3 ms·

We saw/feared where it would go and now it’s gone there. Was it there 10 years ago? I don’t think so. At least not so explicitly.

• stephenr 8y ago
  They’ve been an advertising company since 2000, so I’d argue that yes it was there, people just didn’t recognise it/gave them the benefit of the doubt.
  • 0815test 8y ago
    Granted, advertising in the early 2000s was vastly different though. It was served organically, with none of the tracking or embedded-scripting nonsense that's ubiquitous today (whether from Google or other actors). The very notion of "ad-blocking" or "tracker-blocking" would have made no sense back then.
    • zu03776 8y ago
      While tracker-blocking in today's sense would have made no sense, there certainly was ad-blocking and cookie-blocking before the 2000s. AdSubtract advertised it's ability to block doubleclick.com cookies in March of 2000: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_blocks_ads_cookies/ https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/91102/adsubtract_bl... The article also mentions Siemens' WebWasher product which blocked cookies. Other cookie-blocking products were released in the same time period.
    • Sylamore 8y ago
      I remember using Privoxy back in the early 2000s because even then certain ad networks were regularly serving up malicious content and pop-ups. at that time Google was the good guy serving up only text ads.
    • stephenr 8y ago
      I was referring more to their motivation for doing things, not specific shitbag things they do now.