creepy

I don’t always agree with Marco Arment, but his post today about the ethics of modern web ad-blocking really struck a nerve.

As a publisher myself I’ve been trying to figure out how to monetize my sites so they will at least pay for their own expenses. I’m not trying to turn my podcast into my sole income source, but it would be nice if it wasn’t a money pit, y’know? However, I want to support it in a way that’s not creepy — I really don’t want to track you, and you don’t want me to track you, I’m sure.

Recently my wife also was complaining about flashing and otherwise intrusive ads on a “free” game site she frequents. We talked about the ethics of blocking the ads on a free site, and she eventually decided that blocking the ads was worth reducing headaches from flashing and flickering junk on her screen. We installed an ad blocker for Firefox, and not only did the ads go away, but it actually improved the site’s performance on her computer (an older white MacBook model). This surprised me at the time, but blocking those JavaScript loads on the page really reduced the amount of work that her browser had to do.

In Marco’s article, he recommended the free Ghostery add-on, which installs in your favorite browser and shows a little pop-up of what tracking scripts are running on a given page. It can also block any or all of these, but the most interesting thing for me today has been just to see them, and realize that there was more going on on my own site than I knew.

Let’s take a look at what Ghostery is seeing on my own sites.