7 ms·

Not to bang on about it, but this kind of thing is why I use an ad-blocker. It's barely even about ads in the traditional sense anymore, it's about being able

by SCdF 9y ago

Not to bang on about it, but this kind of thing is why I use an ad-blocker. It's barely even about ads in the traditional sense anymore, it's about being able to read a fucking article without having half the internet downloaded in the background while every nano of my being available is processed and analysed by 30 different tracking companies simultaneously.

MetalMatze 9y ago
Couldn't agree more.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Its not as sexy a name, but I think ad blockers should be primarily described as tracking blockers. Its sounds as important as "anti-virus" and i think it could drive a few more people towards using them.
- fredley 9y ago
  I'd agree with this. I would be more likely to allow ads, particularly on sites I want to support, if I could have assurances that those ads aren't harvesting every available datapoint they can. Make ads dumb again.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    Yep. So much this. I don't mind ads. I mind tracking. Oh, and advertisers: I've never bought anything because I saw it on facebook or in a google ad or anywhere else like that. I'm not sure what you think you are doing with all that data, but it's not working. Ads are not how I learn about new "needs."
    - theorique 9y ago
      I've never bought anything because I saw it on facebook or in a google ad or anywhere else like that. Can you be certain that this is true? Perhaps you didn't click through (I don't either), but what if your unconscious mind saw an ad that you did not register consciously.
      - dhimes 9y ago
        You can never falsify that, obviously, and I think a lot of the web-ad industry like to keep that FOMO in front of the advertisers. But I'm fairly certain. Vacations? Nope: I have my way of deciding and that's how I do it. Car? Nope. Calendar/planner? Nope. Pencils? Pens? Grill? Pants? Nope Nope Nope Nope. I'm hard-pressed to think of the last brand I learned of from an ad. Books? Usually from here (also planners, cars, etc.)
    - davchana 9y ago
      Most of the the the ads I see by Google or Facebook are the ones for purchases I already made. Few weeks ago I already booked a hotel on booking.com, and then searched about that hotel's official website and facebook page, and boy, for two weeks every google ad and facebook ad had that hotel name.
      - dhimes 9y ago
        LOL exactly. It's ridiculous. I accidentally cost my buddy a click when his ad appeared on my feed (his ad has no business being on my feed)- I was on mobile so of course accidentally clicked it. The ad industry is just so damn broken that it's ripe for a huge disruption. The whole hypothesis of Google- that people will want to see ads centered on what they are searching for- seems to be erroneous. But it's been taken as gospel for what- a dozen years?- that everybody has piled on to the idea that we can know what people want to buy based on the type of information they seek. I think that except in explicit cases- searching for 'umbrellas that can withstand high winds' for instance- it's not true. As I've said before here, when I'm ready to buy I'm searching Amazon, not Google.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  uBlock Origin describes itself as "a wide-spectrum blocker which happens to be able to function as a mere ad blocker". It has the explicitly stated goal of allowing the user to personalise their browsing experience in whatever way they choose. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
  - westmeal 9y ago
    For finer grained control of the scripts, XHRs, and media being accepted by your browser I'd recommend installing uBlock Origin && uMatrix. uMatrix allows you to blacklist or whitelist everything on a page with some pretty good defaults.
    - rightos 9y ago
      You can get a lot of uMatrix's functionality just by enabling the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in uBlock Origin. I actually find it a better interface, but that's a personal preference.
    - nothrabannosir 9y ago
      I second the recommendation for uMatrix. Recently switched from noscript due to ff57 and boy, what an improvement. The matrix model works very well. It makes total sense to only allow certain types of resources and/or/from certain domains per level in the dns hierarchy. The defaults are much more usable than noscript and the UI is great once you “get it” (won’t take more than a day or two).
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I run one as a malware blocker, because if I don't then my computers get attacked at least once a day, often by reputable sites. It's probably more important than an antivirus for stopping malware.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    It's definitely more important than antivirus but I don't think the general population has figured that out.
- clouddrover 9y ago
  Firefox and Brave have tracking protection built-in. Not sure if any other browsers offer this out of the box.
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    how good is it though? I couldn't care less about "non-intrusive ads" of adblock plus for example, that's not very efficient. microBlock origin on the other hand, that's pretty much required these days, especially on tiny mobile screens.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Firefox doesn't really have tracking protection built-in. There's "Do not track", but that's worse than worthless and off by default, and you can turn on blocking thrid-party cookies but, again, off by default and only covers a small area of concern. I don't even know what to say about Brave other than the business model feels very wrong. Firefox + uBlock Origin is the right level of protection and you can get it on desktop and mobile (Android at least). I've come across a few sites that were still using affiliate links and uO didn't block them. I'm not sure if uO has a policy of not blocking them but, to me, those are the only type of "acceptable ad" and CPU cycles shouldn't be wasted trying to detect and eliminate them.
    - skymt 9y ago
      I believe clouddrover is talking about this tracking protection feature, which uses Disconnect's list of tracking scripts: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection
