Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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Should we gatekeep adblockers? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Genuine question as I'm having a dilemma.

I've seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don't even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It's not like they know what they're missing.

I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ad blocker is a terrible misnomer. Go to ublock's github and read the README. Ublock's primary purpose is to protect your right to privacy. Blocking ads is a consequence.

That given, your question could be reframed as "I don't have spyware and my friends do. Should I tell them how to protect themselves at the risk of being spied on again?" An ethical dilemma where only a coward makes the wrong choice.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

This exactly. It's more like a firewall for your browser. Because web browsers are incredibly crap software that's pretty completely ignored privacy and filtering along their development and it's being slowly patched on in tiny kludges and extensions instead of being set in policy from the start.

Of course spam and malware is a hard problem in web browsers. It's been a hard problem everywhere else, too.