# Ad blocking
## Ad blocker in use:

My dad serves as the exact target market online advertisements and pop-up schemes set out to prey on. Big fingers, uncontrollable movements, and poor eyesight are all to blame for the countless number of times he has found himself in a black hole of online ads and website pop-ups. In his case, ad blockers became a holy grail. As soon as my brother became aware of their importance, he decided to download ad blockers for every scenario on my dad's laptop to try and put a stop to these issues. Assuming these ads would cease with the help of blockers, I was surprised to read about retargeting and the lengths large companies will go to in order for their ads to be seen- for better or for worse. Don Marti's article, "Targeted advertising considered harmful," discusses the overall distrust consumers have developed because of online advertisements. Retargeting causes users to see ads "following them around" from one site to another. This made it obvious to users that the ad is not only attached to the content being viewed, but it is also attached to you. Because of this, online ads are trusted the least out of all forms of advertisements and the reliance on ad blockers continues to grow.
Large companies such as Google, which recently accidentally allowed the promotion of malvertising through its Google Ad Manager, are also to blame for the ad-abuse consumers face. In an effort to minimize some of this torture, Acceptable Ads was created to try and create a more respectful and less intrusive way to advertise online. Seems like a nice compromise, right? Not really. Acceptable Ads cannot prevent program participants from placing trackers on a user's device. This can result in retargeting as mentioned above, or these trackers can sell the data they collected to another ad network in order to increase the size of the database on your online searches. Although we want to believe that ad blockers we install and sites that promote ad-free browsing will keep us and our data safe, our heads (and fingers) should always stay on a swivel.