> But if content providers do not want to give me their stuff unless I watch their ads, I think that's fine.
Exactly. I've got a right to block ads if I can figure out how to achieve that technologically. But they've got a right to not give me content if they can figure out, technologically, that I'm blocking their ads.
I mostly agree, but it seems wrong to me that the side serving up content even has the ability to tell how you choose to display it. It's like a magazine with embedded cameras that self-immolates if it sees you take out scissors to cut it up for scrapbooking. Feels like a gross violation already.
But that's not what's happening: what's happening is the server is asking for the properties of the client and making a decision to serve based on response. Similar to presenting credentials to be served. Surely the server is allow to set whatever conditions they are able to express technologically. You can't force a server to serve, or can you?
The server should not be able to ask beyond the protocols of the request. The client says this is what I need, the server responds in that form if it can. The server is not supposed to send a script inspecting the client for more details.
If the server can run a script to analyze what plugins you're running, what else can it take? Exfiltration of arbitrary data is not something that is OK.
You can't force a server to serve, nor should you force a client to give more information than is necessary to serve the request. Anything else is no longer technology, it's adversarial and now we're in a Prisoner's Dilemma.
Obviously the criterion cannot be "is is technologically expressible". With modern tracking/spying you can know with plenty of confidence someone's personal characteristics such as ethnicity.
They can ask for the properties of the client, and the user can then make a informed decision to consent to that collection of personal information. In EU it is similar to asking for identification credentials.
Naturally this may make the process a bit cumbersome and websites that does not behave like this will gain a bit competitive advantage.
Agreed. As someone who could not use the web without an ad blocker, I wouldn't even be opposed to a `X-Blocks-Ads: true` request header or something, to just shut down the hue and cry between the two parties. Let's all be honest, then see where it gets us.
If we could trust adtech to be honest we wouldn't have to vigorously block them. You and I both know X-Block-Ads would be nothing more than an extra wrinkle for your browser fingerprint.
Right, because the Do-Not-Track flag was respected oh so well. The only people that seem to care about flags are an invading colonizing system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8
It would be another bit for the fingerprinting, that's an important caveat.
The point is that web site owners should be able to easily implement ad/pay walls, and let the market decide whether users are OK with that. The current situation is that ad blocking is a luxury, afforded by people like us with a decent Internet connection for the constant updates, and understanding of technology, to enable ad blocking in the first place.
You're choosing to run their javascript. If you turn off JS, they don't get any control, and you'll likely not get any content or ads.
Let's not forget that people are (1) choosing to visit the site, and (2) choosing to run the server's code locally. This isn't authoritarianism.
If you want to watch YouTube, or Netflix, or whatever, you have to seek it out, and run their code. And of course, you should mutually agree to terms to see be distributed their content.
>I paid for my device, they should have no control over it, yet they do.
no they don't. Even with this theoretical header, they wouldn't have control unless it was an OS-level setting (even then, it'd be trivial to spoof).
they have data you desire, you send a request to connect, they use info in that request to give you a response. malicious services aside, the worst they can do is send nothing, or only undesirable data (a page full of nothing but ads, that you'd block. resulting in nothing). It doesn't control your ability to tab out, close the tab, switch the browser, nor change your OS.
I've read about the chromium stuff. This is why 1) alternatives are important and why I switched to Firefox this year and 2) why being open source is important for competitors to fork and avoid this BS.
>certain cables being unable to display movies, etc.
HDCP was indeed a mistake. A very flimsy one at that. There's so many ways to display content that trying to block it on some specific kind of cable protocol is silly. It just makes people think the device is broken.
I think it doesn’t even need to be a “try to achieve” type thing. I’ll happily leave if a site doesn’t want to serve me without ads. I’m not interested in a technical back and forth.
I wish sites would stop with the nag pop-ups and all that junk.
Ideally, sites’ link generators would have a means of labeling their links as “ad-required” and our browsers could just be programmed to not render them. Link aggregation sites like Hackernews could just not show those sites to users that don’t want them. If a site requires a GDPR tracking pop-up, I just don’t want it to show up in my duck-duck-go searches.
It is annoying that it is a battle. We have two parties that just don’t want to do business with each other. I get that many sites are ad-supported and I wish they could be hidden so that I could more easily find the other ones.
Not sure I understand that particular hill for dying on. If they aren't legally required to give you a choice, they're just going to be tracking you unconditionally.
Plenty of sites ignore GDPR, some sites will GDPR just to CYA, some sites have cookie popups just to be polite, "Site with GDPR popup" in reality is a very poor analog for "site that wants to track me." Most sites that want to, especially for those not in the EU, just will, no questions asked.
I'm asking why because I don't understand and I would like to understand your perspective. With my current understanding, that seems like a strict downgrade.
They'd rather filter sites that track in the first place.
Sure today, in a world that developed without that, that would remove most of the internet, but so what?
That just means their principle vs practical set point lands on a different part of the scale than you, but so does everyone's vs everyone else's.
It's a great idea to imagine, if that were somehow possible and the norm, would it still be most of the internet? Would good old unprincipled pragmatic market forces not result in most sites somehow finding a way to be in front of everyone's eyes?
>But they've got a right to not give me content if they can figure out, technologically, that I'm blocking their ads.
If they can figure out how to do that technologically, it's their right (IMO). However, I believe they're fooling themselves if they think they can maintain this: the hackers are constantly figuring out how to defeat such protection measures, and it only takes one hacker to figure out how to bypass their ad-blocker-blocker and add it to the ad-blocker apps (or filter lists) for it to work for everyone who uses that ad-blocker.
Exactly. I've got a right to block ads if I can figure out how to achieve that technologically. But they've got a right to not give me content if they can figure out, technologically, that I'm blocking their ads.
This all seems very fair to me.