I’d just like to point out that the shadiest of behaviors in the context of digital advertising are logically ethical if you grant the premise that charging for data copies ever is ethical.
(Charging per hour to create or manage data is entirely different as that is equivalent to charging to build furniture or the like. Also privacy rights are not intellectual property law.)
Essentially, logically, you are either a hardcore intellectual property law abolitionist like myself, or you are in favor of commoditizing and privatizing every single bit. If at any point you say with regard to profit seeking shenanigans “that’s going too far” you’ve become logically inconsistent, cherry picking, and hypocritical because “muh income” is a fallacious argument you’ve already accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy
Either every piece of data ever (including every individual elemental digit, letter, bit, concept, shade, or symbol) should be exposed (to protect profits) and someone’s property, or it should all be confidential (the opposite of open to perpetual “fraud” inspection) and free (as in speech and beer) where the concept of “owning” a piece of data is a contradiction in terms in the same way now that the idea of owning a letter is.
Logically, you really have to pick one. But of course humans are free to be illogical and what we have here as a result is in essence a religious conflict with an infinite range of denominations.
As an IPL abolitionist, I adblock on principal first, safety second, and mental health third.
That third one is really important and rarely if ever mentioned. Neurologically and psychologically you can’t actually disregard an ad. It gets filed and processed by your brain regardless of your conscious will. You must first see something to choose to disregard it, and by then for some brain processes it’s already too late.
(Don’t think of an elephant right now. See? Too late.)
The cumulative impact of these unwanted intrusions is harmful to cognition in my opinion. You start getting false impressions about ratios and popularity of certain concepts and new defaults form in your mind that aren’t actually majority positions. These false positions are crafted expressly to open you to further manipulation.
The preferable situation is to it impossible to own any abstraction. You may take credit for discovering or inventing it, but you don’t ever get to own it. That is, the selling of copies or access is legal but it’s also perfectly legal for the buyer to in turn sell copies as well. This would put everything in the public domain that isn’t private, like medical records and your personal stuff. Restricting the sharing that data would be handled case by case from other directions on other grounds, such as privacy violations not profit or quasi-property protections.
Any effort that literally can’t or won’t exist without the the current IPL system profit motive, wouldn’t or couldn’t, and that would be the price we pay for the utility gained on the other end of everyone being able to remix everything and all software and art and the like being collaborative.
