5 Reasons You Need an Ad-Blocker

Some people claim to really appreciate targeted advertising. They say that they love hearing about new products, services, or media they might be interested. Others, like myself, hate advertising of any kind with an unhinged level of vitriol that I should probably talk about in therapy.

Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, I believe that an ad blocker is a must-have for modern web browsing for a wide range of reasons. Here's just a few ways that blocking online ads can benefit you.

Ads Invade Your Privacy. A Lot.

Ads are currently one of (if not the) biggest threats to privacy. Recently there's been growing news coverage about "Real-Time Bidding," which is the current system for how online ads are delivered. Here's a quick overview of how it works:

1. You visit a website that has ads.
2. The ad network starts a bidding process for who gets that ad space.
3. Part of that bidding process involves transmitting your data to advertisers so they can decide if you're in their target audience and how much they're willing to bid on you.
4. Advertisers bid (if they decide it's worth it)
5. You see the ad that wins.

Of course, this is all automated and takes fractions of a second, but there's two important things to note:

1. The data that gets transmitted in Step 3 includes personally identifiable information like unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information. This is far more than enough information to link it back to your real identity if someone wanted to.
2. The advertisers still get a copy of your data even if they decline to bid (see Step 4), which they're under no obligation to delete. In at least one case, we've seen governments use the real-time bidding system as a surveillance method. It's safe to assume that there are several companies keeping the data for one reason or another.

You can read more about real-time bidding and all the privacy concerns surrounding it in a variety of places online, but two standout sources are this EFF article for a quick overview, or Byron Tau's Means of Control for a deeper dive.

Advertisers Literally Stalk You

Most of us have had times that we've known someone well. You might know exactly the right gift to get them for Christmas, or you knew they were going to like a certain movie. Of course you're not always right, but that's because you're not a stalker.

Advertisers, however, are unashamed stalkers. In 2010, Google CEO Erich Schmidt famously and plainly admitted:

We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.

In that interview, Schmidt kept emphasizing that the data collection this psychic ability is based on takes place "with your permission," but tech companies seem to have a very fuzzy understanding of permission and consent. Consider, for example, their rampant use of "dark patterns," which is where companies will use deceptive practices to encourage certain behaviors. A famous example is how it may take only a few clicks to sign up for a service, but you have to contact support to delete your account.

It's also worth noting that the terms of service - wherein you give that "permission" Schmidt talked about - are purposely long and confusing. One group asserts that most terms of service would take over an hour to read (many of them would take far more, into the double digits each).

And that's to say nothing of passive tracking methods like Google Analytics, the Meta Pixel, and others. Google trackers are present in some way, shape, or form on over 70% of websites according to one source. Often the process to "opt out" of these kinds of trackers involves creating an account with the company or adding some kind of browser extension.

Once you finally "agree" to hand over your data - in the same sense that a bank teller in a robbery "agrees" to hand over the money - the amount of data you hand over is so overreaching that most people would be left in shock. It often includes things like visits to houses of worship and abortion clinics. It could also include confidential medical information or even chat logs from online therapy services.

Just to drive the point home: Target's advertisers once determined a teenage girl was pregnant before her own family did. That was over 15 years ago. Imagine how much worse it must be now.

I would say that the only way advertisers could stalk you harder is if they hired a physical person to follow you around, but actually that would be an improvement. At least that person couldn't read your texts, every website you visit, every photo you take, and more.

Advertisers Are Predatory

Advertising has always been about pressuring you into thinking that your life would be better with some product or service, but the rampant collection of data allows advertisers to really ramp that pressure up to 11 in sometimes the worst ways possible.

Our moods and willpower rise and fall throughout the day. Because advertisers have been stalking you all across the web, they know the precise moment to strike when you're most likely to buy something.

Maybe it's at 8 pm, you've worked a 12-hour shift, you're exhausted, and suddenly DoorDash sends you a notification that the McRib is back. Maybe it's right after you just changed your Facebook status to "single" and you see an ad for a thing you've really been wanting but were holding off cause it's a little on the pricier side. Now seems like a good time to go easy on yourself, you think.

This is called "nudge marketing," and it's all about those tiny little things you won't notice that "nudge" you toward the decision they want you to make (kind of like a dark pattern). Some examples you might recognize are "only X remaining" or "frequently bought together" or "limited time offer."

These tactics are designed to pressure you into buying, but with nearly-psychic levels of data and insight, advertisers can take that to the next level by personalizing the messages, time of delivery, even the color of the item in the ad, all in an effort to make it irresistible in one way or another.

If you think I'm being dramatic with the word "predatory," consider the recovering alcoholics who see ads for alcohol or parents who've had a miscarriage seeing ads for baby products.

In this context, you should also know about "decision fatigue." Decision fatigue occurs when we've run out of emotional bandwidth (aka "spoons") and we struggle to make decisions. Steve Jobs was famously rumored to wear the same outfit every day because that was one less decision to make each day, saving his bandwidth for the other important decisions involved in running a company.

When we spend all day looking at ads, that takes up our emotional bandwidth. Even though it only takes a second, that's still a second where you have to pause, evaluate what you're looking at, parse whether it's a genuine piece of content or an ad, and then decide to skip it.