    - dhimes 9y ago
      I use noscript and am pretty happy with it. I also use Adblock Plus because I'm ok with the idea of allowing certain types of ads through the adblockers. I was kind of thinking that we could get sites to stop doing the tracking bullshit if we put out a list of what is acceptable and blocked the rest. I guess it wasn't well executed?
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Why don't we just call them malware blockers? What we refer to as tracking or analytics code has evolved well past the point of understanding and has crossed over into manipulation. That's ultimately what advertising is these days, a means to manipulate you into spending your money.
  - fhood 9y ago
    Honestly I don't care what is be tracked, but until it is no longer the case that 60% of webpages slow my computer to a crawl for about six seconds I am not turning mine off, no matter how many times the website asks politely.
- andrewaylett 9y ago
  That's Privacy Badger's USP: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
beejiu 9y ago
I hope you do not use Google Chrome, if you are worried about privacy.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Well that's debatable. The technology of chrome (better sandboxing) is an advantage. I've alternated between Chromium and Firefox. Some sites seem to work better in one browser or the other.
  - joosters 9y ago
    I think the parent comment was because Chrome does its own user tracking and reporting to Google.
    - drdaeman 9y ago
      What exactly does it do? I've re-read their whitepaper and while there is some data one may consider sensitive, it's not something like "user tracking and reporting" beyond the performance metrics and search suggestions (which all other major browsers do as well). There are optional features which may result in private data being sent to Google, e.g. keeping history with Google without local encryption - but you have to opt-in, which feels OK to me. https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.html https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...
  - libertyEQ 9y ago
    I think using Chromium makes sense when sites have a preference, and there are attempts to remove the Google tracking from the core of the project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/releases https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/releases
dahart 9y ago
> this kind of thing is why I use an ad-blocker While ad blockers do stop a lot of third party ads and iframes, and probably some tracking, I don't think that ad blockers are stopping most tracking by web sites. Not the kind this article is talking about, anyway. It's quite simple for sites to track user activity in ways that ad blockers can't easily stop. And I suspect it's becoming more likely quickly, purely on the anecdotal number of sites I visit that now detect ad blockers. Some of this article seems like FUD though. It's pretty hard to think of what keystrokes you would type into a web site that you don't want to send the web site. The main thing they're getting by tracking keystrokes that they didn't get before is typos and form activity that you start and then decide to clear and bail out. I'd speculate that this is being used and is most important for sales conversion pages, where they monitor your activity to try to figure out if you started out interested in buying something but then decided not to buy. Web sites cannot track your keystrokes when you're using a different site / tab in your browser, they can't track keystrokes when you use another program besides the browser, they can only track when you're interacting with the site. So what sensitive data can they get that you weren't already giving them?
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I was at a University that paid for some tracking software we self-hosted. It showed a highlighted webpage showing gradients over the most common places they scrolled too. Adblock lists are community maintained, so whether this stuff is blocked depends a lot on people who actually enjoy having their network debug panel open. Facebook's tracking pixel their e-commerce affiliates use is insane. It sends most mouse movements and they use it to determine what words users hover their mouse over! Their AI/marketing engine is pretty advanced, to the point where their predictive analysis is accurate enough people swear Facebook/Instragram are sending microphone data. Sure they cannot track you across tabs and browsers ... directly. But they do. If 30% of the pages you visit have some kind of Adobe Omniture or Facebook pixel, they do in fact gleam a ton of data about you. This AI is so powerful it can predict products you want, potentially before you even verbally announce them. That's incredibly powerful predictive analysis ... used to cure cance---oh no wait. It's not. It's just used to sell you shit. What a waste of tech honestly. I know a lot of people here use uBlock Origin since there are concerns with Ghostery/AdBlock/etc either allowing in certain ads for a price or selling some of your data to be viable. The only real solution for tech people is to run a Javascript blocker like NoScript, and explicitly white listing what you want to run .. which is honestly a ton-o-work.
zeveb 9y ago
The problem isn't just ads, though: first-party JavaScript can still record every keystroke you type, so e.g. if you accidentally type your login password into a browser window (even if no input field is focused) then you must change it. The problem is that most of us are reading what should be static content which is instead a dynamic program written in a general-purpose language.
phrygian 9y ago
I simply disable JavaScript. Only when I’m on a page that I think I really need JavaScript capabilities to I open it in another browser that has JS enabled. Of course some in the latter category do nasty stuff but only those I explicitly allow get to run JS with Adblock enabled.
apostacy 9y ago
If javascript is allowed to persist in the background, read the keydown and cursor location, and keep a socket open back to the server, then that won't matter. Personally, I do not understand why this has become acceptable, if all I am doing is viewing text and static images. Ideally, I would like it so that the browser suspends everything if a tab is not visible in the foreground, unless I pin it.

