Browser ethics

 Unless you use a phone to read my posts, you may see Google ads. I pretty much allow Google to add ads to my content as a matter of principle. I only get a few cents when someone clicks on an ad and this happens only once every several months. The principle that motivates this behavior is the belief that my time and the money I pay for server space is worth something even when this something is close to nothing.

I encountered a recent post about how to disable the ad system in the Brave browser. I consider this and other easy to implement ways to block ads on other browsers as unethical. There is a certain reality that many social services collect your personal information and use this information to target you with ads and other content. These ads are the basis for the many free services and free content we all see online. While the collection of personal information is an important issue, the ethical response is not to block the ads that largely fund the Internet.

To be fair, I do block third party ads. These are ads that collect information from sites you have visited, but are not immediately viewing. With third party cookies the site that benefits is not the site that was involved in the collection of information. Blocking third party rather than first party cookies, allows sites to benefit only when you are viewing the site associated with the ads.

Brave has what I consider a better system. If you opt in to the ads from Brave, the ads are not based on sending information via cookies. The ads are less personalized, but the companies paying to have their ads displayed understand this (consider ads on television or in magazines as a comparison). If you allow these ads, you can also allow Brave to compensate sites that have registered with Brave when you spend time on these sites. Brave supports itself, but taking a cut of the ad revenue. So, as far as what I mean by ethical behavior, Brave offers a revenue model that compensates content creators and service providers without relying on the collection of personal information. This makes sense to me.

if this interests you, Brave is built on chromium the same underlying code base used for the Chrome browser. The common base allows the use of Chrome extensions on the Brave browser which so many of us use. Brave does use a cryptocurrency called BAT to bring together content creators, content consumers, and ad companies. This seems to bother some (see the link at the beginning of this post), but it allows a micropayment system and I don't really need to worry about the method used.