Ad Blocking | itcomo

The Ethics of Ad-Blocking

Ads, ug! amirite?

The vast majority of us, to put it charitably, don't care for advertising, online or offline. Most of us put up with them because we aren't immediately aware of how to stop them.

In this article, we'll do a deep dive on the topic of online advertising, and include some parallel references to traditional, offline advertising as well. We'll discuss the dangers of advertising (yes, it can be dangerous), how ads are served to you, how ads spy on you, the ethics of ad-blocking, and more.

We'll get into a fair bit of technical detail but I promise I won't lose you in the weeds. This is written to be accessible to everyone.

I'm sure you'll enjoy learning more about what many consider to be one of the more onerous aspects of the internet.

In the beginning...

Advertising is a truly enormous subject. So lets start with the early days of online advertising.

The first websites to include advertising was late 1994. These early ads were usually static "banner" ads and they appeared at the top of a website. There was usually only one per page, centered along the top edge, a few inches wide, and maybe an inch or so in height.

My, my, how times have changed.

Over the years, as "banner blindness" took hold, new display formats were created, trying harder to engage the user. Ads became animated and sometimes included sound, though thankfully ads with sound never really took off.

Ads started appearing in more places on the webpage:

Outside the margins as sidebars
Headers and footers
Sprinkled in-line with content
Unscrollable (always visible)
The much-maligned interstitial "pop-up" that you had to click away before you could do anything
"Pop-unders" that surfaced when you closed the browser
Adobe Flash-based ads that included micro games (remember punch the monkey?)
And many other creative but annoying designs intended to hijack your attention

Ads starting multiplying like rabbits. Ad fatigue was a real and growing problem and there was no easy way to avoid it. That's because the web browsers of the time had no capability for installing extensions*. Hence, no ad-blockers. Whatever advertising the website wanted to display, you had no choice but to see/watch it. Well, you did have one choice, a Hobson's choice, and that was to simply leave the site.

* An extension is a collection of code that attaches to your browser that performs a specific task, such as a grammar checker, or blocking ads.

Browser extensions, that made ad-blocking (and many other things) possible, didn't arrive for several years. And even when they did, not many people were aware that "ad-blocking" was even a possibility. Remember, these were the earliest days of the web. It was all still pretty new to everyone. The idea of blocking ads (whaaat??) on a website was as preposterous as blocking ads on broadcast television*. It just wasn't something anyone thought about because it was impossible.

* Well, VCRs and TiVo let you fast-forward past the ads, which was pretty good, though you couldn't actually block them from the outset.

By the early-aughts, online advertising was so utterly rampant that some people were becoming disillusioned with the promise of the World Wide Web. It was an advertising hellscape that was looking more like Times Square and less like a cozy coffee shop.

But as new browsers dropped, especially Firefox in 2004, with their robust extensions capability, and the developer community that soon followed, people discovered they could retake control of their browsing experience. And guess what? Ad-blockers were among the first extensions created.

Nowadays, online advertising is still as rampant as ever but the key difference is we the people* have more tools to fight it. No longer are website visitors forced to endure most advertising. That Hobson's choice became a real choice.

* Alas, only about a third the browsing public, mostly younger people, are using ad blockers. The more seasoned among our populace are disproportionately and needlessly suffering. Let's fix that, ok?

n.b. Due to changes in Google Chrome in mid-2024, ad-blockers and privacy tools will not work nearly as well as they used to. This was deliberate. Google is getting tired of people blocking their ads and trackers so they nerfed Chrome to prevent blockers from doing their thing. I strongly recommend dumping Chrome and using Firefox instead. More on all that here.

Harms caused by online advertising

Virtually all online advertising is served by advertising companies and not by the actual website you are visiting. The site's webmaster will have signed-up with an ad-serving company and include links on the site that invoke the ads to be served by the ad-serving company's servers. The specific ads that are shown are not controlled by the webmaster. They are chosen by the ad-company based on algorithmic determination.

Online advertising is rife with a litany of problems, including...

