> It is crazy to suggest that any company doing analytics has any sort of right to make my software connect to its servers.
No analytics company has a right to make you connect to its servers. But, that isn't the case at all: You visit some website. The operator of that website has contracted with the analytics company. You ask the website for some information and it replies with that information as well as a request to ping the analytics company that the website contracted with. It's apparently "crazy" to comply with that request, all while still consuming the information that you asked for and received.
Ad-blockers wouldn't be controversial if they worked by navigating away from any site that displayed ads or included a tracker. Of course, that would be inconvenient for the user, so, they don't do that. The whole point of an ad-blocker is to allow a user to consume a service in a manner that the entity running and paying for the service didn't intend. We could at least acknowledge that. Your position, however, seems to be that doing what the service you are using is asking you to do in exchange for its information is "crazy" - and that is straight up ridiculous.
Just wait until that official DRM crap is used for adtech and preventing you from modifying the HTML the server sends.
This is a war; a never-ending war of users VS adtech. I realize how much defense I have to run to protect mtself even moderately, and I'm still losing.
Adblockers are not controversial. Stop pushing adtech narrative and passing it off as an established fact. HN is the last place on earth where people would fall for this kind of crap.
The internet was built to decentralise and make information globally available. It wasn't built for some morally bankrupt interest groups to turn a profit. The http protocol is explicitly in favour of user control over content.
> Ad-blockers wouldn't be controversial if they worked by navigating away from any site that displayed ads or included a tracker. Of course, that would be inconvenient for the user, so, they don't do that. The whole point of an ad-blocker is to allow a user to consume a service in a manner that the entity running and paying for the service didn't intend. We could at least acknowledge that.
It's the other way around. The HTTP protocol and supporting web standards were designed from grounds-up to allow and encourage the kind of things an ad-blocker does. The browser acts on behalf of the user (hence the term "user agent"). Links in a HTML response are information, "there is something related over there", not a command "you must go there"[0].
The right way to solve ad-blockers is for sites to comply with the protocol they're operating under - to refuse delivering a resource, with 402 or 403 code, until payment is provided, or an ad is displayed. AKA "the paywall". The controversy only exists because many website operators prefer to be dishonest and manipulative - they post content that they mark as free giveaway, but simultaneously demand compensation. They stir up drama of how ad-blockers are immoral, whereas in reality, blocking ads is "playing by the rules" and it's them who are in violation of human decency.
> Your position, however, seems to be that doing what the service you are using is asking you to do in exchange for its information is "crazy" - and that is straight up ridiculous.
It's not crazy. But it's also not required by any technology, law or custom. Thing is, the service is asking the wrong way. HTTP protocol was created with means for asking to do something. Like, by responding with 402 Payment Required or 403 Forbidden and some instructions on what you want the user to do, instead of responding with 200 OK + content + guilt-tripping popups and pretending to be victim in news articles.
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[0] - Want the "command mode" web? Invent your own, DRMed one. Because otherwise what you're doing is, again, trying to have your cake and eat it too - putting your content on the public web to gain free audience, and then refusing to play by public web's rules.
How do you feel about older screen readers that don't handle JavaScript well and probably won't load the ads (which probably aren't accessible anyway) to read them to the user? Has the user "stolen" or simply used their _user-agent_ to do what is best and most accessible for them?
> The whole point of an ad-blocker is to allow a user to consume a service in a manner that the entity running and paying for the service didn't intend. We could at least acknowledge that.
It's kind of funny that that was, originally, the very definition of "hacking", and we are in a site called "hacker news". But moving on...
The adtech industry got in its head that it can just arrive in a place that already existed (the Internet) and start inventing implicit contracts. It reminds me of the "nice guy" that does some nice gesture for a woman he likes and then gets outraged when the "implicit contract" for sex is not honored.
Hosting is not even that expensive. You know what's expensive? "SEO", buying traffic, in short polluting the very environment where you exist. That is the sort of thing many companies will do with their ad money. They do what they can to place themselves between me and the stuff I want to talk/read about, and then act all outraged when I take counter-measures against their spying and manipulation attempts. That's rich.
I hope EasyList continues to do its job of acting on behalf of the users and does not get swayed by bullshit.
Yes there is. SimpleAnalytics claim that they "don’t track visitors of our customers’ websites".
Are they lying? If not, how is it a tracking script?