Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior, not piracy at all.

Unless you’re giving food and shelter to every Jehovah’s Witness that comes to your home, then you’re the insane one.

if you’re arguing this, it’s probably already vanishingly rare for you to be clicking on ads or looking anything more than a glance at them. and on my work device, where i didn’t install adblockers as an experiment, i don’t recall ever seeing ads that ship malware, and i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device.

if by malware you mean how viewing ads slows down your machine, that what people say of Denuvo.

(not sure what you meant by the jehovah’s witnesses part. are they actually starving?)

You don’t have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.

It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.

The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?

Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.

If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I’m financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.

Full stop.

these are as rare as non-tracking ads, and my approaches of<1. i don’t use my web browser much on mobile (that distance probably fries my eyes anyways) 2. i use µBO and whitelist sites on my normal computer>probably helps me avoid that anyways