In the news, we have a consortium of French publishers, which somehow includes several major U.S. corporations (Google, Microsoft), attempting to sue AdBlock Plus developer Eyeo, a German firm with developers around the world. I have no idea of the legal basis for their case, but it’s all about the money. AdBlock Plus and the closely related AdBlock are among the most popular Chrome extensions, by far, and publishers will no doubt claim huge monetary damages around presumed “lost income”.
First off, it’s important to understand just how invasive and unpleasant the advertising industry has become. I put together a one hour talk about this, in late 2012, for a conference that was hosted by the Federal Trade Commission. In short, advertisers go out of their way to profile you and learn as much about you as possible. In some cases there’s an auction that occurs in the space of milliseconds to maximize the value of the advertising being shown to you.
There’s a huge ecosystem of companies that sell services to the advertising marketplace, both on the web and on mobile. Those ads you see inside your apps? They’re just web pages, using all of the same mechanisms, but with additional bonus privacy concerns, such as capturing your GPS location or reading unique hardware identifiers from your phone.
Ad blocking technology benefits: Ad blockers, on mobile and on the web, are a simple mechanism that pushes back on this invasive behavior.
Android ad blocks forbid your phone from connecting to specific DNS names, although Android users can add on the remarkably detailed XPrivacy extension or can install a third-party variant of Android called CyanogenMod which includes the user-friendly PrivacyGuard feature (read more on those in a nice article on XDA Developers).
Web browser ad blockers are quite sophisticated. Even when advertisers use crazy obfuscated JavaScript to hide themselves, the blockers just wait for the ads to show up somewhere on the page and then remove them when they appear.
Ad blockers have all sorts of benefits to their users. Turns out that advertising uses a significant fraction of the power budget of your mobile phone. Remove the ads and you get longer battery life (gory details, see: Vallina-Rodriguez et al. 2012, Pathak et al. 2012). But wait, there’s more! A significant number of Android apps request networking privileges solely for the purpose of fetching advertising and it’s getting worse over time (see my own work on this: Shekhar et al. 2012, Book et al. 2013).
The more security privileges an Android app has, the more that minor bugs can be abused to become significant security vulnerabilities. If an app doesn’t otherwise need full network access, why should it have that privilege at all?
Privacy and ad blocking technologies consequently improve a user’s security posture, save power, and improve page loading times. What’s not to like about that?
But, but, but… ad revenues: Yes, advertising pays the bills. Way back when, there was a time that we thought micropayments would solve the problem, but instead of micropayments flowing from users to publishers through some clever cryptographic mechanisms, we instead have those payments flowing from advertising services to publishers, through pedestrian accounting mechanisms.
If users block ads, then publishers can claim “lost revenues”, right? Astute readers will notice that this sounds much like the claim that software piracy leads to lost revenues, and will recognize just how bogus this claim is. For example, if we could reduce piracy on Adobe Creative Suite to zero, would all those graphical design tool users buck up and pay Adobe thousands of dollars? Dream on. They’d instead become aficionados of much cheaper tools, such as the remarkably good Pixelmator. Similarly, people who block advertising are precisely the sorts of people who are least likely to click on ads. If you force them to see ads, they’ll hate you and won’t click anyway. Advertising revenues are largely based on clicks. No clicks, no revenue.
So how, then, can we solve the problem?
The dream world: Right now, web and mobile advertising build on a slew of mechanisms that were never expressly intended for them, and they operate largely without any regulation as to what’s okay and what’s verboten. My proposal is simple. If you want to require me to see your ads, then you need to be regulated as to what information you’re allowed to collect about me, what you’re allowed to do with that information, how much of my power budget you’re allowed to consume, and how visually intrusive you’re allowed to be. For example, in our own work (Shekhar et al. 2012), we considered how Android might offer advertising as a top-level system service that could ration power and avoid privilege bloat from advertising libraries.
In short, we have the technology to regulate advertising and make it operate in a more secure, more power efficient, and more privacy-aware fashion, but that technology needs to be built into the platform if it’s going to have any measure of success. If we’re going to resign ourselves to a world of advertising-supported content, then we need to meet in the middle. User-level technologies like ad blockers or nation-state regulatory authorities can curb the current excesses of the advertising industry, and purpose-built alternatives can provide necessary revenues.
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