaining...

Frankenstein's karma.

------
tanv_nadkarni
One more point.

While Ad-blockers are getting popular the tech industry could indeed innovate
to become ad-blocker-blockers. I guess ad-blockers work by looking at the
domain names of the content. Why not use IP address alone to serve ads ? Why
use JS embeds code to serve ads and not render it through server itself?

Even JS based ads could provide challenge response based callbacks to render
content only after ad is loaded.

~~~
seanp2k2
I'm already one step ahead and using CIDR blacklists + peer guardian. Keeps a
lot of malware from installing or working too.

------
scoot
We need an ad-blocker blocker.

------
bpg_92
They are evolving!