Inappropriate content
Malvertising
Consumption of resources
User tracking and data harvesting
Psychological manipulation
Excessive impressions

Let's punch that list one at a time, shall we?

Inappropriate content

Because online ads are chosen algorithmically, there is no human vetting for any particular ad insertion. This can result in provocative, age-inappropriate ads being served, untargeted ads that are patently non-applicable to the viewer, and possibly ads that are targeted on various controversial topics.

But isn't that why targeting is good, to eliminate irrelevant or inappropriate content ? So you'll only see ads that are relevant to you specifically?

That sounds good as far as legit ads go, and online advertisers do love that. But for that to happen, advertisers need to know your specific interests (and your weaknesses) in order to target them. Do you really want that?

Conversely, in the offline world of print, TV, and radio, advertising is vetted by humans and is usually targeted to the demographic of the media or program in which the ads appear. Most magazines, especially non-news monthlies, such as leisure and lifestyle publications, have a primary audience. The included ads will hew closely to that demographic's interests and sensibilities.

And that's ok! They can do this without any specific knowledge about you. They can only infer viewer interest by the media or program associated with their ads. And never to a specific person.

Malvertising

"Malvertising" is the name given to malware-infected advertising. Like everything else on a website, ads are comprised of programming code that is rendered on your device. That code can very well contain malware. Since the website operator isn't the party that creates and places the ads (the ad companies do that, remember?) then they have no idea if the ads they are hosting are infected or not.

Legit ad networks try not to host malware-laden ads. It's bad for business. But detecting malware isn't that easy, especially zero-day exploits*. The best defense is preemptive which is to block their vector of transmission -- advertising.

And then there are borderline fraudulent and certainly scammy ad companies that have no such moral compunction to avoid malware. The scammy ad networks often pay better than legit networks, catering to websites who want a higher ad-presenting payout. There's no way you can know that ahead of time.

* A zero-day exploit is a heretofore undiscovered online attack method for which there is no specific defense.

Consumption of resources

All advertising consumes some resources; processing power, memory, bandwidth, etc. Poor quality ads, auto-play videos, and surreptitious crypto-mining ads can consume a lot more resources, slowing device performance. Hey, it's your device being hammered, not theirs, so what do they care?

Even in the best of cases, webpages that include advertising assets take longer to load and render, and may cause the viewport (the portion of the page that's visible on-screen) to jump around as those assets render. This can be especially bad on mobile devices that have tiny viewports and generally slower internet access.

User tracking and data harvesting

This is huge. The only thing more valuable than showing ads is the data-harvesting that ad-serving companies engage in. There is no limit to the ways that your personal data is abused by and for Big Data's financial advantage. Serving you targeted advertising is just the beginning.

Psychological manipulation

And that targeted advertising will be tweaked to push your buttons. You will see ads that specifically target you, as an individual, and your weaknesses. Such ads aren't necessarily trying to sell you something. A lot of ads are targeted to rile you up, make you angry or fearful, and link to more content to drive engagement according to the wishes of those who commissioned the ads.

Depending on your politics, the ads you see will be crafted to manipulate you in certain ways.

Make no mistake, this is happening.

Excessive impressions

Finally, there's just too damn many ads. Browsing the web "naked" (no ad-blockers) is patently intolerable. So much visual noise competing with the reason you visited that site in the first place. It's all just too much.

An anecdote: Back in the 1960s, a one-hour network television show, like Star Trek or Mission Impossible (my two favorites as a kid) ran about 50 minutes to accommodate about 10 minutes of commercials. Today, those numbers are typically 42/18 or even 40/20 -- a 100 percent increase in advertising airplay. Thirty minute shows are as bad as 20/10.

The same thing is happening online. Advertisers are always pushing the limit of what people will tolerate.

Big Data following you around

It's not enough that advertisers want you to see and click on their ads; they want to track your every move, both online and offline. Advertisers and "Big Data" are inextricably linked; they are two sides of the same coin. And that coin wants to be in your pocket 24/7/365.

