TL;DR: found this ad company that seems to have the right ideas and values compatible with the community here. Posting for feedback on whether to go deeper in the topic.

A while back I came across EthicalAds which, in my undestanding at the time, used to show ads based strictly on the site’s content, i.e. it used no information about the user whatsoever. I just looked at the EthicalAds site again today and noticed two things: they now brand themselves as ads targeted to developers, and they use geolocation information for showing the ads.

I’m interested in this topic because of my more general interest in the growth of federated social media and the understanding that servers cost money. I’ll express here my current take on the subject, and if there is enough interest I’ll be compiling more information on the subject.

Ads are the most commonly recognized way of monetizing content that is free to access, including much (most?) social media today. The main perceived issues with ads are tracking (by which I mean the collecting of identifiable information about the user) and visual polution. The matter of visual polution (including information overload) works on a spectrum, as any who went through the pop-up age of the internet must admit. Where to place ads is something that can be managed by a site’s admin, even under the constraint that less convenient locations (from a content consumer perspective) may be better monetized. If ads are poorly placed, I’ll be anoyed when trying to get to the content I’m looking for, but that’s really the extent of my issue. All in all, visual pollution seems simple to consider and deal with.

Tracking, on the other hand, seems like a whole different beast. The first important difference is lack of transparency: it’s hard to know what data is being collected, when, for what purpose, how it’s being processed, as well as tangible and potential impact of the use of this data. The impact of my data being collected is so indirect to me, that my worry about it feels irrational at times. Yet I’m convinced enough that data can be turned to power, and the way this power is centralized today makes me uncomfortable.

If visual pollution can be handled by the platform, the tracking issue is where EthicalAds might come in. EthicalAds collects location information about the user, but not much else that I could identify. So here we have a first issue of determining with certainty that no more information is being collected. On their pricing for publishing ads, they have two regions:

• US, Canada
• UK, W. EU, Australia, New Zealand This suggests the location information collected is not necessarily sufficient to pinpoint any user’s location, again without certainty on the matter.

Furthermore, EthicalAds has a minimum ad buy of $1000.00, which ads up to at least 166.000 ad impressions (at $6,00 for 1000 ad impressions as the most expensive available). The large volume of ads distributed over large regions without granularity seems conducive to maintaining audience privacy.

There is also the matter that they use Machine Learning on contracting sites’ content in order to choose which ads to show. With my relatively shallow understanding of ML I am not very worried about this point, but the existence of what may amount to a black box consuming user information seems worth pointing out.

Based on all of the above, I am personally mostly comfortable with seeing EthicalAds used for financing proper FOSS and federated projects. I would, however, like others’ opinions on the topic (both from technical expertise different from mine as well as just the perspective of others).

As a last note, EthicalAds is a company, which I cannot say for sure whether is for profit. Also, I have no affiliation with them and would be glad to learn about competing alternatives.