Hey, I’ve been thinking about something that’s been bugging me lately. I’ve always used an adblocker (even before caring about privacy), but now I’m noticing more and more websites putting up paywalls. Some even want you to pay like 5 bucks a month just to still see ads, which is in my opinion stupid.
I can’t help but wonder if, if we keep using adblockers, everything is just going to end up behind a paywall. And then there’s the whole privacy issue. If you have to give them your card info and create an account, they can just track everything you read. I know there are options like privacy.com, but that isn’t available in Europe, so that isn’t an option.
Am I overthinking this, or does it make sense? It’s really been on my mind (And I get the argument that tracking you everywhere isn’t ethical either, but I really don’t have the money as a student to just go around paying even 5 bucks a month with all the privacy services I pay for currently).
In general, these companies are losing their war against ad blockers. The ‘everything inaccessible if you use an adblocker’ world you are imagining just isn’t going to happen.
They are depending on people not knowing technical ways around their anti-adblock scripts. You will start to learn them as you go along, but you have to stay up to date too as it changes over time. There is a cat-and-mouse game with adblock and anti-adblock, and it’ll continue in the future.
Sometimes i do felt bad too for small indie site trying to earn something to cover their time, effort and server cost. But my pity usually turned to disgust when i whitelist them on my adblock and saw the usual borderline malware ads they’re serving so back to 100% adblocking i did.
I don’t think it’s unethical to block ads, but it is possible that the ad industry is so greedy that they won’t accept anything less than targeted ads. Google tried to reach a compromise with The Privacy Sandbox’s FLoC (later succeeded by Topics API and then killed) proposal, but received backlash from both privacy advocates for being a form of profiling as well as from ad tech companies since this could kill their business.
As explained in Security Now episodes 811 and 815, FLoC/Topics could’ve been a more private alternative to tracking if it completely replaced web tracking and fingerprinting. Whether that would’ve happened is open to debate, but based on what I heard in the news, it sounded like competing ad tech companies applying maximum pressure were the main barrier.
Honestly, I don’t give a single crap about ads. I will happily block them. Why? Well ads are annoying. If I find the article or video I watch to be worth the value, then I will support the creator. Even a $1 a month on Patron. I will keep using UBO all I want because it makes the internet actually barable.
I agree payment is a privacy issue. Ideally, there should be a universal standard that pays pages you visit a certain amount (set by the user, could be for example 1 cents) automatically using a privacy-preserving technique (you pay through your browser/another third-party that pays those sites once a month total amount) or even crypto for websites that accept it.
But I believe paywalls are good for the health of the web, we can complain all we want about how tracking and ads are bad, if we want to stop being the product we must be ready to pay for the product.
I personaly would be ready to pay around 20-30 bucks per months for this.
I do like the ad-supported internet, you’re right that paywalls are annoying and not everyone can afford to pay for every site they visit, on top of the privacy issue of giving your card out to every site as well.
Ultimately though I think the onus is on websites/browsers/advertisers to make ads more tolerable so people don’t feel like they need to use an ad blocker. There’s a lot of work right now on what’s called Privacy Enhancing Technologies like OHTTP and differential privacy that will allow targeted ads but still preserve the privacy of individual users, that’s the concept behind Google’s Privacy Sandbox. We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out but I think with this tech, advertisers can pay more for ads so websites won’t have to plaster as many ads everywhere, and we won’t have to worry about tracking.
Ads have existed for millennia and they really aren’t the problem in my opinion. The problem is targeting advertising which should absolutely die, but the ad giants will do anything to stop that from happening.
Once targeted advertising seizes to exist I’ll stop using an ad-blocker. Until then I won’t give it a second thought.