just that the TV commercial looks back at you through the TV and the TV follows you around everywhere, wherever you go, whatever you do, taking note of everything to get to know every single detail about you, every interest, every prejudice, every weakness of yours, to get to know you like no person, no matter how close to you does, like not even yourself do to use that information to influence you most effectively to the TV channel’s and the advertiser’s advantage, to manipulate you, to sell this information about you to other companies like insurances who use the power that this knowledge provides over you to extract every last cent of money from you, to sell you.

  • @Thagthebarbarian@lemmy.world
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    18 months ago

    A reminder that this war isn’t new, even before the mass consolidation of TV stations, they got together to standardize commercial break timing so it didn’t matter if you changed the channel because you were just switching to commercials on another channel

  • @Austin_Skeldon@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There’s nothing wrong refusing auto-play video (ads) and tracking (ads) from running on your device using your bandwidth.

    The issue is that services and newspaper came to rely on advertising platforms and those have become worse and more intrusive, to the point a significant portion of users are now blocking them.

    I like the approach taken by EFF’s Privacy Badger. It blocks scripts and cookies that track you despite the presence of an opt-out signal in the browser. It happens to block a number of ad platforms incidentally. But it offer a mechanism to unblock hosts once they honor tracking opt-out. cf https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-from-Disconnect%2C-Adblock-Plus%2C-Ghostery%2C-and-other-blocking-extensions

  • @ganymede@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Adblockers are self-defense technology by nature

    We are in an asymmetrical arms race involving an abhorrent industry. They cannot feign to discuss morality when it’s common knowledge they have none.

    It’s probably fine for a website to kindly request you unblock them, or better yet offer easy & private ways to donate or contribute. If they don’t offer the latter, they can’t really cry about it can they?

  • Marxism-Fennekinism
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    1 year ago

    The way I see it, they ruined ads for themselves and it’s not our fault for hating them enough to want to get rid of them. If ads didn’t make the web literally unusable, steal our data, consume more system resources than the site itself, and be a portal for malware, people would be more accepting of them to support websites.

    This is a textbook greed leads to ruin tale, like cyberpunk Aesop.

  • @madcaesar@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    You know what’s immoral? Advertising medicine. Advertising surgery breakfast foods to kids. Advertising garbage fast food to kids.

    That’s immoral, not adblockers.

  • UnfortunateShort
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    08 months ago

    It is, because you don’t switch the channel, you decide to skip the commercials that are meant to finance it.

    I think they are immoral beyond any doubt, but many websites are acting immoral as well, which justifies their use. I happily disable them for sites with an ethical approach to advertising and data collection.

  • @mikeyBoy14@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I don’t think that’s quite right. The act of changing the channel wouldn’t have impacted the station’s ad revenue because the tech couldn’t tell if the ad was served. On YouTube you actually deprive the site of ad revenue with an ad blocker. And if enough people do it, you could also deprive creators of material earnings.

    • @owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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      18 months ago

      Well, historically ad revenue for TV is based on viewership, right? I’m not 100% sure how that was calculated before streaming, but I would think that changing the channel would still affect those numbers, albeit in a more gradual way. It would still have a similar effect, just not as immediate.

      It’s important to differentiate “immoral” from “consequences.” The consequences of adblockers/changing the channel is that it may impact content creators, but that doesn’t make it immoral.

      • JJROKCZ
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        18 months ago

        The Nielsen company doing surveys of a percentage of households is how they know. Nowadays they even have a tracker you wear that reports back to Nielsen what you’ve been watching/listening to based on what it can hear, in the old days it was a form folks filled out saying what they watched or listened to