# <span style="color:#ad5cad; font-family: 'Georgia'; font-size: .9em;">Ad Blocking</span>

## <span style="font-family: 'Georgia'; font-size: .8em;">Ad Blocking Assignment</span>

#### **Before**
#### **Installing uBlock Origin**
#### **After**
For this assignment, I decided to pick Buzzfeed because I knew that it always has ads, and it's a site that is very popular. It's interesting how the ads fill in blank space, and without the ads, the website looks bare because the white space on the right isn't covered up.

### <span style="font-family: 'Georgia'; font-size: .8em;">Reading Response</span>
About three years ago, I decided to implement the use of an adblocker on Chrome. Mostly, this was for emotional reasons–ads tend to fill in a lot of space (like the ads seen above on Buzzfeed), and this visually makes me overwhelmed, especially when I'm just on a website to learn, shop, etc. Eventually, I turned off the adblocker as I started to realize that not all ads were being blocked and since I didn't want to do research into a better adblocker, I have not used an adblocker since.

Reading through Sven Taylor's [Advertisers Are Paying Off Ad Blockers to Show 200 Million Users “Acceptable Ads”](https://restoreprivacy.com/report-ad-blockers-allowing-acceptable-ads/), I realized that this issue I was having with my old adblocker is actually a program called "Acceptable Ads." Adblockers are incentivized with money to keep specific advertisers from getting blocked, and usually these advertisers are well-known like Reddit or Amazon. Taylor discusses how this is a much more dangerous issue than just getting unwanted advertisements when scrolling the internet. Additionally, advertising networks install trackers on the user's device, which are usually used for targeting advertising. Both Taylor and ["Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful"](https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/) discuss this type of advertising and its dangers. Since targeted advertising is so personal, it is difficult to explain how something advertised directly to the user could be harmful. However, the danger exists because all of these sites have the data of so many users online, and with so many scrolling the web constantly without any knowledge of how the internet works, many people don't even truly know how advertising works. UBlock, which I used for the assignment above, is discussed in Taylor's article:
> We checked AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, and Crystal. All now display Acceptable Ads by default. Presumably, uBlock, which was acquired by AdBlock Plus last year, will do the same.

Since Taylor's article was published in 2020, I decided to see if UBlock now accepts Acceptable Ads, and since this article was written, it now does. I wonder if defeat should simply be accepted. It seems very difficult to find a good adblocker that doesn't have Acceptable Ads, but the only other option is to not use any adblocker at all, which is only worse. I hope that this still continues to be fought against, despite the fact that this isn't very well known by most internet users.