[jug]

The publishers aren't very innocent themselves. Clickbait articles are nowadays not a dirty strategy to get ad views, but to be expected. Then you have the endemic tracking going on, the tracking that has become intertwined with viewing an ad. Being tracked and seeing an ad... it's the same thing! Nowhere else in the real world but on Internet is this to be expected. And it's a debate that is frustratingly only discussed in organizations like the EFF, never lifted to the general public.

The mafia comparison feels much more like a stretch when talking of ad blockers than when talking of the bulk of the world's news sites secretly (unless inspecting network traffic or HTML code) using a common few advertisement agencies.

I think the recent cookie laws feel pretty useless, especially since cookies aren't nasty by themselves. "Hi! This site uses cookies! Click here to learn more." It doesn't tell me anything. It doesn't imply that the site is evil nor good. However, give me a law requiring web sites to say "Hi! We are part of a tracking network where your behavior on this site will be registered." Then we're talking. Where the link doesn't lead to an explanation by the publisher, but be required to lead to a link on an external part with an easily digestible, up front explanation of what an ad tracker does and can do. I'm honestly quite fed up that this offensive behavior can keep going on behind the scenes. All people see are photos of a new car model. A normal ad that is anything but normal.

For as long as there is this World Wild West on the publishers' sides, I'm not going to change my behavior on defending myself. Because I look at this as a form of defense. It's simply like running antivirus tools on Windows. I wouldn't want a trojan horse to be downloaded that uploads my browsing behavior to some server either. The difference from what these guys are doing seems razor-thin.

[bigbugbag]

It actually depends on the publisher, the french news site nextinpact[1] listen to criticism of ads, looked into the issues and made their move: ads are limited to display format, no behavioral targeting, no animation, no mixing content and ads, no tracker on client-side (tracking is on server side with a locally installed piwik).

The mafia comparison is targeting adblock plus for their "do your ads as we say, give us a 30% cut of the money you make and we may whitelist your ads (only if you're big enough as in at least 10m ad impressions)" feature[3].

[1]: http://www.nextinpact.com/blog/97835-pourquoi-next-inpact-ar... [2]: http://www.nextinpact.com/publicite-partenariat [3]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/25/adblock-pl...

[manigandham]

Advertisers run ads on the internet precisely because of the richer metrics it offers - knowing exactly who/how many saw, clicked, or otherwise engaged with an ad. This makes advertising more efficient and better for both the advertiser and you the user.

The implementation is current broken largely due to a lack of regulation and enforcement in the industry but this can easily be fixed by having better opt-out mechanisms online (3rd party cookie removal went the opposite way). This would allow you to get more generic ads if that's your wish.