Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Should we gatekeep adblockers? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago by Timely_Jellyfish_2077@programming.dev to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Genuine question as I'm having a dilemma.

I've seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don't even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It's not like they know what they're missing.

I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.

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[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ad block users are already the minority.

Adblockers are a must have for protecting against mailware and phishing attacks. Google and other ad services have proven to be incompetent in protecting their service against those kind of attacks targeting users.

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Less so than you'd believe. Over 30% of people use them

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Source?

[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

If you search 'percentage of people who use ad blockers' on ddg you find the same thing on several sites. I found it unbelievable too, but given multiple sites, I'll take it at face value. I don't have time to deep dive everything. Let me know if you find anything to the contrary.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

Not much information on the data. But still some critique of the data:

the source claims

"use ad blocking tools at least sometimes" so not all the time

It is only 16-64

Both of those metrics exclude lots of data for example, when you scroll down you see that yes a lot of ppl use ad blocker on the PC but not on phones or tablets. Also ppl below 16 have a very low usage rate also ppl above 64.

I think actually ad block usage by sites visited with and without ad blockers would be nice too.

But thank you for the link, guess ad blockers are indeed more popular than i thought.