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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Good. Ad blocking is security and anyone that tells you different both doesn't care about your computer security, and also wants to sell you something.
That 2/3 to 3/4 of computer programmers, computer security experts and advertisers seems low. I feel like that should be closer to 90%
The rest are designing/coding/testing the ads and work for ad companies.
Or bots
You underestimate laziness
It's almost as if companies have gone a bit overboard with advertising. Huh. Didn't see that coming...
76 percent of cybersecurity experts use ad blockers.
I'm a bit worried about that other 24%. How expert are they if they don't recognize the risk?
There's some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it's an extension, you're trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn't going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it's open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.
I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don't think it's unreasonable to value security and not use one.
Open source adblockers reduce that risk significantly. Don't trust closed source blockers.
But by that logic, absolutely everything other than standing still in a fethal position in a dark cave is a cyber security risk.
Are you using an extremely solid version of Linux? Wellllll, sometimes bad actors can push bad code to open source projects! It's a risk!
I mean, it's true. Network-connected devices are inherently a cyber security risk.
Yes, which is why that can't be used as an argument against one specific tool.
The benefits massively outweigh the risks when it comes to open source ad blockers (lets be honest, we’re all talking about uBO), but limiting your attack surface is a very widely practiced concept in cubersecurity, and there’s no situation where it is totally without merit.
maybe they don't enable js at all /s
jk, maybe they value fingerprinting over that? even tor browser doesn't have one built in.
SponsorBlock - for anyone interested in taking their ad blocking hobby to the next level.
Can confirm. Been using with freetube, invidious and clipious as it's built-in and it's fantastic.
What I wonder is... how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.
My mom knows nothing about adblock, and is still blocking ads. You better believe all of the kids having to fix their relative's computers will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Can't comment on the sample size though, Ghostery might indeed be somehow biased and measure devices where their software is installed vs. total number of internet users or something? But users of ghostery are more likely to be tech savvy, so there's a higher chance of them having more devices that are equally sanitized.
I'd have to dig through the study and see if the sampling mechanism is made public.
will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Those mfs have got a way to go if they're setting up free antiviruses. Free anti-virsus will hurt your system probably more on average than actual viruses
Yes it is available. It in turn points to another site Censuswide, but does say:
The figures are representative of all US adults aged 16+
According to statistics on my server, it's 57% Chrome, 14% Safari and 12% Firefox. Also 10% use Linux. I'm not hosting anything tech related though.
Anyways, adblocking is kind of essential. Even the boomers ask what's wrong when ads start showing. The only people I've seen browsing without adblock are Apple users.
iPhone or Mac?
Yes
i always lol about people opposing ad blockers.
oh no! my favorite unethical multinational conglomerate now has a few bucks less!
how can anybody see this as a bad thing? ad blocking is cybersecurity.
Some people only believe what they're told by an authority, and some people only view massive corporations, politicians, and the church as legitimate authorities. So if a corporation tells them it's bad, they'll believe it's bad.
Good, your attention is a commodity, don't let advertisers steal it. We've been assaulted with enough ads in public spaces already.
It is literally wasting the most valuable thing we have, our lifetime.
Surprised the rates of adblocking is so high! I thought it was a little more niche.
Also surprised that the article didn't mention manifest v3 rolling out later this year to Chrimium-based browsers - which will effectively end adblocking in all browsers except Firefox.
Google isn't stupid, they know that ad blocking undermines their business. And Google controls Chromium: the backbone of almost all browsers. So of course they're going to engineer it to prevent ad blocking. It was only a matter of time.
I'm doubtful of this article claims. Majority of them use adblocker? I'm sure its inaccurate. Most of the people I have seen don't even know about adblocker. So google doesn't have to worry for a long time. This article seems like bootlicking Google.
Nice! It only took 25 years.
lmao let's all thank YouTube for spreading the word about adblockers, best adverisment ever
The problem with YouTube is that even if you manage to block ads, you find most of the videos are ads too.
SponsorBlock is essential now. I switched from iPad to an Android tablet largely so I could use YouTube ReVanced. And on Android TV there's SmartTube Next.
I get that creators gotta eat, but I pay for YouTube Premium already. If they would stop accepting sponsorships from scam companies I might even stop blocking those.
Freetube + Sponserblock or Newpipe+Sponserblock is the goat setup
Data like this makes me wonder what Firefox is doing. If Nord can sell a VPN surely Mozilla could get some market share
I'm not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.
I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there's a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.
You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you've still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.
I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.
I wonder if the statistic includes mobile users, because mobile ad blockers are definitely less popular than browser addons on desktop.
note: this isn't an invitation to tell me about all the wonderful mobile ad blocking solutions, I'm already aware of virtually all of them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.
More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.
"People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.
"It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."
Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.
But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.
The original article contains 681 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a census so people probability answered they use ad blockers on the computer but they didn't ask about mobile, I assume
Here's where the report is.
i think adblock use on mobile may be far more limited since google chrome on mobile dosent allow to load extensions on mobile
Firefox allows for the full ublock origin on mobile.
Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.
Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.
Anyways ad blockers are the best.
W
"Github for lesbians" sounds like something I could recommend to my friends of that persuasion though.
Added, for those of you who missed the reference: https://xkcd.com/624/