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shreyasminocha / shady-hosts

👀 List of ad/tracking servers.
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ethicalads.io #3

Open domdfcoding opened 3 years ago

domdfcoding commented 3 years ago

Hi,

Can you tell me why "server.ethicalads.io" is marked as shady? EthicalAds is the privacy-focused ad network from the folks at ReadTheDocs.

shreyasminocha commented 3 years ago

Thanks for asking. I looked up their "advertising vision":

Most ad networks have databases of user data […]

At EthicalAds, we don't use these techniques.

So far so good.

Instead, we target based solely upon:

  • Details of the page where the advertisement is shown including:
    • The name and keywords associated with the publisher's content
    • Content of the page (eg. H1, title, etc.)

This is also, in my opinion, alright.

  • Whether the page is being viewed on a mobile device
  • We allow advertisers to target ads to a list of countries or to exclude countries from their advertising.

This gives me pause.

  • […] For ads targeting the USA, we support finer geo targeting but nothing smaller than a 50 mile radius.
  • We geolocate a user's IP address when a request is made and we don't store precise locations or precise IPs for longer than a few days to detect fraud and keep our site secure.

… but this pushes me over the edge.

Still, if EthicalAds respects DNT by default, I think there's a case to be made for exclusion, but given the geolocation stuff I'm inclined to not exclude.

There's some more discussion about "ethical analytics/ads" at StevenBlack/hosts #1346 that you might be interested in.