VPNs, Battery Life, Stripping Ads & Ethical Quandary

VPNs and Battery Life

Based on this great tip, I’ve been testing running Express VPN to eliminate ads. It works wonderfully!

My question for those with knowledge of the matter is, “How much impact does running a VPN have on battery life (MBP, iPad, and iPhone)?” I’m considering running Express VPN most of the time provided it does not have a material impact on battery life.

Ethical Quandary

My second question concerns an ethical quandary. How do I avoid what I consider to be overly intrusive ads that interfere with my ability to read articles, while not “stealing” information given that authors and publishers have a right to be paid for their material? In law, the standard of “reasonable” is often employed. How can such a subjective standard be applied to what is “reasonable” in accepting ads?


Thoughts?

For me ads themseleves are not an issue, but I take extreme exception to having my personal life surveilled and tracked by adtech companies that feel entitled to my personal data. I wish more sites would look into static ads like on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball or offer an ad free paid subscription.

As far as the VPN battery life, I run a VPN on all my devices 24/7/365 and haven’t noticed an impact.

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I would expect zero battery impact, since all a VPN is - essentially - is a set of directions to send all existing Internet traffic to a different IP address.

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@liminal, @webwalrus, thanks for the information on the battery use. That is encouraging!

I don’t have an issue with the concept of ads in content. I do have issue with the execution of some ads. Full-page overlays are probably the worst, but the ones that make me angry are the ones embedded in the content flow that constantly reload and change size meaning the content jumps around when you’re trying to read it.

I guess for me the ethical equation is this: If you have a shred of respect for me, the reader, in the way you execute ads, then I will respect the value of your content and not block them.

I don’t actually run any form of ad blocking — I tried several over the years and they all had downsides that annoyed me — but I will absolutely abandon content, and occasionally whole sites, that abuse my respect equation.

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To the second part of your posting …

Pondering the ethical or legal implications of blocking ads seems to be taking altruism in the wrong direction. Depriving a Website of income from click-bait ads is not a choice to harm the authors, it is a choice to sidestep their approach to monetize content delivery. The authors have no right to be paid for their material, but they have an exclusive right by copyright to seek means to be paid for their material. The two phrasings are not the same. As they seek ways to monetize their content, Website authors have to be aware and thereby live with the consequences of the fact that certain approaches can be circumvented. You cannot hold yourself responsible for making up the shortfall as you sidestep their approach, nor can you believe that you do any malicious harm by sidestepping their choice. As for what is reasonable in the law to require you to have to accept ads, invert this. What is defined in law that requires you to accept Website ads? Nothing, you say?? Well, then good. You have your answer.

In summary, the standing is that you are permitted to block ads and Website authors are permitted to set up ways restrict what you see if you have an ad-blocker enabled. It is a happy co-existence that helps keep the once deeply-brewed Catholics (like me) from going on unnecessary guilt trips.

Also, as for “stealing” the content, you may be confusing the act of violating copyright restrictions from the simple act of removing junk from content so that you can read the content.


JJW

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“Internet advertising” is a big bucket with many approaches inside. Some advertising is inevitable, given the world, and is nothing new. Given the plunge in what digital ad companies pay compared to the good old days 20 years ago, the argument could be made that it’s foolish to tie your site’s existence to such a fickle system. But I digress.

Some advertising is very intrusive, making reading an article all but impossible without interruptions every other paragraph, often with big images. Not to mention other sites with autoplaying videos that have little or nothing to do with what you clicked for.

Finally, embedded advertising is very much a vector for malware. Actual dangerous executables, that is, not just cross-site tracking and predatory targeting.

All of the above makes claims of the necessity of not blocking advertising very, very difficult to follow along with.

I get not wanting to put your work online for free. There should be other mechanisms for renumeration that don’t require what is currently being pushed on the average person. It’s a mess.

Of course at the rate things are going, the web and search engines will soon be filled with AI slop to the point that we’ll look back on the popup windows and banner ads of yore with nostalgia, wondering who wound up being the last of the human bloggers.

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I argue that ads are stealing resources from me not only on my Mac but cognitively. They are intrusive and cause interruptions which takes time to recover from. I used a paper from Datamation (I think) that worked out the mental cost of various types of interruptions. The worst being off-project interrptions which were estimated as needing 20 minutes recovery time to get back to the point one was at before hand; all ads are in my grumpy opinion off project. Esterling was the author of the paper I seem to recall. (Can’t for the moment find my old spreadsheet that included these costs and applied them to software development man-hour estimates.)

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I think even an original iPhone has enough CPU to perform traffic encryption so fast that the main battery life culprits will still be the screen and baseband radio access by several orders of magnitude.

Perhaps it’s worth looking at this from another angle.

Many ad networks operate on a “pay per click” model, where the publisher is not paid unless you click the ad. In that situation, do you feel morally obligated to click so that the writer gets paid?

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Interesting question. I don’t recall ever clicking on an ad, so no. Because I don’t plan to start now.

Not a bad idea but I would probably click and not look, I also never inhale. :rofl:

When I click on YouTube videos, I immediately hit mute until I can click on “Skip Ad.” I also mute TV commercials and I record all sporting events so I can blissfully fast-forward past all the commercials. That said, at least clicking on the ad gets the writer paid, so at least I’m “doing my part.” Thanks for the suggestion, though it would still interrupt my reading flow.

