Can Facebook really make ads unblockable? | Hacker News Reader

Can Facebook really make ads unblockable?

freedom-to-tinker.com

60 pointsIrishsteve80 comments

One thing I find annoying about their rhetoric is this rationalization that people want advertising to teach them about new interests and things they might be interested in. People do want to learn more about what they're interested in, but I can't think of a less honest source than an advertiser.

I'll grant that targeted advertising is better than untargeted advertising, but no advertising is still strongly preferred (I'd even pay a couple bucks a month for it). This is why tons of users use adblockers - it's just a better experience.

I understand advertising is what funds Facebook and I get why they care about it, but don't also try and tell me why advertising is something the users want. Users don't want it and the experience would be better without it (and without all the tons of engineers dedicated to making it better instead of working on the core product).

Actually some users _do_ want adverts, bizarre as that may seem to us. The majority of users probably don't care either way, based on the proportion of web users who use Adblock or one of its kin.

> The majority of users probably don't care either way, based on the proportion of web users who use Adblock or one of its kin.

Ya because everyone on the web is savy enough to use an adblocker. You're making a lot of silly assumptions.

It's not just a better experience, it's also safer. Less malware from three ad auctions downstream, less private information exfiltrated by third parties, etc. The flashing annoyances are the least of my worries.

> People do want to learn more about what they're interested in, but I can't think of a less honest source than an advertiser.

The opposite side of this is people that think ads are the worst things ever. I really don't understand what the big deal is. It's not like a random ad is going to brainwash me into buying something I never wanted in the first place. Ads being too distracting (e.g. flashing, videos) and a malware source is a different story though.

> It's not like a random ad is going to brainwash me into buying something I never wanted in the first place

Absolutely they do, that's their entire purpose. It has various names such as 'acquired need', a prime example that gained universal acceptance being fabric conditioner.

Sugared water is another prime example, I'm sure you can name some brands and mentally picture their bottles lying in a bed of ice cubes.

You are right that this is there intention, but it is not always the effect. Think about SPAM. Have you ever fallen for any of those emails?

People fall for them all the time. Most of the more poorly worded ones are actually trying to filter out intelligent users, since they will end up being a waste of the spammer's time.

Yes, some people do. That doesn't mean that everyone does, which was the point that seanwilson was making.

Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

http://www.worldcat.org/title/four-arguments-for-the-elimina...

(Mander was himself an ad executive.)

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly

http://www.worldcat.org/title/amusing-ourselves-to-death-pub...

http://www.worldcat.org/title/technopoly-the-surrender-of-cu...

Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self

http://www.worldcat.org/title/century-of-the-self/oclc/86087...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

While we're at it, A Thousand Clowns

http://www.worldcat.org/title/thousand-clowns/oclc/748574510...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AGeq3aMQpbU

Great list. I'd add this one.

Billy Corgan Warns of Weaponized Zombies - Full Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojAXUqL--mY

Infowars? Seriously?

Though you create the opportunity to mention that there is a non batshit-insane lying-for-attention Alex Jones out there worth reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_(journalist)

It's incredibly disingenuous of them to suggest they're doing users a favor.

Do they not see the irony in justifying their circumvention of adblockers with the claim that users want ads?

With that said, I've surprised myself by clicking a couple of Facebook ads in the past few months. Or rather, Googled the product to avoid tracking.

> Googled the product to avoid tracking.

You sure you avoided tracking by 'Googling'?

Ha. Maybe slightly.

Most users, however, want the sites and apps they use to remain free AND not have ads.

What makes you think that? I hate ads and am more than happy to pay to not see them and to support things I use. I do this all the time with, for example, Netflix, iTunes, and a few others. I even pay for the NPR I listen to in my car where they can't track me or force me to subscribe or pay.

I think the reality is that most users get very little value out of the web sites and apps they use and would be just as happy to not use them if they disappeared due to low ad revenue. For those that they would actually miss, some large percentage might be willing to pay for them.

In fact, Hulu [1] just announced that they are no longer offering an ad-supported version. That's pretty telling. Either their service was so bad that they couldn't even give it away (doubtful given that they've kept the paid version), or users actually do hate ads and are willing to pay for content that's actually good.

[1]http://betanews.com/2016/08/08/end-of-free-hulu/

I don't disagree with your general point, but the paid version of Hulu had ads (and still mostly does) until recently.

They have a paid version that's a few dollars more without ads, but that's relatively new and still has ads for some shows.

If ad supported free content isn't great, it's at least reasonable - ad supported paid content is absolutely terrible. I think people should categorically reject ad supported paid content or we might end up with another cable tv situation.

