Does this also include annoying texts, because EE are particularly great at them.
EE plans to block annoying ads on mobile network
EE may have a pretty pathetic customer service record, but the company is hoping to cheer up its 27-million-strong subscriber base by potentially allowing them to block ads on their mobile phones. At present, the carrier is mulling a proposal to bring in network-level blocking tools for its customers. “We're at the beginning …
COMMENTS
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Monday 23rd November 2015 14:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Eh?
Quote
Swantee told the Telegraph: "Not all ads are bad. When a business gets it right, it's appreciated and sparks a connection. But when it's intrusive or crass it can drive people crazy." ®
IMHO, ALL, repeat ALL adverdising is BAD. It is an intrusion that I did not ask dow. I never buy anything that I have seen advertised on TV or heard on Radio.
If I am looking to buy a particular item then I might look at ads for various types of that item but that is part of normal research that you should do before opening your wallet.
Once upon a time I did buy stuff after seeing adverts. Then I spent 18 months working for an Ad company. boy, were my eyes opened.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 17:43 GMT Martin Summers
Re: Eh?
The last thing you should do is look at ads if you're doing your research on something. Seems you play right into the hands of those 'bad'advertising people.
Their job is to get you to buy product. Ignore it if you don't like it, the ad was never designed for you in the first place in that instance. Which is why personalisation/targeting is not the devil people make it out to be.
Ads have their place but intrusive ones do not. There is a difference that a rational person can discern. And besides if it were not for adverts, the Reg would not exist.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 18:04 GMT User McUser
Re: Eh?
Which is why personalisation/targeting is not the devil people make it out to be.
No, it's just worthless. Usually I see a ton of "targeted" ads for things I've already bought - like when I bought a cordless screwdriver I started seeing ads for cordless screwdrivers. However yesterday I had something altogether new happen.
I'm on Newegg.com buying an SSD and some RAM to upgrade my grandmother's laptop. The SSD and RAM are *in my cart* and I am *in the process of checking out.*
NewEgg's site is running a little slow so I open my email in another window while I wait. Along side my email is an ad - an ad for NewEgg to be precise. An ad featuring the *exact two items that are already in my cart.*
So thanks targeted advertising for trying to sell me something *while I was already in the process of buying it.* That was super useful.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 21:30 GMT John H Woods
Re: Eh?
"No, it's just worthless. Usually I see a ton of "targeted" ads for things I've already bought" --- User McUser
Top Tip -- browse for under, beach and nightwear --- even better, leave some items 'saved for later' in various shopping carts to cheer up your browsing experience for a few days.
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Tuesday 24th November 2015 00:56 GMT Peter X
Re: It's not about the customer
Exactly this. It's the same as when the service providers were complaining about BBC iPlayer and this like using too much bandwidth, basically trying to frame it so they can charge people on both ends of the wire*.
It should be illegal to tamper with content over the wire*.
* you know what I mean! :D
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Monday 23rd November 2015 15:16 GMT msknight
This is potentially going to be insane
The big players can afford to program their own advertising platforms which the likes of U-Block, erc. can't block (faceache being one) in the mean time, the small players won't be able to do this, so will lose their small but vital revenue stream.
Way to go EE. Kill the little guy.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 15:18 GMT tiggity
no good ads on mobile
My web use is normally on desktop / laptop with various ad scripts / domains disabled via browser addons (or nobbled at hosts level in some cases)
So a salutory experience a few days ago when I needed to quickly look something up online on my mobile when out and about (not helped by a poor signal area) & experienced the full horror of ads on mobile with slow page loading, content obscured by popups, page layout jiggling about as various junk loaded and page layout changed, clicks getting hijacked due to layout change.
From that experience, in the mobile space, with slow downlaod speed, I would say no such thing as a good ad
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Monday 23rd November 2015 16:14 GMT Paul
I find this painfully ironic. I recently bought and signed up to their mobile broadband service special deal.
Immediately my Osprey Mini started receiving premium text messages from T-Zones, run by IMI Mobile, with chart updates regularly, at 17p per message!
I called up EE and they failed to stop them. Eventually I tracked down the 3030 number to IMI Mobile and demanded they stop - they ignored the "STOP ALL" message I sent.
I then called EE again and they said they would block the messages, but I would have to wait a while before they could refund the charges.
So on this basis I would say EE are in cahoots with the text spammers.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 17:08 GMT xj650t
Oh yes
It'll be all about the EE definition of a bad or annoying adverts.
And no, I'm sure EE won't inject their own or preferential partners adverts instead.
Bigger questions would be the legality of the ISP replacing legitimate adverts with white space, not gonna make a lot of website owners happy that's for sure.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 20:07 GMT John Tserkezis
"Swantee told the Telegraph: "Not all ads are bad."
Sure, all ads are bad - except the ones that paid EE to be "unblocked".
That's a good deal, when you "look" like you're doing right by your consmers, but are making money at the same time.
Till your users find out what's going on, that is.
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Monday 23rd November 2015 20:59 GMT David 132
As an aside...
I built a new PC yesterday. As I hadn't yet installed Firefox+UBlock, but needed to look something up, I clicked the little blue e icon.
Big mistake.
I had forgotten what a shitshow the Web is without script/ad/iframe blocking - thinking about it, it must be 10 years since I last browsed without block-tools installed. Popups, autoplaying videos, and - bonus - HTML5 video/animation that, as far as I can tell, IE has no way of stopping. (the "play animations in webpages / play sounds in webpages" checkbox options appear to be a sick joke from the days of embedded .GIFs and .WAVs).
And I'd only been searching for innocuous technical content. I shudder to think how much worse it would have been if I'd been doing my usual game of where's-the-best-torrent-site-now.
Short version: remember, there are millions and millions of IE users out there. To them, that is what the web looks like.
Dammit, people, we the technically savvy owe it to them to get them onto a decent user-centric browser ASAP. It's practically a human rights issue.