by SCdF 9y ago

MetalMatze 9y ago

Couldn't agree more.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Its not as sexy a name, but I think ad blockers should be primarily described as tracking blockers. Its sounds as important as "anti-virus" and i think it could drive a few more people towards using them.

fredley 9y ago
I'd agree with this. I would be more likely to allow ads, particularly on sites I want to support, if I could have assurances that those ads aren't harvesting every available datapoint they can. Make ads dumb again.
- dhimes 9y ago
  Yep. So much this. I don't mind ads. I mind tracking. Oh, and advertisers: I've never bought anything because I saw it on facebook or in a google ad or anywhere else like that. I'm not sure what you think you are doing with all that data, but it's not working. Ads are not how I learn about new "needs."
  - theorique 9y ago
    I've never bought anything because I saw it on facebook or in a google ad or anywhere else like that. Can you be certain that this is true? Perhaps you didn't click through (I don't either), but what if your unconscious mind saw an ad that you did not register consciously.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      You can never falsify that, obviously, and I think a lot of the web-ad industry like to keep that FOMO in front of the advertisers. But I'm fairly certain. Vacations? Nope: I have my way of deciding and that's how I do it. Car? Nope. Calendar/planner? Nope. Pencils? Pens? Grill? Pants? Nope Nope Nope Nope. I'm hard-pressed to think of the last brand I learned of from an ad. Books? Usually from here (also planners, cars, etc.)
  - davchana 9y ago
    Most of the the the ads I see by Google or Facebook are the ones for purchases I already made. Few weeks ago I already booked a hotel on booking.com, and then searched about that hotel's official website and facebook page, and boy, for two weeks every google ad and facebook ad had that hotel name.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      LOL exactly. It's ridiculous. I accidentally cost my buddy a click when his ad appeared on my feed (his ad has no business being on my feed)- I was on mobile so of course accidentally clicked it. The ad industry is just so damn broken that it's ripe for a huge disruption. The whole hypothesis of Google- that people will want to see ads centered on what they are searching for- seems to be erroneous. But it's been taken as gospel for what- a dozen years?- that everybody has piled on to the idea that we can know what people want to buy based on the type of information they seek. I think that except in explicit cases- searching for 'umbrellas that can withstand high winds' for instance- it's not true. As I've said before here, when I'm ready to buy I'm searching Amazon, not Google.
jdietrich 9y ago
uBlock Origin describes itself as "a wide-spectrum blocker which happens to be able to function as a mere ad blocker". It has the explicitly stated goal of allowing the user to personalise their browsing experience in whatever way they choose. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- westmeal 9y ago
  For finer grained control of the scripts, XHRs, and media being accepted by your browser I'd recommend installing uBlock Origin && uMatrix. uMatrix allows you to blacklist or whitelist everything on a page with some pretty good defaults.
  - rightos 9y ago
    You can get a lot of uMatrix's functionality just by enabling the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in uBlock Origin. I actually find it a better interface, but that's a personal preference.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    I second the recommendation for uMatrix. Recently switched from noscript due to ff57 and boy, what an improvement. The matrix model works very well. It makes total sense to only allow certain types of resources and/or/from certain domains per level in the dns hierarchy. The defaults are much more usable than noscript and the UI is great once you “get it” (won’t take more than a day or two).
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I run one as a malware blocker, because if I don't then my computers get attacked at least once a day, often by reputable sites. It's probably more important than an antivirus for stopping malware.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  It's definitely more important than antivirus but I don't think the general population has figured that out.
clouddrover 9y ago
Firefox and Brave have tracking protection built-in. Not sure if any other browsers offer this out of the box.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  how good is it though? I couldn't care less about "non-intrusive ads" of adblock plus for example, that's not very efficient. microBlock origin on the other hand, that's pretty much required these days, especially on tiny mobile screens.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Firefox doesn't really have tracking protection built-in. There's "Do not track", but that's worse than worthless and off by default, and you can turn on blocking thrid-party cookies but, again, off by default and only covers a small area of concern. I don't even know what to say about Brave other than the business model feels very wrong. Firefox + uBlock Origin is the right level of protection and you can get it on desktop and mobile (Android at least). I've come across a few sites that were still using affiliate links and uO didn't block them. I'm not sure if uO has a policy of not blocking them but, to me, those are the only type of "acceptable ad" and CPU cycles shouldn't be wasted trying to detect and eliminate them.
  - skymt 9y ago
    I believe clouddrover is talking about this tracking protection feature, which uses Disconnect's list of tracking scripts: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection
  - dhimes 9y ago
    I use noscript and am pretty happy with it. I also use Adblock Plus because I'm ok with the idea of allowing certain types of ads through the adblockers. I was kind of thinking that we could get sites to stop doing the tracking bullshit if we put out a list of what is acceptable and blocked the rest. I guess it wasn't well executed?
cptskippy 9y ago
Why don't we just call them malware blockers? What we refer to as tracking or analytics code has evolved well past the point of understanding and has crossed over into manipulation. That's ultimately what advertising is these days, a means to manipulate you into spending your money.
- fhood 9y ago
  Honestly I don't care what is be tracked, but until it is no longer the case that 60% of webpages slow my computer to a crawl for about six seconds I am not turning mine off, no matter how many times the website asks politely.
andrewaylett 9y ago
That's Privacy Badger's USP: https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