We've all noticed how ads follow us around the internet like a wad of gum stuck to our shoes. How does that happen, you may ask?

Let us count the ways...

3rd party browser cookies

A cookie is a tiny file stored by your browser at the request of a website. There's two kinds of cookies.

1st party cookies are only accessible by the site that created it. It helps the site remember your preferences, login info, etc. These cookies are yummy and it's okay to have them.

3rd party cookies can be accessed by any website. This is one of the many ways are you tracked across the web. These cookies taste bad and you should refuse them. Some browsers disable them by default.

Device fingerprinting

There are many ordinary, non-unique things about your device that, when taken together, creates a unique "fingerprint". When you visit a website, it can ask your browser to return a number of benign technical specs about your device that, collectively, can reliably identify your specific device in the future.

That, combined with location permissions that some apps request, can determine your identity. And from that, a whole 'nother pile of useful data becomes mapped into the graph. It's utterly comprehensive.

Nerd Alert! More on all this, including a browser test, at eff.org.

EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, often regarded as the ACLU of the internet

It's just like with humans: Even without an actual human fingerprint, people have many other immutable features that can be ascertained visually from a (short-ish) distance. Apparent race, hair color (well, changing color notwithstanding), facial features such as distance between eyes, color of eyes, shape and size of various features of the nose (dorsum, tip, columella, width, nostrils), size and shape of lips, chin, cheeks, and more. None of these feature are particularly unique in themselves, but taken together, they can identify a specific person. Obscuring any one or two of these human features will not make you unidentifiable, either. That's exactly how visual recognition works, right?

IP address

This is your unique routable address on the internet. It changes quite often so it's not all that super valuable by itself. But it's not nothing either.

Social media engagement buttons

A lot of websites today have social media engagement buttons. You've probably seen them, usually off to the side somewhere. By the time you see these buttons, they have already tracked you and know exactly who you are, without you clicking. Clicking them simply offers you more options to share content on that platform if you want, but the tracking and ID'ing has already happened.

"Web bugs"

A web bug is an invisible, tiny, one-pixel image that, when rendered in your browser, can call-up fingerprinting trackers or act as an email read-confirmation.

These web bugs are often used in email as a read-confirmation sent back to the sender. If you ever see your email program display "Images are not displayed, click here to see them" (or similar such wording), inside an email, that's your email program warning you there are linked- images.

The purpose of that warning is not to protect you from seeing some x-rated or other inappropriate content. The purpose is to prevent linked image loading so the sender cannot tell when or if you read the email. Not all linked images are used as read confirmations. But there's no way your email reader can know that, so you get the warning whenever there are linked-images.

It would be nice if email programs explained that, but they don't. That's because the geeks that designed the email UI already know the reason and, incorrectly, assumed that everyone else knows, too. But they don't. But now you do!

Referrer links

Often used by websites that have product links to other (usually shopping) websites, so that the shopping site knows how you got there. Usually the linking website (the one you were on first) gets a commission. This is pretty benign but it is a form of tracking. It's could also be an important source of income from the referring website. You decide on this one.

Is ad-blocking unethical?

Much ink has been spilled on this very topic, so I'll metaphorically spill some as well. White ink?

In a single sentence, no, ad blocking is not unethical. Let's discuss why.

First of all, (hopefully) you read just above about the litany of significant problems with the state of online advertising today. That, alone, should absolve anyone of any imagined ethical violation arising from ad blocking.

But wait, there's more...

▶︎ There is no implied consent. Advertising is and has always been aspirational. The ad-makers put it out there in print, on TV or radio, and online, and hope you read/watch it and really hope that you act on it. But there's no expectation, no quid pro quo. You are under no obligation whatsoever, either moral or legal, to act on or even see the ad.

▶︎ Is it unethical to mute the TV, change the channel, or leave the room when an ad comes on? I don't imagine many people believe that. So why should it be any different online?

▶︎ Was it unethical to fast-forward past the TV ads with your VCR back in the day? Again, I suspect most of us think not. So why should it be any different online?