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I didn’t mean to imply you should begin clicking on ads. I only meant to compare your/mine/our default behavior of not clicking ads to blocking them. Both scenarios mean the same thing to the publisher: no payment. Such is life in the internet publishing world. :woman_shrugging:t2:

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This is a concern of mine as well. I’m hoping that publishers have learned, or are learning, their lessons and will not use AI to generate their content, looking at you CNET.

But, how many bloggers and others will be publishing AI slop? I’m thinking of writing an article titled: “Losing Individuality: The Androgyny of AI Writing” because, among other things, AI-written articles lack the unique characteristics—tone, style, worldview, and personality—that make writing distinctly human, distinctly “that person.”

Speaking of AI slop: :slightly_smiling_face:

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:+1:t2:

20 characters ….

I’m going to put a different spin on the battery life issue (or perhaps non-issue).

  • A VPN routes all traffic through the VPN server/service. This has no energy impact.
  • When using a VPN, all data is encrypted. The encryption of outgoing data and decryption of incoming data does consume power and slows things down, but with modern processors the impact is minimal, and hardly likely to be noticed.
  • If the VPN blocks advertising traffic, that means less data transferred, less time spent writing to the screen, and less scrolling since screen content is much smaller. All of these will save power.

I’d say that for heavy web browsing, using that VPN will be a net increase in battery life. And if your internet use is metered, you might even save money.

I’ll even throw in a twist on the ethics issues. While it doesn’t work this way, supposing your web browser requested* all the advertising data but just didn’t display it. Would that be ethical? Is that no different than buying a newspaper and throwing out the advertising sections without looking at them? In either case the website/newspaper gets paid for delivering the advertising.

*The way HTTP works is that the client (you) requests all data from the server (the web site), so you get the advertising because you requested it. An ad blocker blocks the requests so the advertising is not delivered and the website gets no credit.

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If the people who think displaying ads in the middle of article that I am reading is okay, I believe its okay to block them.

This is also one of the reasons I use Goodlinks to read long form articles.

Although most web browsing is encrypted as well these days. So depending on your Internet traffic, it might not be that much of an additional load for the stuff that would not otherwise be encrypted.

No, but if the ad is at least somewhat inline with the text and not doing obnoxious things to my browser window I think it’s reasonable for me to let the ads show up.

The implied agreement with the publisher in that case is that they’ll let me read/view whatever content they have, and in return I’ll see the ad. Enough people seeing the ad will result in some percentage of people liking what they see (and thus clicking).

It’s kind of like those sample carts at the big box stores. They have a plate of taquitos, and when you take one the lady behind the cart says something like “these are (whatever brand) taquitos. They cook in the oven in 8 minutes, great for game day or when your kids have unexpected company for dinner. These are $9.98 in the freezer right next to me.” I get my free taquito, I hear the ad. If I’m not willing to listen to 10 seconds of the lady talking, I avoid the taquito cart - but the impression frequency results in plenty of people taking home a box of taquitos, so it works well for the lady at the cart. :smiley:

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  1. Battery Life: I can’t think of a reason that it would cause more resources to be devoted to any additional computation, and thus extra electrons. One component it generally will affect though is your internet connection speed. Depending on the VPN/server I connect to, there can be a small or drastic reduction in speed, according to Ookla’s Speedtest. I ran a test right now, and while I’m getting 932 down/926 up without VPN, NordVPN chose it’s preferred “best” server and Speedtest reported back 905 down/502 up. Most often I connect in the 400-600 range through VPN, but that varies (I’m actually surprised to see the 905 down).
  2. I see no quandary whatsoever with blocking ads. Is it unethical to change the channel, turn down the volume, fast forward, or step out of the room when a commercial is on TV? Of course not. How about flip the page past the ads in the newspaper or magazine? Same idea, I figure. An automated process for doing the same is just a matter of convenience, like the way my dad would tell me to get up and change the channel when a commercial came on.

A lot of us were early ad-blockers!

I suspect that the ethics boils down to contracts, implicit and explicit. I mean ethics and not law.

No-one is obliged to publish or share anything online. They might have many different reasons and motivations for doing so, part of which might be the reasonable expectation that it will help them to “pay for their shoes”.

Similarly, no-one is obliged to read or consume anything online. Again their reasons and motivations for doing so probably include an expectation that they won’t be directly harmed (e.g. have all their money stolen) as a result.

In there somewhere is the kind of mutual obligation that is an implicit or explicit contract. The terms should be reasonably clear so both sides can make an informed decision whether to participate. It’s when the terms are NOT clear, or there are different assumptions on each side, that it becomes unpleasant. If I’m providing content paid for by tracking you, amassing your data and selling it to advertisers, or by charging people so that their advert is the most prominent thing on the page, and you stop me doing that, you are effectively stealing content. If I am taking your data or attention when I haven’t even asked permission or told you that’s the cost of this content, then I am exploiting you.

Like everyone, I compromise on all this, all over the place. Life is too short to read all the terms and conditions. I default to blocking tracking, especially 3rd party. I profoundly wish that developers and content providers would not just assume that they can take what they want: my expectation as a consumer is that you should provide me something so compelling that I will willingly pay a fair price for it or choose not to do so. I don’t use an ad-blocker but there are lots of services (Facebook, X etc.) that I won’t touch with a bargepole and want nothing to do with and there’s no content compelling enough to make me put up with intrusive advertising. My YouTube usage has dropped drastically as a result, but life is too short to spend time with people loudly shilling for things I don’t want or need.