First the Music industry was running a cartel and then got exactly zero sympathy when piracy took off. A few years latter it was the movie industry bleating, DVD's region codes and their policy of suing kids so their parents paid off. The whole world started making charity appeals for the poor movie industry. Wait sorry I've got that wrong. They all went "they're a bunch of rich &%#@$ who ripping us off" and ignored them. Despite huge lobbying the industry got short shrift from most governments.

I've not used uber and rarely taxi's, this is slightly different as there's government regulation/tax involved in this one. But only last week I was cut up by a taxi trying to pull out across 3 lanes to a dedicated right turn lane that was already full. He forced 2 lanes to emergency stop then blocked the third. Nice. I'm not even a customer and I'm pissed off. They wonder why they don't get sympathy? Last time I did need one he was trying to surreptitiously use a gps on his knee. I had to "I know where I'm going keep your eye on the road." The taxi licence didn't exactly look like him, they never do. If there was an app that rated taxi drivers the way uber does most would be rated lower than pond life.

(Image courtesy of the internet)

Now its the turn of the online Advertising industry to start whinging. The online add industry's behavior has been utterly continence free. They love the notoriously security flawed flash platform. The online advertisers accept malware - always have, coupled with their profiling of users, the malware publishers can target vulnerable users/pcs.

The Add industry is responsible for massive slowdowns in the net, you click a link it loads a 3rd party site, then jumps you to the target site. Then loads buggy flash plugins to flash crap at you. What's not to like? I'm on 3g at the moment and its expensive. I don't want to watch auto-run movies of plastic people and their puppies. I used to run ghostery and Add Block Plus. But am currently using an open source one called ublock.

Now here's where it gets complicated. I delete cookies on exit and don't run flash by default - these were all features of old Opera Browser. fortunately back in Vivaldi! The net result is I've had to stop reading the Guardian. I do sympathize with the Guardian the're add funded, but this is what their site looks like: 

Normally I zoom in, and my browser remembers that (remembers locally on this PC not using a cross site tracking cookie) this has the effect of rendering the page un-readable. Even if I paid the guardian money this would not go away. Not much incentive for me to pay. They can remove those banners only by tracking me. Either by login or cookie (which I will delete). Also they'ed probably share my preference to pay with "associates" who'd then find other ways to nag me.

Not much incentive to pay is it? I block your intrusive technologies, you detect the lack of feed back from affiliates you then put up appeals all over the screen asking me to give you my personal details, and bank and money so you can set a system to uniquely identify me so the banners don't appear? Not making me uniquely identifiable was part why I did it in the first place. Its a shame, I'm now reading the independent instead. Someone needs to fund the Guardian, its one of the worlds most important newspapers keeps people honest. However they want to share my visits with some of the worlds most intrusive bastards including google. A company that's pretty much single single-handedly responsible for their financial problems).

My 2 cents worth: A marketing fool and his money are easily parted, its the industries fault for becoming too good at targeting individuals, tracking them and feeding their statistics back to the people who gave them the money. If you see an add they know, if you click it they know (and usually charge per click). The only fix i can see for this it to make the add networks trackers go dark. Using add blockers, and script blockers. Replacing them with click fraud robots. Click fraud is falsely clicking adverts to increase the sites profits (add networks have historically been quite tolerant of this as they get a cut too).

Can someone write me a program/plugin that will work out how much data I've got left and randomly browse deserving sites I choose and click their adds randomly? This would fuck up the add industry by double wammy. Firstly it would fill their trackers with false data. Poison the targeting well, secondly I could make the Guardian get money, but not useless click bait like "5 hamsters who look like Donald Trump" though I think that last one may have been Rob Manuel's Click Bait Robot. A Turing machine for generating click bait, now we need another Turning machine for Click Fraud.

Its your mistake not mine. If you weren't spying on me you wouldn't know I was blocking you, if you didn't know I was blocking you then you and your client could believe I was and every body wins. I don't get my internet experience Guardian gets its money and some marketing fool pays for it. As far as i can tell my click fraud robot is the only way forward.

EDIT: It turns out most of the Advertisers are being fleeced anyway http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/ - fascinating article.