▶︎ Most websites that display ads still allow people to browse even with an ad-blocker. The vast majority of site owners have made the business decision that having eyeballs on their site is ultimately worth more than the penny or so (often less) per ad impression they didn't get due to ad-blocking.

If a site owner wants to, they can easily enable preventative technology (an ad-blocker blocker) that don't allow people with ad-blockers to browse. Though uncommon, some sites, indeed, do just that. In my experience, those sites tend to offer an ad-free subscription model. Such sites generally display a pop-up message asking the visitor to disable their ad-blocker. Some sites show a "I'll disable it next time" button and still allow the visitor access. That's how badly sites want visiting eyeballs, even those with ad-blockers.

Some businesses employ site-wide, network-level ad-blocking as part of a wider cybersecurity effort, to help address all the problems associated with online advertising that we discussed above. In these cases, individual users have no control over the blocks. Websites that employ non-permissive ad-blocker blockers must consider that loss of visitor eyeballs from people who cannot remove ad-blocking.

▶︎ Is ad-blocking a form of theft? Absurd comparisons to shoplifting have been made. No. It's not theft. Just as muting the TV or leaving the room isn't theft. Shoplifting a bottle of water and bag of chips entails removing tangible merchandise from the store. That is theft. It deprives the store from selling it another person.

▶︎ No advertisement is neutral. All of it, without exception, is at the very least, attempting to influence you in ways that are advantageous to the advertiser. No product or service is perfect. But no ad will call out those deficiencies, even as they loudly proclaim the benefits, often exaggeratedly so.

The most ethical ads may be technically honest, but you are never going to get, as Paul Harvey put it, "the rest of the story". Otherwise, we wouldn't need magazines like Consumer Reports, would we?

The worst advertising, both online and offline, are actively misleading and some are downright fraudulent. Here's an ample list of product and service categories that tend to have the worst ads, in no particular order:

Health and wellness products
Beauty and skincare products
Financial services and investment schemes
Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) business opportunities
Dietary, weight loss, and alternative health products
Digital products and services
Wireless mobile carrier and internet service provider plans
Insurance and credit card offers
Credit relief services
Appeals for (fake) charities and "social causes"
Home and auto warranties

That's quite a list and I probably left out some categories.

It's obvious the entire advertising industry needs to clean up their act, but that will likely never happen. The sad fact is these ads work. There's always some poor schmuck, or two, or 37 million, that will bite, so these ads are here to capitalize on that.

Why would anyone believe it's unethical to avoid exposing oneself to all that?

▶︎ And finally, perhaps while not directly addressing the point of ethicalness, as a practical matter, do you, personally, even respond to advertising? Do you tend to discover and buy products or services via the unsolicited advertising model? Or do you, like me, when a need or want develops, seek out a provider using our own independent research?

I know what triggers me, what motivates me, to do whatever. And it's most definitely not advertising. It's just noise.

Positing that one must consume advertising to somehow fulfill their end of a social contract in order to enjoy free content is a false construct. There are any number of reasons why. e.g., Must I watch a commercial advertising tampons even though I am male? Must I watch a beer commercial even if I don't drink alcohol?

Or does that imagined social contract somehow exempt compliance from people for whom the advertisement is clearly not intended? If so, would that person then be an ethical free rider in that context? What about the person sitting next to them? Who makes that call?

My priority is advocating for you have a safe, comfortable, and productive online experience. I am not shedding a tear for Big Tech and their estimated $20,000,000,000,000 market cap. That's 20 trillion in case you got lost in all those zeroes. Big Tech will be just fine...

Being "sold to"

Americans don't generally like being "sold-to". When most Americans enter a store, we (usually) don't want to be approached right away by a sales person. We like our autonomy and to be left alone to browse. A quick acknowledgement of our entrance "Welcome to Ace" is ok, but not required. If, or when, we want help, we'll ask for it. It's like that when entering a car dealership, a department store, or even a mom and pop in most cases. This is the custom, the social norm, in America. That custom may very well be different in other countries.