This situation highlights the elephant in the room- People are not much interested in paying for online services, even one as large as FB. Their growth and DAU would suffer dramatically if they had to charge even a nominal fee for use. People will take it for free but it is not worth enough to most to pay even a small amount.

If users wanted ads, they'd be willing to pay to get them.

> people want advertising to teach them about new interests and things they might be interested in

Sometimes they do. I bought my current wallet after seeing an FB ad for it. It's much better than my previous wallet and I'm happy with the purchase. That's how advertising is supposed to work.

What wallet was that? :) Genuinely curious.

And meanwhile Axel Springer won an interim injunction to have Eyeo (makers of Adblock Plus) stop accidentally filtering tweets and other live content on their "news" sites. Ignoring Eyeo's whitelisting business model for a moment, Eyeo's laywers are right in explaining that the filters accidentally block non-ads because sites deliberately make the actual content fit into ads' patterns, which then requires updated filters.

The interesting part is that Axel Springer's lawyers argue that filtering content undermines freedom of press. IANAL, but that's like saying if I put headphones on because I don't want to hear the public radio at a train station, then I'm filtering content and restricting freedom of press. The judge accepted the argument, but it doesn't make sense logically and goes against another pillar of contemporary societies: informational self-determination. If we don't fight this, we might actually end up in a world as depicted in that one Black Mirror episode[1].

Sorry, couldn't find anything in English: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Adblock-Plus-Axel-Spr...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

I mean, I'm going out of my way to try to stop my computer from running code I don't like. (In this case, advertising and tracking code.) There are tonnes of alternatives I could try, but I think the easiest way for me to block Facebook ads is just to stop visiting Facebook.

Ads are more than just annoying. They take away my valuable time and resources. I don't care what business model you think I'm destroying, my attention is mine and mine alone, and I will not have it wrenched away from me by dancing bottles of soap accompanied by the whir of my computers fans as it struggles to play yet another poorly coded flash applet. (I realize Facebook ads very rarely use flash, but they are still distracting in the worst way.)

Facebook can try to do a lot of things here, but they can never win my trust back after all these years, and I consequently refuse to trust their advertising platform more than any other. It's an intruder into my system, I will not allow it to run, and they may kindly deal with it and move on. I run my life ad free, I stopped watching television for similar reasons because I didn't feel like paying money for a service that seemed engineered to waste my time with product placement. If your business model does not agree with my preferences, too bad. I'm still not letting you run your code on my computer.

I don't go to the movies anymore. You have to sit through ads in the beginning, then they pause to sell snacks, and all the while you have to cope with people's disruptions. On top of that, you cannot temporarily enable subtitles or seek back to rewatch a moment. And let's not forget how expensive it is for a single showing. I suppose if you treat it like a real theater or a concert, then it's fine, but it's not comparable to watching a movie yourself or with two friends.

That's why I like living in a (relatively) large city. Here we have enough audience to sustain a couple of "weirder" theaters without concessions, ads or interruptions which show older and/or more independent films.

Agreed, but the movie theaters are in a tough spot here.

They're dying - they make almost no money from the ticket sale since the costs of showing movies is extreme. Most people don't go that much anymore because streaming services are quite good and in home TVs are a lot nicer now.

A lot of the money they make is from concessions - which is why I usually buy some when I go.

Very interesting! I had earlier proposed[1] that FB would have to start this arms race, of making ads that look different to human users, but not to computers.

The article points out that FB seems to be in a losing position since they need their ads to say "suggested post" and give those posts special options -- so ad blockers can always just look for that.

I think they can be a little more devious though -- say, make the CSS really complex so that the letters for "suggested post" only appear in the right positions for legit adds, and then have it load the options for the element from somewhere else. But that comes with a major code-complexity/debugging cost.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12255612

Even that is a losing battle, as you would then just identify the class(es) that result in the 'correct' position of letters.

Ultimately it is an unwinnable battle, but one they can fight as long as they want.

What if it was a set of pixels instead?

even better, the entire page is rendered using the canvas api, using obfuscated javascript

I disagree. I don't see how it can be unwinnable.

Even if it were an endless game of whack-a-mole, free adblock plugins don't have a fraction of the resources of Facebook.

Publishers became greedy, ads became intrusive, and users reacted by flocking to adblockers.

Now the users have taken it too far and publishers are forced to respond.

No one is owed an ad-free experience.

The cost to deliver 'unblocked' ads is exponentially more expensive than the cost to block ads. Ads also have to be properly identified to avoid CAN-SPAM issues, so unless they ignore those laws, it will always be relatively 'easy' to programmatically identify ads.

It sounds like you are reinventing CAPTCHAs.

I'd be happy if all ads became served from the same domain, an integral part of the page (no popovers, popups, focus stealers, etc) and not-dynamic. That would remove 90% of my objections to them.

