What Is Spam
Back when Facebook was still quite new, and 95% of my "friends" were fellow students, one of them, someone I'd not spoken to for several years but with whom I went to college and felt obliged to remain "Facebook Friends", began posting adverts for a local business. I ignored them. A few weeks later the same person posted an advert for a different business, one I'd not heard of. I did what I considered to be the right thing, and messaged her, outside of Facebook, to say "Hi, this is Ash, I think your Facebook account has been hacked, I've seen two adverts supposedly from you appear on my timeline in the last fortnight." A few hours later she replied to tell me that she'd posted those adverts and was surprised (and, I guessed from the tone of her email, a bit offended) that I'd mistaken her "legitimate" posts for advertising spam sent from a hacked account.
But this is one of the biggest non-technical problems with spam - not everything is spam, to everyone.
There has been a shift over time. When I started using the internet in the 90s, all online advertising was a cardinal sin. Bandwidth was limited, and expensive, and anyone posting an advert to a newsgroup or web forum was treated with utter contempt, and with good reason. These days, most companies we refer to as 'tech companies' make most of their money from advertising, and would probably not be pleased if the majority attitude towards online advertising were to revert to its previous state. Even the 'best practice' for dealing with spam seems to have changed since those early days. Clicking the 'unsubscribe' link used to be the worst thing you could possibly do, as it tells the spammer that their email had been received and read. Now we're told to click unsubscribe, as if no advertiser has ever been caught doing anything sneaky.
Call me old-fashioned, but I personally still see online advertising the same way I did in the 90s. I use an ad-blocker in my browser, as well as a network-level ad-blocker on my router. I have never clicked an unsubscribe link, I choose instead to report all advertising emails to my ISP as spam, before blocking the sender. I don't accept IMs from unknown contacts and my phone blocks all calls with no caller ID. I don't use social media at all. My email client doesn't load remote images, meaning senders can't tell if I've received their email or not, and Javascript is disabled in my browser for all domains that I haven't explicitly whitelisted, meaning that most code in web pages designed to track my activity and serve adverts doesn't run.
There will be people who agree with my stance, and people who disagree, probably quite strongly. But whatever your opinion, the fact remains that I have been mercilessly blocking adverts for over 20 years ...and the web is still here.
