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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty immoral. Companies that create or provide content should at the very least be able to decide if they want to serve you content if you don't agree to see ads with it (or pay for it). How is it moral to effectively force someone to allow you to see the content you want to see without compensating them for it.

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This is like saying that it's immoral to change the channel whenever ads come on the TV or radio, or to use the mute button on your TV. It is in no way immoral. The way HTML works is your browser sends a request for resources it wants, then renders them for you. IF you don't send the request for resources you don't want, that's not immoral. If it affects the web sites' businesses, then the onus is on them to come up with a model that works. There are other reasonable free models, such as those used by public TV and public radio.

You are sending the request for the resources though, e.g. if you load facebook.com there isn't a separate request for ads, they are just loaded as part of the feed. It's very much within their right (contractually) to encumber your usage of the site to rendering the full page as it's served to you. Attempting to fool them into thinking you're rendering the content as presented while you do not actually do that (as a result, imposing on them a net revenue loss) is clearly immoral.

You don't agree to a TOS by watching TV and listening to the radio, the internet is fundamentally different from those media.

That isn't how the internet works. It's a series of requests and at any point some requests can be rejected. Whether that request was critical for site functionality depends on what request that was.

Consenting to requests from google.com does not guarantee or imply consent from adservices.google.com, so if google.com tells my browser to please fetch resources from adservices.google.com I'll tell them to go away.

Personally, I use a giant blocklist [0] of domains I do not wish to request resources from.

As a comparison, if you invite a friend to your house do you expect them to show up with 50 other people? Would you be upset with your friend for assuming it would be okay to invite other people to your house without your consent? Is it morally wrong to tell your friend they may not bring other friends to your house without your approval? If you agreed to letting them bring friends over, are you okay with any friends or is their neo-nazi friend not allowed?

[0] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

>You don't agree to a TOS by watching TV and listening to the radio, the internet is fundamentally different from those media.

You don't agree to a TOS by visiting a website either. Agreement is usually done when registering an account and even those are limited in any legal ability to enforce it.

That’s a shitty analogy. It’s more like if you invite your friend over to your house and they are wearing a wristwatch and you have an irrational fear of wristwatches (illuminati might be listening, so huge privacy risk obviously). Should you a) rip the watch off their wrist and throw it out the window, or b) not invite people over who wear wristwatches.

To use your analogy though in the context of this paper... It would be more like if your friend only wanted to hang out at your house if everyone could join, and you told your friend everyone was allowed to come in, but then you secretly kicked out one person and managed to trick your friend into thinking the person you kicked out was still there because you knew everyone would leave if they found out. Sounds pretty selfish to me.

> If you invite a friend to your house do you expect them to show up with 50 other people?

But if you say no, your friend has the choice of whether to come alone.

Anti-anti-adblocking systems prevent your friend from making that choice.

In theory, content would not be delivered until the ads have been fetched and reported that they've been delivered. In practice, that isn't a realistic option. Not because it isn't technically possible - but because people are impatient and expect near instant load times and this would slow things down a tiny bit.

The anti-adblocking systems are the equivalent of coming over anyway but complaining about not being able to bring 50 friends the entire time. Anti-anti-adblocking systems are telling them to shut up or don't come over.

There's something to be said about people who repeatedly invite the friend over who constantly complains about not being able to bring 50 friends. I tend to respect sites who ask me to disable my ad blocker: I just won't visit their website.

A low traffic site doesn't make enough to sustain from ads. The proper response isn't to push traffic away - it's to find a business model that works. Ad based models are increasingly not working.

What is immoral is for companies to try to manipulate my computer into doing something that I don't want it to do. If they want to keep total control of their content then they should keep it exclusively on their computers, by sending it to my computer they are surrendering control of it.

You're requesting that you load their site by the act of visiting it. It's very reasonable that they should have the right to decide to serve what you are requesting or not depending on if your request is going to make them money or cost them money. If you don't want what they're serving then don't visit the site, it's pretty simple.

Do you go into stores and demand they take down the displays that you don't like while you're shopping?

If store ads fingerprinted you for storage and tracking, flashed annoying lights in your face, displayed obscene content or infected your body with viruses, absolutely yes

That’s pretty weird. Why wouldn’t you just not visit the store.

> Do you go into stores and demand they take down the displays that you don't like while you're shopping?

No, but stores are usually happy for me to not look at the displays if I don't want to. Staff don't follow me around putting up displays in front of the shelves I'm looking at, sneaking things I don't want into my basket, or following me after I leave the store to keep showing me displays. Nor do they outsource these things to unvetted lowest bidders, and swear off responsibility when the people they've contracted steal my car whilst I'm in the shop.

It has a few potentially legit applications:

* Avoiding the privacy implications of ads without restricting access to content

* Avoiding browser fingerprinting through checking which ad-blocking lists are enabled

* (More arguable) Enforcing 'Acceptable ads' policies

* (More arguable) Enabling ad replacement programs such as Brave.

> * Avoiding the privacy implications of ads without restricting access to content

Guaranteed that something like this would also block ads that are "site served" (e.g. Facebook's ads) though. Pretty difficult to make a privacy argument there since you're tracked exactly the same way there by nature of using the site.

I think that even for site served scripts, there's potential for ad-blockers to do good for your privacy, for example, if Facebook had a script that tracked the movements of your mouse through the page exclusively for advertising purposes and which was independent of the rest of the scripts of the page, then it could be blocked for a privacy gain.

But then, for site served scripts, the provider could sufficiently "tangle" it with the rest of the scripts as to be inseparable, so it's a lost war in the end and your point still stands, I believe.

So paywall your site? See if it lasts.

I can't comment on.morality because it is inherently subjective but there is no legal problem here.

Did you read the article? It’s proposing a way to prevent websites from detecting that an adblocker is in use, effectively breaking their ability to selectively paywall.

Did you read their post? They didn't say selectively paywall.

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