6 ms·

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity. It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector. The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.

davidgerard 10y ago
> It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.
- Pigo 10y ago
  Every time I'm blocked from a news site because of my blocker, I just get context from comments and move on with my life. It's so rare that there's important information beyond what's in the headline anyways. I respect paywalls much more.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    "I'll whitelist you, as soon as you stop using a third party ad network" "But then what's the point", we both said in unison.
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      "Because ad tech is a sucking leech", per the article this post is about. * Everything is worse for users (tracking and malware) * Everything is worse for advertisers (ineffective ads) * Everything is worse for publishers (pays way too little) * But adtech gets paid well
chrisan 10y ago
Genuine question: has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? I thought they were, while still annoying, safe from serving such content. So much that if they detect your site has malware they prevent it from serving their ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=e... As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to have everything pay-walled off and still allowing sites to generate ad money
- pricechild 10y ago
  Here's one such claim: https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75731/good-morning-android/ https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75731/good-morning-and...
- arthurfm 10y ago
  > has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? Yes. http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/youtube-ads-lead-to-exploit-kits-hit-us-victims/ http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/y...
  - victorhooi 10y ago
    I read the article - it's an interesting read. The claim is that a YouTube ad was serving malware. However, upon reading the article, it seems that: 1. Somebody purchased legitimate YouTube ad space. 2. They then redirected that traffic twice through two other legitimate ad networks. 3. They then broke into a Polish government website, and funnelled the traffic there, to serve up malware. That certainly doesn't seem to be a case of Google/YouTube serving up malware - if anything, these attacks went to a lot of trouble to obscure from YouTube what they were doing, precisely so they wouldn't get shut-down (presumably by either YouTube, or the two other ad networks they were piggy-backing on). You could argue, they should have caught them earlier - but isn't that a bit like blaming your email provider that you got a spam/malware email - when the actual party to blame is the person sending you aforesaid spam/malware?
xg15 10y ago
A variant of this that highlights the absurdity of that very nicely are auto-redirecting mobile ads. The two valid options according to the site (and anti-ad-blocker people) would be: 1) Don't open the site to begin with. 2) Open the site and instantly get redirected. Note how none of the options entails actually reading the content provided by the site. So if there is no valid way to consume the content, you could ask why it is there in the first place.
- kakarot 10y ago
  Good point. And I guess the answer is, the content is there to lead you to advertisements :)
- phrygian 10y ago
  I noticed this a while back, and it annoyed the hell out of me. So on my iPhone I have JavaScript permanently disabled on safari, which is my default browser and use chrome as an auxiliary for any site that I really want to access but can't do so without JavaScript enabled in safari.

davidgerard 10y ago

> It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.

Pigo 10y ago
Every time I'm blocked from a news site because of my blocker, I just get context from comments and move on with my life. It's so rare that there's important information beyond what's in the headline anyways. I respect paywalls much more.
- tripzilch 10y ago
  "I'll whitelist you, as soon as you stop using a third party ad network" "But then what's the point", we both said in unison.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    "Because ad tech is a sucking leech", per the article this post is about. * Everything is worse for users (tracking and malware) * Everything is worse for advertisers (ineffective ads) * Everything is worse for publishers (pays way too little) * But adtech gets paid well

chrisan 10y ago

Genuine question: has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? I thought they were, while still annoying, safe from serving such content. So much that if they detect your site has malware they prevent it from serving their ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=en https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=e... As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to have everything pay-walled off and still allowing sites to generate ad money

pricechild 10y ago
Here's one such claim: https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75731/good-morning-android/ https://securelist.com/blog/incidents/75731/good-morning-and...
arthurfm 10y ago
> has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past? Yes. http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/youtube-ads-lead-to-exploit-kits-hit-us-victims/ http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/y...
- victorhooi 10y ago
  I read the article - it's an interesting read. The claim is that a YouTube ad was serving malware. However, upon reading the article, it seems that: 1. Somebody purchased legitimate YouTube ad space. 2. They then redirected that traffic twice through two other legitimate ad networks. 3. They then broke into a Polish government website, and funnelled the traffic there, to serve up malware. That certainly doesn't seem to be a case of Google/YouTube serving up malware - if anything, these attacks went to a lot of trouble to obscure from YouTube what they were doing, precisely so they wouldn't get shut-down (presumably by either YouTube, or the two other ad networks they were piggy-backing on). You could argue, they should have caught them earlier - but isn't that a bit like blaming your email provider that you got a spam/malware email - when the actual party to blame is the person sending you aforesaid spam/malware?

xg15 10y ago

A variant of this that highlights the absurdity of that very nicely are auto-redirecting mobile ads. The two valid options according to the site (and anti-ad-blocker people) would be: 1) Don't open the site to begin with. 2) Open the site and instantly get redirected. Note how none of the options entails actually reading the content provided by the site. So if there is no valid way to consume the content, you could ask why it is there in the first place.

kakarot 10y ago
Good point. And I guess the answer is, the content is there to lead you to advertisements :)
phrygian 10y ago
I noticed this a while back, and it annoyed the hell out of me. So on my iPhone I have JavaScript permanently disabled on safari, which is my default browser and use chrome as an auxiliary for any site that I really want to access but can't do so without JavaScript enabled in safari.