beejiu 9y ago

I hope you do not use Google Chrome, if you are worried about privacy.

ams6110 9y ago
Well that's debatable. The technology of chrome (better sandboxing) is an advantage. I've alternated between Chromium and Firefox. Some sites seem to work better in one browser or the other.
- joosters 9y ago
  I think the parent comment was because Chrome does its own user tracking and reporting to Google.
  - drdaeman 9y ago
    What exactly does it do? I've re-read their whitepaper and while there is some data one may consider sensitive, it's not something like "user tracking and reporting" beyond the performance metrics and search suggestions (which all other major browsers do as well). There are optional features which may result in private data being sent to Google, e.g. keeping history with Google without local encryption - but you have to opt-in, which feels OK to me. https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.html https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/whitepaper.htm...
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  I think using Chromium makes sense when sites have a preference, and there are attempts to remove the Google tracking from the core of the project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/releases https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/releases

dahart 9y ago

> this kind of thing is why I use an ad-blocker While ad blockers do stop a lot of third party ads and iframes, and probably some tracking, I don't think that ad blockers are stopping most tracking by web sites. Not the kind this article is talking about, anyway. It's quite simple for sites to track user activity in ways that ad blockers can't easily stop. And I suspect it's becoming more likely quickly, purely on the anecdotal number of sites I visit that now detect ad blockers. Some of this article seems like FUD though. It's pretty hard to think of what keystrokes you would type into a web site that you don't want to send the web site. The main thing they're getting by tracking keystrokes that they didn't get before is typos and form activity that you start and then decide to clear and bail out. I'd speculate that this is being used and is most important for sales conversion pages, where they monitor your activity to try to figure out if you started out interested in buying something but then decided not to buy. Web sites cannot track your keystrokes when you're using a different site / tab in your browser, they can't track keystrokes when you use another program besides the browser, they can only track when you're interacting with the site. So what sensitive data can they get that you weren't already giving them?

djsumdog 9y ago
I was at a University that paid for some tracking software we self-hosted. It showed a highlighted webpage showing gradients over the most common places they scrolled too. Adblock lists are community maintained, so whether this stuff is blocked depends a lot on people who actually enjoy having their network debug panel open. Facebook's tracking pixel their e-commerce affiliates use is insane. It sends most mouse movements and they use it to determine what words users hover their mouse over! Their AI/marketing engine is pretty advanced, to the point where their predictive analysis is accurate enough people swear Facebook/Instragram are sending microphone data. Sure they cannot track you across tabs and browsers ... directly. But they do. If 30% of the pages you visit have some kind of Adobe Omniture or Facebook pixel, they do in fact gleam a ton of data about you. This AI is so powerful it can predict products you want, potentially before you even verbally announce them. That's incredibly powerful predictive analysis ... used to cure cance---oh no wait. It's not. It's just used to sell you shit. What a waste of tech honestly. I know a lot of people here use uBlock Origin since there are concerns with Ghostery/AdBlock/etc either allowing in certain ads for a price or selling some of your data to be viable. The only real solution for tech people is to run a Javascript blocker like NoScript, and explicitly white listing what you want to run .. which is honestly a ton-o-work.

zeveb 9y ago

The problem isn't just ads, though: first-party JavaScript can still record every keystroke you type, so e.g. if you accidentally type your login password into a browser window (even if no input field is focused) then you must change it. The problem is that most of us are reading what should be static content which is instead a dynamic program written in a general-purpose language.

phrygian 9y ago

I simply disable JavaScript. Only when I’m on a page that I think I really need JavaScript capabilities to I open it in another browser that has JS enabled. Of course some in the latter category do nasty stuff but only those I explicitly allow get to run JS with Adblock enabled.

apostacy 9y ago

If javascript is allowed to persist in the background, read the keydown and cursor location, and keep a socket open back to the server, then that won't matter. Personally, I do not understand why this has become acceptable, if all I am doing is viewing text and static images. Ideally, I would like it so that the browser suspends everything if a tab is not visible in the foreground, unless I pin it.