Multiply this by dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of posts per day. Several studies suggest that we see up to 10,000 ads per day (though this includes everything such as logos on shirts and cars, billboards, and others we may not consciously register).

Imagine how much more mental energy you'd have at the end of the day if you took even just a few hundred of these micro decisions off the table. It may not be enough to finally master quantum mechanics, but maybe it'll be enough to read a book, start learning a language, or cook at home and save money.

Minimalism Is Good

Before I begin, I'll admit my bias here: I consider myself a minimalist. Let me clarify that minimalism isn't about having the fewest toys, it's about being intentional. If you bring a thing into your life - physical or otherwise - do it because it truly brings you value in some way that improves your life (objectively or personally), not just because it's trendy or you feel some kind of social or societal pressure.

Advertising, on the other hand, often convinces us to impulse-buy cheap crap we don't need because it uses nudge marketing and constant assaults on our mental bandwidth to wear us down, prey on our emotions, and catch us when we're most likely to buy, even if it's something we end up regretting (or at best, feeling indifferent about) later.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you how wasteful mindless materialism and consumerism is. You've heard it all before. But still, I'll give you a couple of reminders from Relevant Magazine:

• Americans spend more money on fashion accessories than college tuition.
• Nearly half the world's toys are in America.
• On average, American homes have more TVs than residents.
• Plastic kills 1 million seabirds every year.

A common critique says that if you didn't want or need a TV, you didn't save 50% by buying a TV on Black Friday. You still wasted hundreds of dollars because you bought something you didn't really want or need simply because it was on sale.

Ad-blocking helps us avoid being suckered by advertisers who only wish to part you with your hard-earned money, regardless if the purchase is something you really want or not. Blocking ads can help save you money and clutter (mentally and physically).

Ads Slow You Down

For most of us, bandwidth (the digital network kind, not the mental kind) isn't a concern at home, but it can be in some places. Even on mobile phones, usually an "unlimited data" plan means "we'll slow down your data after a certain amount of usage." In some places or on some plans, even home internet is limited on how much bandwidth you can use in any given month.

If bandwidth isn't a concern for you, you probably still want the internet to be as fast as possible. Once again, ads play a role here, too. Blocking ads will make your internet faster. Every thing you load from the internet takes times, so loading ads takes longer than not loading them. This goes for web pages and apps.

AdGuard reports that they tested 119 pages with and without ad-blocking. On average each page loaded 11 seconds faster with ads blocked, which may not seem like much but added up that was a nearly 50% speed increased.

For anecdotal evidence, my current Brave install claims to have saved me 6.1 hours on desktop and 41 minutes on mobile. It's hard for me to say exactly how much time I've spent browsing over the months for a variety of reason, but still. That's 6 hours of my life I've gotten back. (Now if only they could return the time I wasted watching Rise of Skywalker.)

How To Block Ads

Hopefully by now I've converted you to thinking that ads are worth blocking. If so, there's several easy ways to do it.

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is a web extension available for Firefox. A stripped down version called uBlock Lite is available for Chrome and Safari (in order to comply with the more strict ad-blocking rules of those browsers). uBlock Origin is hands-down the best ad-blocker out there. Adding uBlock Origin (or uBlock Origin Lite) to your existing browser is a great way to get started on ad-blocking, and as an added bonus it will block other invisible trackers to help protect your privacy even more.

Brave

An even better solution (if you're currently using a browser like Chrome or Safari) would be to switch to a privacy-respecting browser such as Brave. Brave comes pre-loaded with an ad-blocker built on uBlock Origin's blocklists, plus a bunch of other behind-the-scenes privacy-preserving features.

It's worth noting that you could also switch to Firefox and add uBlock Origin. That's also good, but it requires a little bit of tweaking to get set up for maximum privacy. If you want something ready to go out of the box, Brave is the best choice.

DNS

If you need to block ads in places other than the browser, you have several options (though the efficacy varies). Specifically you'll want to look into DNS-based blockers. Some DNS providers - like AdGuard - offer apps for a wide range of devices, so you may be able to simply use that. In some cases, you may have to search for instructions on how to change the DNS for your particular device. Again, this is often hit-or-miss in my experience, but it's the best and safest place to start at least. If you need a list of trusted DNS resolvers, Privacy Guides offers a great one here.

On Supporting Content

A common argument for not blocking ads is that ads are how creators make money, but that's not really true. In fact, it's rarely true. On my previous podcast - Surveillance Report - the funding we got from patrons dwarfed our ad revenue. And that was with less than 150 paid members on a podcast that had 33,000 subscribers and routinely got five-figure views. (Adding sponsors made the ad-revenue even more insignificant.)

The truth is that most of your favorite creators have methods of being supported directly without ads, and those probably pay better than ads. If there's a service you like that offers a premium paid service, use it to show support. If there's a creator you like, sign up for their Patreon or buy a shirt. Ads aren't the only way to monetize.

Now, of course, I recognize that not everyone will love a product enough to pay. There are plenty of YouTubers and podcasts I love but not enough to pay for. And that's okay. The point is not to say that you have to pay for everything you like, but rather to remind us that other monetization methods exist and we can use them to support the things we do feel strongly about. Advertisers want us to think it's the only method because it benefits them, but it's not.