I've come to feel that the unwritten social contract was broken decades ago when ad networks decided their best bet was to become data farms and to sell ads and private data to any bidder regardless of ethics (and morality and truth in advertising laws).

My only "ad blocker" is Firefox enhanced tracking protection and walling off Facebook (Meta, but their only app I still use is Facebook), Amazon, and Google logins to separate containers and/or apps and/or private browsing tools. I feel like this is a good ethical compromise still fills my part of the social contract. If a site wants to show me the most generic, untargeted ads, I welcome that.

They don't get my data for free, that's not part of an ethical relationship with ad networks in my mind. I am happiest to keep them in the dark and feed them junk and lies, that is all I think that they deserve.

It's fascinating how the ad networks respond to this. Several, like Admiral (to especially call out at least one offender) whine loudly that I'm using an ad blocker because they've confused targeting and tracker blocking with ad blocking and ask me to disable it. They don't even try to show ads. It seems pretty clear what their real slimy game is and I don't think they deserve to exist. Ads existed for centuries without tracking and privacy violations. Ad "common sense" up until about the 1980s was the broader the message and distribution the better; demographics and targeting was about saving money with the trade off of losing potential audiences. The more you target an ad the less you benefit from people that didn't even know your product might apply to them, or to people that might buy it for others or as gifts. "Everyone knew that."

Google is nasty in its own ways. ReCaptchas get worse. YouTube ads have several levels of hell, including interruptions in parts of videos it shouldn't interrupt, all sorts of racist and intellectually disgusting groups (including but not limited to allowing outright scams, platforming disinformation, and spreading malware) it allows to buy ads, and how much it allows those groups to serve 30 minute/1 hour/2+ hour videos as "ads". It's amazing how many ads I've felt I had to report from hate groups alone. All of that seems to background radiation for everyone with access to Google's ad networks, but the less tracking data you have the fewer targeted ads you see and the more the mask off greed feeds you terrifying things that make you wonder how humanity is okay with all this and why Google isn't seen as more of a greedy, evil company for how much of this stuff they fail to vet and continue to associate their brand with.

Show me old family friendly TV advertising staples like Clorox ads and whatever the latest cereal fad is, please, I don't mind. That's a written social contract that worked for a long time, especially because it had rules like Truth in Advertising laws and followed ethics boundaries like brand contamination by association with criminals and liars. Targeted advertising is and was a mistake. Ad networks believing private data was their new playground and revenue gold mine was a mistake. Neither of those, I think fit the old social contracts about ad-subsidized content, and I think all we can do is send a message that both of them break the spirit of the contract and it is past time for a change/fix.

But that's also maybe just me and a personal crusade at this point. I don't see a lot of people going to the sort of privacy minded extremes I have and also still not install an actual ad blocker. But that's how I'm trying to square the ethics dilemma of appreciating ad-subsidized content, but also understanding that the internet is no longer safe without some sort of privacy-minded safeguards that companies like Admiral and Google are going around and calling "ad blocking", because it is starting to interfere with their real, more lucrative, and much more evil business models.