Annoying versus unethical

When I finally get to be emperor of the world, I’m going to be a tyrant. Anything that bugs me will be a crime — and, watch out, because I’m easily annoyed.

Use a cell phone near me in a restaurant and you could lose an ear. Sit behind me in a movie theater chattering away and you could end up on a chain gang. Drive way below the speed limit in the left-hand lane and you’ll be hanging upside down in a dungeon somewhere.

So I suppose it’s fortunate for you, and probably for me, that I’ll never become emperor of the world, although, as with most people, I entertain that fantasy from time to time. There are many considerations on which we should base our laws, but one individual’s annoyance threshold shouldn’t be one of them. It’s too personal and too subjective to sustain the weight of justifiable legal sanctions.

The same applies to ethics. As I’ve said so often in this space, my likes and dislikes — and yours too — aren’t determinants in deciding what’s ethical. Despite what some people would like, we need something more reasonable and more defensible, especially if we’re going to get others to buy into it.

What started this line of thinking was a reader who wrote in to ask my opinion of pop-up ads on Web sites. Aren’t these unethical, the reader wanted to know, just like spam, viruses, or denial of service attacks? After all, the ads do consume your time and resources, and they are annoying.

My immediate response was that they may be annoying, but that in and of itself doesn’t make them unethical. There are plenty of things that annoy me and you that aren’t necessarily unethical. However, as I thought about it more, I realized that I probably spend more time closing unwanted pop-up windows in the course of the day than I do deleting spam, so the subject should be worth closer examination.

I’m not talking about those windows that pop up while you’re trying to perform some online function and that tell you you’ve done something incorrectly or left a required field blank. That’s a Web design question and not necessarily an ethical one. I’m talking about advertisements that run the gamut from legitimate ads to porn and seem to continually clutter the screen while you’re trying to do something else.

After considerable thought, I’ve tentatively decided that some of these ads are skirting the edge of being unethical, others are clearly an abuse, and still others are just a part of “doing business” on the Web. A lot of it has to do with how, when, and where the ads appear.

Let me start with the most benign form of the pop-up ads: those that appear on a site you visit to enjoy the free content provided there. This can be a news site, a humor site, or any other place that provides content without charge, which you find useful in some way.

There seems to be a certain reciprocity there. You are apparently getting something of value or you simply wouldn’t visit the site. The site, on the other hand, can’t survive financially by providing free content. So it brings in the money by selling ad space. Advertisers are constantly doing whatever it takes to get their message in front of their target audience.

Consequently, we’ve seen a progression from text ads to banner ads and then to ads that jiggle and dance. Then we went to pop-up ads and finally morphed to the full-motion ads, in which distracting hordes of animals or sporty cars go racing across your screen. The hope there is that since your view of the desired content is momentarily blocked, you’ll take advantage of the few seconds to notice what the sponsor is selling.

I, too, find these annoying, but (probably because I work in the business) I understand the financial necessity of actually paying for the free content and for the Web site. But, while annoying, it’s no more annoying that those ads that punctuate the movie I want to watch on the free channel. I’d really like to see “The Eggplant that Ate Altoona” without commercial interruption — especially to better appreciate the fine nuances of the plot — but I realize that’s not going to happen.

It’s a basic equation: If you want something of value (the free content), then you’re going to have to give up something of value (your time and attention to the advertiser’s message). You have a relationship with the TV station or Web site, and each side of the relationship gets almost what it wants. You could say there was an implicit agreement between both parties for the trade-off.

The next category of pop-up ads includes those that are planted by one Web site, but don’t launch until you’ve left their site and gone to another, leading you to believe that the second site is the one serving them up to you. For example, I’ve gone to the InfoWorld site only to be confronted with an online casino ad, something I know we don’t do here. The only explanation was that it came from a site I had visited previously, but didn’t launch until I was off their site.

Now, I suppose the operators of the site responsible could claim all of the things I listed above as justification for what they do, but that would ignore the crucial point that what they’re doing is deceptive. Also, at the time I see the ad, I no longer have a relationship with the site and they would have lost all justification for interrupting whatever I’m currently doing.

It would be the same situation as if I had finally gotten sick of the ads from the “Eggplant that Ate Altoona” and switched to a movie on a premium cable channel. If the advertisers from the free channel kept forcing their ads on me, while I’m trying to watch the for-pay movie, I would feel they were doing something wrong.

The third — and clearly unethical (at least to me) — use of pop-up ads are on those sites that I refer to as “hostage sites.” These are the Web pages that snare you because you mistakenly follow a link or you type in an address incorrectly. Counting on the fact that many people will make predictable typos in entering the addresses for some popular sites, some “entrepreneurs” have established sites that provide no useful content, but begin a barrage of pop-up ads that range from merely annoying to disgusting.

These windows pop up faster than anyone can close them and will pretty much prevent someone from leaving the site. Here we have none of the justifications for a quid pro quo. Without any content of value, there is no implicit agreement between the visitor and the operators/advertisers. The site has visitors in a trap and is treating them as a captive audience, subjecting them to sometimes offensive content.

So my answer to the reader should have been longer. Pop-up ads sometimes get in the way of what we would prefer, namely a smooth Web surfing experience. However, they are often the very things that make the experience possible to begin with. Without them, most of the free-content sites just wouldn’t be there. In other cases, they just aren’t as defensible, and deserve some scorn.

What do you think? Check in with our Ethics Matters forum at www.infoworld.com/forums/ethics or write to me at ethics_matters@infoworld.com.