Third party ads with javascript can and have been used to introduce malware, through deception or zero-day/drive-by exploits, even on otherwise reputable sites. It is for that reason that I block ads.

I now whitelist javascript and use an adblocker after being hit by a drive-by javascript exploit that installed a bitcoin miner.

After taking these precautions, I haven't had an issue with malware since.

IMO it's certainly possible to make ads unblockable. Right now they just aren't trying very hard. It's all about the footprints. This article claims that laws requiring ads to be marked as such would preclude them from removing these footprints, but that isn't necessarily true. For example, Facebook could have two images of identical size, one that says the word "sponsored" and one that is blank, stored on their servers. Every post - sponsored or not - could reference the image like "/image.png?postid=123" and the server would decide based on the post ID which image to actually serve. Unless adblockers could implement machine vision, they wouldn't be able to distinguish this.

Facebook could also go the hostile route - when they detect an ad blocker, just display a blank overlay saying that you can't use Facebook with an ad blocker enabled. Ads are here to stay.

I believe this would violate ease-of-access rules - screen readers would have to be able to tell a user, so if an image is used, the alt/title tag would be set to 'sponsored'.

I suppose, but that's not a legal issue, that's a usability issue. There's no law that says I have to use alt/title tags.

The ADA might want to disagree with you:

"The Department is currently developing regulations specifically addressing the accessibility of goods and services offered via the web by entities covered by the ADA. The fact that the regulatory process is not yet complete in no way indicates that web services are not already covered by title III." — Statement of Interest of the United States Department of Justice in NAD v. Netflix (page 10)

Title tags are not appropriate for every image, and no judge is going to wade into the murky waters of deciding which images need them or not.

If the title tag which denotes that it's sponsored content, as required by another government agency, you can easily assume that yes, a judge will care.

> by entities covered by the ADA

Is Facebook covered by the ADA? I can't imagine that they are, as it is not an essential service. According to [1]:

"The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and, if the government entities receive federal funding, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 generally require that state and local governments provide qualified individuals with disabilities equal access to their programs, services, or activities unless doing so would fundamentally alter the nature of their programs, services, or activities or would impose an undue burden".

But that has nothing to do with private organizations that are not receiving federal funding or providing access to government funded services.

[1] https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm

You may notice that the quote in my original post is from the DoJ to Netflix. If Netflix is subject, why wouldn't Facebook be?

The ADA also applies to privately owned stores as well, so there is certainly precedent. Ever wonder why your office building has a certain number of handicapped parking spots in its parking lot? The ADA is why.

What you're referring to is not a court ruling, but rather an opinion letter penned by the DOJ in a case to which it was not even a party. It holds no legal weight.

That courts are current split on whether it applies or not indicates that there is some weight to the DOJ's opinion. That Netflix decided to ultimately settle instead of forcing the issue does not speak well of their confidence in succeeding (or their willingness to bear the costs of getting to a decision).

However it ends up finally playing out in the courts, if Facebook were to fail to properly label sponsored content in tags, you can bet someone will take them to court over it.

The 9th circuit has ruled that the ADA does not apply to web-only businesses (in the very case you cited).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/9th-circuit-rules...

It also highlights that other courts have ruled that it does apply; it probably won't be settled until someone takes it to the Supreme Court. That Netflix did not attempt to speaks a bit to their confidence in succeeding at that level.

Netflix won the case, so they wouldn't have gone to the Supreme Court. Their opponent could have appealed to the Supreme Court, since they wound up the loser in the case, but they didn't - either because they ran out of money or didn't believe they would win.

From your own link:

After the company lost the initial motion, Netflix settled the case with NAD, agreeing to pay $750,000 in legal fees and caption all of its videos by the year 2014.

IANAL, but I was under the impression that the Americans with Disabilities Act can be applied to some websites to impose just such a requirement.

Yes. Those would be government websites providing essential services. Not privately owned and operated websites.

No, ads are not here to stay. The arms race will escalate. Facebook will lose. And so will every other entity that thinks they'll be able to force ads down our throats.

This. There are tons of talented engineers who will put some serious time into defeating any insidious crap that advertisers try to shove on us. If they start doing things like hosting ads on the same image domain as normal content with indistinguishable URL patterns, people will implement OpenCV to see if an image has any text, and block it if so (trivial example). It might be difficult enough that the mainstream ad blockers will miss it and the arms race will temporarily be "won" by Facebook et al, but the tech savvy will never have to look at ads.

Real life is one exception, since it's hard to stop cities from allowing the construction of billboards. People could start ripping them down, breaking the electronic ones, tagging them, hacking them and replacing the images with offensive ones, etc to send a message that we don't want this trash polluting our vision, but most people aren't that annoyed by them yet.