Watching old TV commercials on Youtube can be fun, because we're not being solicited or sold-to in the moment. It doesn't feel transactional. I suspect that's one reason why the infomercials of the 1980s did well (more on that below) whereas straight-up commercials, not so much. Yes, infomercials were sales pitches, but usually wrapped up in a longer, more "entertainment-centric" presentation.

Creator Community

Don't think I'm naive. I'm certainly well aware of the effect that ad-blocking could have on websites and creators that provide free content. But, at least for now, because of the rampant abuses of virtually all ad networks and Big Data, allowing ads even as a method to mitigate creator losses is just not doable, in my opinion.

There are other, better, and more direct ways to support your favorite creators. e.g., Many creators are moving to creator-owned and operated sites like Nebula.tv that allow you to experience different creators, ad-free, for a pretty reasonable fee -- way cheaper than subscription Youtube. I'm a Nebula subscriber and it's where I watch many of my favorite creators, like City Nerd.

You can also buy creator merchandise and join their Patreon pages. I've done both.

Thoughts for an ad-free future

If enough people are avoiding advertising to the extent that free content is suffering as a result then I'd proffer that the model has reached its failure mode. Content providers (e.g., websites), need to develop ad-free funding solutions to satisfy those that do not tolerate traditional, experience-interrupting advertising.

One of those solutions we're seeing today is when brands pay highly-followed social media "stars" to talk-up their products and services. This is called influencer marketing and it's the 21st century equivalent, of sorts, of the venerable infomercial from mid-1980s.

Influencer marketing, and those old infomercials, are/were not unwelcome distractions that one must endure. Instead, many felt they were themselves a form of entertainment, worthy of attention. They were not an interruption to an existing program; they were the program. And I must say, even though they didn't appeal to me, those early infomercials were oddly compelling to surprisingly many, just as today's influencers are.

Another solution is ad-free subscription offerings.

I already support numerous* news outlets and other sites because good journalism costs money and it's well worth paying for. It's critical to a free democracy. But not with ads!

* NPR, NY Times, The Guardian, Ars Technica, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Wikipedia, to name a few.

I'd love to see an online world where I could make micropayments to read certain content. There are numerous sites with paywalls that I won't read often enough to justify a formal subscription so I miss out on them entirely. I figured that it would cost me a couple of thousand per year to subscribe to all the publications that I might want to read every now and then. Well, I'm certainly not doing that!

But I would gladly pay a modest fee to read that occasional article or two that was linked-to from another site. Or maybe pay for a day pass.

Problem is, micropayments aren't convenient with today's payment methods. Credit card processing fees are too high for micropayment levels, and they aren't designed for microtransactions in the first place.

We need a clearinghouse where micropayments can be made to a content provider. It could operate similar to how a toll-road fast-pass works. That is, your micropayment wallet could contain an initial amount of money, say $10 or so, then as that amount decreases to a certain threshold, maybe $2, it'll be automatically recharged from your credit/debit card in $10 increments.

When you visit a site that asks for a micropayment of 10¢ (or whatever), a payment confirmation box would appear asking you to confirm or cancel the payment. Very little friction, just one click does it. No logging into PayPal or Venmo. No digging out your credit card and typing in all the stuff just to read the article.

The website itself would not display the payment prompt. It would make an API* call to the micropayment processor that would then display the payment screen. If you click to confirm, the micropayment processor would tell the website that payment was made and credit the site a percentage of that fee (hopefully 90% at least).

* A secure way that a website could communicate with a micropayment network

That's how a friction-free micropayment system could work.

I'm pretty dismayed that something like this has not yet become a reality. It's one answer to the problem of online-advertising.

Avoiding ads today

Here are some of the easier things you can do today to avoid seeing ads and being tracked all over.

Don't use Google Chrome. Use Firefox instead. If on Apple, Safari is fine. Here's why
Install the uBlock Origin extension on Firefox. Link here: bit.ly/ubo-firefox
On your phone, use a proper browser instead of that site's app, if possible.
See my article on Security 101 to learn more ways to secure your online life.