I'm in the same boat. I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
> I never see ads anywhere (and not just on the web: I never watch regular TV (I don't even have a TV), never listen to ads-supported radio stations, etc.)
Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
Have you filled a car with gas any time in the last ~5 years? The pumps around here (New England, USA) start playing ads with sound once you start pumping fuel. It's an absolute delight when your pump and the pump on the other side of your island are playing different ads with different audio or the same ad with the audio just out of sync.
Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button. Occasionally, none of them are, and rarely does anyone else seem to even try to mute their pump.
Pumping gas became pretty infrequent for me once I got a plug in hybrid, but when the closest gas station near me first started playing an ad my immediate reaction was to spam all of the side buttons on the screen until I found the one that muted it. Sweet quiet...
I rarely see these any more (USA, not a small town). Could be the set of gas stations I visit doesn’t have them, but I do remember them being popular for a while. Now I haven’t seen one in a very long time.
This is one of the top things pushing me to an EV, so I can charge at home and be done with gas stations. As EVs get more market share, these intrusive ads will only get worse.
While being recorded from 6 different angles while standing next to your vehicle with a license plate on it?
You get arrested. That’s what happens.
Kiosk makers have already thought of all of these possibilities. There isn’t a nicely exposed speaker. It’s behind a metal plate with tiny holes in it.
Maybe cops are different where you live, but here in Seattle, I cannot imagine a crime so trivial as "someone broke the speaker on a gas pump" ever rising high enough on the SPD priority list for anyone to lift a finger about it, no matter how well-documented it may have been.
It would not surprise me to hear that someone had committed a crime of that scale while being watched by an SPD officer and still gotten away with it.
At one point I was so infuriated that I would feel for the speaker and punch the pump so hard it would knock the speaker out of place (many pumps flimsy plastic.) I did that as many times as I could until the service company started gluing them in better. So I upped and ante by ripping open the front of the pump and tear the speaker out with my bear hands and smash it. Did that a bunch of times until the volumes were turned down.
> Usually, one of the soft buttons on the left or right edge of the screen is a secret mute button
I found out that's the help button and sometimes a clerk will come out and ask what I need help with and I tell that it stops the annoying noise coming from the pump.
I’m reminded of the film Falling Down but I’ve given you an Internet point (upvote) for fighting the good fight. If good people do nothing, evil will triumph. In Ireland, we don’t (yet?) have such devilish instruments of torture but I imagine my cortisol levels would be through the roof if I had to deal with them.
Get a bicycle and learn the car free routes into town and to your work. Nobody puts up adverts on cycle paths. It isn't against the law, it just makes no commercial sense to do so.
By making the bicycle however you get about, you cut down on seeing ads.
It depends on where you live, however, I noted my 'ad free life' whilst in London. I went from the usual commute on trains and tubes with the odd bus thrown in for good measure to just riding my bicycle along the Thames. I went from seeing everything with adverts to seeing everything with herons, gulls, squirrels, trees and flowers. Rather than being tuned in to the latest junk to buy, I became tuned in to the ever changing seasons and what was in blossom.
Incidentally almost all my trips are already by bicycle, with on foot and with public transport numbers 2 and 3. Unfortunately, since almost everybody uses these modes of transportation here, there actually are ads everywhere still.
(Besides the idea of me having to adjust my route to -for now- not see ads being somewhat offensive to me too.)
> Ads in public places, bus stops, etc. are kinda hard to avoid unfortunately.
These are very different - and largely interesting to me in their colorfulness and often whimsy. (The cities around here are otherwise NOT visually interesting).
This is something that web sites have always had at their disposal: use static locally-hosted images as ads and respect my screen real-estate, don't try to track me with 20-200 trackers, and I WILL allow them (and do). I will even allow some animation if it respects my bandwidth.
But no, very few web sites feel satisfied with this so multiple ad blockers they get. A few sites do small static image ads. I don't block these and even frequently follow their links.
In France I have yet to go to a waiting room with a TV with the sound on; I think people would get upset.
I went once to a dentist with a TV above my head (sound off); I refused to sit in the chair until it was turned off. The assistant sighed and said "everybody asks the same thing, I wonder why we installed this".
You do also get used to it. Banner blindness is absolutely a thing (and something that still trips me up where I miss the most important information on a page, despite using adblock most of the time)
Never mind the dozens of pop-up ads and banners on the site. Random words in the article turn into ads that popup while you're scrolling. And it's easy to accidentally click one because there's more pixels covered by ads than not.
I've been telling her to get an adblocker for years because she, like you, feels like she doesn't need one. But that article last night made her rethink her stance on ads.
For me, I don't mind advertisements. I scroll Instagram a few times a week and there are ads there. I get more ads than actual posts. They're easy enough to ignore. And honestly, sometimes they're interesting.
It's when the ads disrupt my browsing session that pisses me off. If sites didn't have shitty ads that cover your screen and just get in the way, I wouldn't have an adblocker.
I also use adblocker to get rid of shitty non-ad pop-ups, like "you have to install our shitty mobile app to use this site!" Yeah, fuck that. Ublock origin zaps it away.
Equally life-changing would be to keep the ads blocked, and visit the “Buy it for life” subreddit, which has recommendations for the best products and services that will last you a lifetime.
If you really needed those things, you would have thought of getting them on your own time. Being tempted into it is consumerism and kinda why we're in this mess
How people put up with ads is a complete mystery.