Well, the game’s afoot. Are you using ad blocking?
PC World’s “The price of free: how Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google sell you to advertisers” article summaries how four major companies handle collection of personal data when you use their products and services.
Because the latest version of Windows is always asking for information in the guise of being helpful, it’s easy to think that Microsoft’s the poster child for the collective attack on your digital privacy. But it’s not.
Now that Apple’s iOS 9 supports ad blockers, are you going to try one on your iPhone? The Washington Post summaries some choices in their “Here’s how some of the top iOS 9 ad-blockers stack up” article.
From a consumer standpoint, it seems like a good deal — particularly on a smartphone, where even a small ad can take up a lot of screen space. Ditching ads makes sites load faster and easier to read. And blocking tracking software may give those worried about privacy some peace of mind.
And the Washington Post continues with a cautionary perspective in “How our love affair with ad-blocking risks giving Internet providers even more power.”
If you often feel that the content on webpages you visit is overwhelmed by ads, this article notes that:
The New York Times took a look at this Thursday. It found that for many online news sites, it takes longer to load the ads than the news content visitors are presumably there to see. On an LTE connection, the Huffington Post loaded in 5.2 seconds with all its ads, for example, but with an ad blocker, that time was cut to just 1.2 seconds.
So, what could go wrong with all of this? Re/code discusses the topic in “Ad Blockers: Unwitting Arbiters of Consumer Preference.”
Deploying ad blocking is not the fight consumers want. But neither the pay-for-access model nor the advertising-in-exchange-for-free-access model works well enough today. … Opting in to the advertising experience is also broken. Consumers en masse should not be expected to choose to view ads when blocking them is both easy and consequence-free. … It is a tragedy of the commons.
What about Heinlein and Friedman? See Wikipedia’s article titled “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”