## Ad blocking
11/13

For this assigment, I installed the AdBlock extension in my Chrome browser. I wanted to see how it would change my experience on one of my go to news website, CNN.
Before turning on the ad blocker, the CNN homepage was filled with large colorful ads. The top banner was distracting me from the main headlines. It felt busy and overwhelming. After i turned on AdBlock and refreshes the page , the difference was very noticeable. The ads disappeared completely, and in their place were just black spaces.The website lokked cleaner and it seemed to load faster. I never realized how much visual noise ads add to a page until they were gone.

### Here is the image before the AdBlock:


### Here is the image after the AdBlock:

## Reading responses

"Don Marti, 2017, Targeted advertising considered harmful,” zgp.

After reading this I understand better why so many people are using ad blockers today. The article explains that even though ads are getting more personal, people still don't like being track. It says, "most US users are not ok with online targeted advertising."(Don Marti,2017) that really stood out to me because it shows how most people want privacy more than "personalized ads". The writer points that even apple knows that peope don't like to be followed online "safari was the first brower to block these cookies by defult"(Don Marti,2017) I think this shows that big companies realize users want control and peace when they browse, not ads that watch them. The article even ask, "why doesn't apple's browser help you connect and share with your favorite brands?"(Don Marti,2017)
I liked that question because it makes you think, if targeted ads were really helpful, companies like apple would promote them more. Lets also talk about how adblower became popular in 2009 "adblocking grew along with retargeting, which cause users to see ads "following in them around" from one site to another"(Don Marti,2017). That's something I have notice too, once I look at something online, I start seeing ads for it everywhere.

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“Advertisers are paying off ad-blockers to show users ‘acceptable ads’”

This reading opened my eyes to how messy the whole ad-blocking world actually is. I used to think ad blockers were simple, you install one and gets rid of ads, end of story. But there is clearly some big ad blocker companies taking money to let certain ads through. The reading explains that ads from huge companies like Amazon, Reddit, and even Google are still shown to "up to 200 million ad blocker users"(Sven Taylor, 2020) because of something called the Acceptable Ads program.
One thing that stood out to me was the part that says users are "opted into the Acceptable Ads program by default."(Sven Taylor, 2020) Which really bothered me because it makes it sound like we are being signed up for soemething we don't know about, they are definitely putting the information about the paid ads in small text when installing and if we think about it, how many people are actually believing that all their ads are gone, when in reality some ads are getting through because the companies paid for it.

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“Google ad for GIMP.org served info-stealing malware via lookalike site”

This article made me worried about clicking ads. It says there was "a Google ad that'd appear to take you to the open source graphics editor's official website 'GIMP.org"(Ax Sharma, 2022). That shows how real the ad looked, even though it was fake. When people clicked the ad they got a file called "Setup.exe." The article says the file is "an info-stealing trojan called VIDAR"(Ax Sharma, 2022). I don't know all the technical words, but that means the file steals things from your computer like "passwords, cookies, history, and credit cards details" (Ax Sharma, 2022), which sounds really dangerous. The attackers also used tricks to make the malware look normal which its why it the article mentions the "binary padding" (Ax Sharma, 2022), to make a small file look like a big 700 MB installer so it seems real to trick people into clicking the ad.
After reading this, I will be more careful with not clicking ads that look like official sites and only downloading things from the actual oage, not from an ad.