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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.
by 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 agoGranted, 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 agoWhile 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 agoI 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 agoI was referring more to their motivation for doing things, not specific shitbag things they do now.