[mevile]

The value of an extension is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. The value of someone's ethics also has a price. It is a different price for everyone. It's silly to go into details about ethics, because maybe I donate half of the unethical income to buy mosquito nets and now I've traded saving lives with inconveniencing users or some other such very personal calculation/rationalization.

You can browbeat developers with your ethics and ideals, but your approval doesn't feed anyone's children.

[geofft]

This doesn't respond to my argument: if your users knew that your sense of ethics is that attacking their private browsing data to buy mosquito nets is justified, they wouldn't be your users. (That small subset of your users that thinks mosquito nets are a good use of money would either donate directly and ignore your extension, or voluntarily participate in a scheme to turn ad views into mosquito nets such that you gain no additional mosquito nets by selling.) So whether or not you are willing to sell, in a market with perfect information, the value of your extension would be close to zero.

Therefore the only way that your extension has value is if you are intentionally withholding information from users about your willingness to sell. Which, even without getting into the ethics of deceiving your users, is at odds with the generally-accepted sense of the word "value" in economics. If a company is withholding information about it doing poorly and has a higher stock price than it would if it didn't, you generally say the company is "overvalued," that people are erring in attributing that value to it, not that it increased its actual value.

[mevile]

Ok, I understand now and I don't disagree. Makes sense.