Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.
I worked on something like this (but at a very much lower scale, of course) and it's fun at first but then I realized that my whole job was making users experience worst and I was miserable for as long as I had that job. I swore not to work on anything advertising-related ever again.
Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.
If ads are unscrupulous, or if the company is doing shady things otherwise, then yes - bad.
But there is no moral argument against making sure that decent ads work with a free product, or when ads are part of any product wherein the social contract is to that expectation.
Facebook has ads, just like CNN and Cosmopolitan, that's normal, ethical, and within the expectations for user's experience. Again, shady things notwithstanding.
In 2018, people can pay or see ads, or a combination of both, there is no pragmatic way around this, and too many decent products depend upon ads for their existence, that's where we are until someone comes up with something better.
I disagree, and you should too. This shit is bad for us. Advertising is a tool. That tool has been abused to the point where the societally responsible choice is to take that tool away. As society is capitally captured, the remaining option is for the implementors to refuse to do it. (Not that I am under any illusion that those implementors will; we, as a profession, think the bad shit we facilitate isn't our problem. Sigh.)
You are correct in the idea that there are "decent ads"; they are not in any meaningful fraction, however, web-served ads. If you're familiar with the theory and the development of advertisement, you'll notice that what you won't see on the web in meaningful quantities are things like brand-anchoring advertisements ("brought to you by"), which I tend to think actually provide societal benefits in the way they are deployed; they provide some level of community participation on the part of the advertiser and they anchor the advertiser in the same firmament of society as the person receiving the advertisement.
What we instead have, and will continue to have and this is why advertising on the Web--as an aside, you can find oases of ethical advertising in places like podcasts, it'd be nice if the rest of the Web was like that!--is profoundly toxic and bad and should be killed, is an unending torrent of calls to action carefully designed and split-tested to claw maximal real estate inside the receiver's head. They amount to psychological assault. It's screaming at the receiver and for many people in the industrialized world the background radiation of this kind of advertisement starts when they wake up and continues until they go to sleep. And I think it's no stretch to assert that that's bad for the health of individuals exposed to them and it's pretty obviously, at Facebook scales and with Facebook morals, bad for society as a whole.
And yes, some people are fortunate enough to have the technical capability and the platform choice to escape some or even most of it. But choosing to shrug and blather about how you're happy to make this worse is a really bad look.
> Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.
This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.
> So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?
More like "ads are bad" means that your free product with ads is also bad, just as "cyanide is bad" makes your free product laced with cyanide bad.
> The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative externalities.
The problem is that bad ads show up basically everywhere. Sure, 99% of the ads on news websites can't infect me with malware, but there's that one that Google hasn't gotten around to banning yet that is running on every website…and even if this wasn't true, basically 100% of them track me or make my web browsing experience slower.
In and of itself? No, certainly not. Historically, however, advertisements have been a few things that matter. They've been passive--the level of attention a print advertisement is able to demand is constrained. Or they've been supportive--your "show X is brought to you by Y!" advertisements, which historically tended to have some kind of anchoring into the community surrounding the content or service being consumed.
They're not anymore. To the first, advertisements are designed, by the platform, to for maximal attractiveness (newspapers of prior eras spent much less effort blending content and advertisement and it wasn't until about the year 2000 where loudness-compression made television advertisements blow out your speakers). To the second, these advertisements tend strongly--not always, don't but-for me, but tend strongly--to be disassociated from the community. Having some startup or multinational demand your attention for this-or-that doesn't tie back into your community, there isn't even a local aspect to the business to fall back on. It's just...voices, yelling at you for your attention and your money. That's just not good for us.
I both pay for content (I was happy to sign up for YouTube Red, for example) and aggressively use ad-blocking and the difference on my mental well-being when I don't have access to my accounts, or when somebody insists on watching television and having it scream at me about how I must buy this thing, is noticeable.
This shit is bad for us. We as technologists should not perpetuate it.
I had a job where I had to reverse engineer broker API's. A few brokers sent us warning letters since it's technically legal but brokers obviously hate it.
That was the best cat-and-mouse game. We had a revolving door of proxies that we would use to hit their endpoints so they couldn't catch us. So much fun.
In what context was this done/could you provide more details (without giving away any information that you don't care to share)? Sounds like something I would enjoy doing as well!
Although I can say that most financial institutions are not nearly as scrupulous in checking their systems as you would expect.
When I would work my way through their auth layer, I'd be sending them like 500 login requests every hour. They never contacted the account I used, so I have to assume they weren't checking for abnormalities like that.
The only time I really fucked up was when I tried to do that with a particular broker in Singapore. Singaporean companies have their shit _locked down_. I spent one hour debugging one of their endpoints, and it let off so many alarms that the CTO of their company was woken up in the middle of the night.
I respect the need to abide by an NDA, and I assumed something along those lines would be the case. Thanks for the tidbits nonetheless! The intersection between finance and tech at the highest levels like that has always intrigued me.
Work on anti-user stuff in the day job, and outside of work, participate (under an alternate identity/pseudonym) in the community efforts to circumvent it --- that might be one way to feel less bad about yourself, although in a weird "solving the problems you created" way.
Not wanting to turn into a Nazi apologist but to play devil's advocate for a minute, that very same research put people in space as well as creating our current communications infrastructure.
