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Google is Killing uBlock Origin. No Chromium Browser is Safe.
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Is there any organization out there that could actually promote an "Acceptable ad standard"? Like, maybe even something within web specs?
A long time ago, ads were slightly irritating, rarely useful, and considered a necessary evil for gently monetizing the web. We've had this slow evolution to draconian tracking nightmares that are genuinely dangerous and often written by malicious untraceable actors. I almost feel like we could pressure back towards decent ads if there was some standard by which they only received basic info about the user, showed basic info about a product, didn't pollute the experience or ruin accessibility, and were registered to businesses by physical address with legal accountability for things like false advertising.
That is...perhaps a vain hope though. It's just hard to picture futures where all websites run off of donations or subscriptions, because advertising is fucking hell now.
Google would never push this because it would cost them money in the short term, eg, next quarter.
They can't have that.
You mean like https://acceptableads.com/ which is only supported so far by Adblock Plus (and its parent company)?
The problem is until there is some kind of penalty for being too annoying or too resource consuming, it will always be a race to the bottom with more, worse ads. As people add ad blockers to their browsers, the user pool that isn't running them begins to dry up and more ads are needed to keep the same revenue. This results in even more people blocking them.
Two of the things I had hope for on the privacy side was Mozilla's Privacy-Preserving Attribution for ad attribution and Google's Privacy Sandbox collection of features for targeting like the Topics API. Both would have been better for privacy than the current system of granular, individual user tracking across sites.
If those two get wide enough adoption, regulation could be put in place to limit the old methods as there would be a better replacement available without killing the whole current ad supported economy of most sites. I get that strictly speaking from a privacy perspective 'more anonymous/private tracking' < 'no tracking' but I really don't want perfect to be the enemy of better.
Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:
uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.
The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla's own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.
I'm still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.