Messing with billboards can get you in legal trouble, which is probably one big reason it hasn't happened yet, unlike ad-blocking on the web which is perfectly legal and doable.

However, now that we have super-cheap small "drone"/RC aircraft, it would probably be fairly simple to rig one up with a can of spray paint and use that to deface billboards without being easily nabbed.... (Anyone who wants to use my idea is welcome to it!)

> Unless adblockers could implement machine vision, they wouldn't be able to distinguish this.

Why not? Surely it would be possible to identify the content itself, instead of ads and hide everything else, including ads and other noise. Think how we distinguish spam e-mails from real e-mails based on their content.

>acebook could also go the hostile route - when they detect an ad blocker, just display a blank overlay saying that you can't use Facebook with an ad blocker enabled.

They could, but ad blockers could respond by downloading the ads and simply not displaying them. They probably don't do this right now because it's wasteful (one of the reasons to block ads is to save your bandwidth and increase your loading time by not wasting time downloading the ads), but it can certainly be a last resort, especially if it's only certain sites that do it as the ad-blockers can resort to this behavior only for those sites.

The only way I see for them to prevent ad-blocking altogether is to mark every image as an ad, even if it isn't one. I'm not sure how legal that would be. It wouldn't completely prevent ad-blocking, but it'd make it somewhat pointless to view an image-oriented site.

Can King Cnut turn back the tide?

If your users rebel against your business model, it's a brave (foolish? short-term?) business decision to fight your users.

Fine for companies who can only generate value from a user by ads (don't like ads? Goodbye, good riddance), but FB gets immeasurable value from network effects and user data. An interesting strategy, then.

I bet they won't get around my advanced uBlock filter:

facebook.com

It could be feasible to circumvent this "attack" by drawing posts and ads in canvas elements.

But then again, the blocker could "look at the pixels".

Basically, if a human can tell the difference, a piece of software will eventually be able too.

With DRM we had the "if you can see it, you can copy" law. Here might apply the corollary "If you can tell it apart, you can filter it out".

It wouldn't even need to 'look at the pixels', it would only have to identify the appropriate canvas elements.

I was thinking of canvas elements with no differences between them. Same size, same properties, random id.

In such scenario you'd have to "look at the pixels". The contents are programatically rendered and they're not subject to DOM inspecting.

If it became prevalent enough, then theoretically you could update the *block extensions to identify the javascript (or libraries) that are used to render the ads and nullify them.

My guess is that actually implementing this kind of thing would not be worth the cost.

It's a very contraditory move to bet high in AI and block-Adblock tech at the same time.

I get the feeling that the future-business side of Facebook and the in-app advertising side of Facebook are not very connected.

And this is a huge business opportunity.

It is a bet that their AI is orders of magnitude better than the adblock's AI.

It's a lot of hubris, but not contradictory.

The same bet Microsoft took against FOSS. I'll stick with the same horse.

One day, a company is going to find a way to disrupt ads, as in creating a viable way for websites and mobile apps to easily make money from free products that doesn't involve inserting ads, and it will usher in the next Web X.0

I wouldn't quite hold my breath on that one. Anything like that is going to have to both get users to open their wallets, and do so at a rate which matches or exceeds the current levels of revenue gained by ads.

The closest thing we have now might be Patreon, and while it's successful for solo artists and small groups, I doubt a Patreon like model is going to be funding the New York Times.

I really don't have an issue with ads, I have a problem with shitty ads. If Facebook put a quarter of those adblock blocking resources into getting appropriate ads, none of this would be an issue. That goes for the rest of the internet. People use adblockers because it's completely intrusive and awful to see.

The latest rash of them have been grotesque "one weird trick" type ones. I'm not sure why they're even selling spots to whatever idiots are making these, because it's undoubtedly driving users away and pushing people to install ad blockers to not look at that nasty garbage.

Because they are probably making more money accepting them, than they are losing money from getting blocked.

> Can Facebook really make ads unblockable?

Of course they can. It's called product placement.

anyone can make ads unblockable, just host them yourself and don't use a lot of javascipt

That will only be unblockable until someone submits a filter for it, and then every ad blocker will block it.

Not only that, but that exact example is already blocked by default in Easylist by this rule:

Static filter /ads/ad. found in: EasyList

Fb could make them heuristically indistinguishable from a wall-post, and some motivated individual would have a plugin that scraped your friends and blocked non-friend content up and running within hours.

Then the ad blocker only has to hide all images from the ads/ folder.

That's not feasible on a large scale. Plus, it's easy to block <domain.com/ads/*> - almost all adblockers allow you to add your own rules.

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