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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

You can block ads online, sure. But good luck travelling across a major city without seeing an IRL advert.

Those are passive billboards. And very few people would mind if the advertising on the web was just as inobtrusive. Initially, it was and generally we accepted it as normal. But ad brokers began making more aggressive ads, with animation, sound, and pop-ups. Thus the demand for ad blockers.

Physical advertising has to obey sign ordinances and in some places laws regulating the content of advertising. (In the US this is loosely enforced and mostly just for food and drugs.) You wouldn't be able to get away with constructing a billboard directly in the right-of-way of a road in an octagonal shape colored red with the word "STOP" on it. But that's the equivalent of what internet advertisers do with their fake virus warnings and the big green "Download" button.

An IRL advert won't follow you home, rifle through your drawers, and sell what it finds to the highest bidder.

Pervasive tracking and unwarranted surveillance via ads are a significant component of the problems that online ads have, but that does not make them worse than the ones you see elsewhere. The ones you see in real life have the distinction of being unavoidable except by going to live in either the wilderness or a country that is not yet developed enough to have them everywhere.

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