# Adblocking

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The world is no longer a place that allows success to generalized advertisement; the age of the banner hanging over highways and the mailed flyer are dead. Adverts are targeted with pinpoint accuracy to groups herded together by similar attributes: websites visited, interests, search history, etc. to the point where when a small one shows up on the side of a site like BuzzFeed News (shown above), it seems to almost encompass an attribute of yourself. To that regard, people are frustrated by the general notion of being targeted with advertisements, and prefer the privacy in knowing their data and information are not being trafficked maliciously for the profit of others. Don Marti discusses how people defend themselves against the now modern norm of the Internet, citing specifics as willpower, habit power, technology, and regulation; these four lines of defense culminate into algorithmic means of eliminating pesky ads (AdBlock, spam folder in email, etc.), and mental means (ignoring, manually closing ads, etc.).
But then AdBlock generated a completely tangential notion to this, stating there is a disparity between ads that are potentially unacceptable and avoided by the user, and ones that are acceptable, as reported by Jacob Kastrenakes. The effect of this realization opened AdBlock up to targeting its users differently, but using the same profitability scope that companies like Google have been using to focus in and isolate individual groups. Whether their implementation of targeted, acceptable ads is more feasible and less outrageous than the current online ad space is not fully determined, but the safety in "whitelisting" ads can aid to prevent ransomware attacks formed by intercepting adverts before reaching the user. Alex Hern wrote that highly targeted ransomware attacks through such adverts can result in large amounts of money being requested in exchange for decrypting precious data. With targeted ads being widely regarded as one of the worst aspects of being 'online', the future of the Internet may be one with both targeted and whitelisted ads that have a less intrusive, but more cohesive role on webpages and online applications.