
AdBlock, NoScript & Ghostery – The Trifecta Of Evil [Opinion] - dsr12
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/adblock-noscript-ghostery-trifecta-evil-opinion/
======
kijin
> _those ads pay my salary, as well as the other full time editors,
> professionals writers, and dedicated server costs_

It depends. If your ads are pay-per-click, and if I would never click your ads
anyway, did I hurt you in any way by not loading those ads in the first place?
Pay-per-view is a different problem, but I have yet to see pay-per-view ads
that I consider non-intrusive. After all, ads need to be intrusive in order to
generate clicks. There's a conflict of interest right there.

> _The modern Internet MUST have Javascript. So when you use NoScript, you’re
> breaking the Internet._

No, I'm not breaking the Internet. I'm only degrading (or improving, depending
on who you ask) my own experience of the Internet, which I have every right to
do. Just like I have every right to tell my browser to display all text in
green-on-black 12pt Courier, or in any of the thousands of unexpected ways in
which a computer program can consume HTML. If I broke into your server and
removed a couple of script elements from your home page, that would be
breaking the Internet.

> _So even if a tracking script does follow some of your browsing habits, is
> it such a big deal? At the very worst end of the scale ... they’re being
> used for what’s called a behaviourally-targeted market._

I don't want behaviorally-targeted marketing, and if you'd like to convince me
otherwise, you'd better give me a better argument than "I wanna make money."
Plenty of honest people have made plenty of money without tracking people's
behavior across websites. Just calling your opposition "conspiracy theorists"
will not do.

If it is "evil" to make HTTP requests to some resources and not others, I
would gladly be evil. If you don't like this, you are welcome to adjust your
business strategies so that your main audience is too dumb to use AdBlock.

~~~
kehrlann
Strongly agree on the pay-per-click vs pay-per-view ...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we may be shifting towards this pay-
per-click model. Remember GM pulling their ads from Facebook ? Views are still
an important part of a marketing strategy, but it's harder to estimate the
actual benefits of such a campaign (as opposed to clickthrough rate).

This is not the death of online advertising - companies are making huge
profits with a cost-per-click model, eg Criteo... So yes, adblock is changing
the way editors made money. But oh well, isn't the internet threatening the
business model of the music/film industry ?

------
nodata
What a poor article. Some responses:

> [..] Ghostery appears to be the ultimate do-not-track plugin.

Then it's not evil, is it? If you have to manually opt-in by installing an
add-on, how can it be evil?

> AdBlock silently removes all advertising and social buttons

AdBlock exists because users got fed up of massively intrusive advertising. If
advertisers had thought a little more long term, AdBlock would be a dead
project.

> What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while
> happy to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very
> same free content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is
> installed. Talk about hypocrisy.

Asking for money via a different route other than advertising is not
hyprocrisy.

~~~
chalst
> If advertisers had though[t] a little more long term

Quite. It is ironic that the author is appealing to users to think a little
more long term and tolerate all these cynical, short-termist ads to support
his preferred revenue stream.

------
DividesByZero
This article conveniently ignores that advertising is a flawed revenue model
in the first place, seeking to attack people who want to access content
without being annoyed - this a natural market reaction. People don't want to
be tracked, they don't want intrusive irrelevant ads, but they clearly want to
access content.

I think AdBlock, NoScript etc. are symptoms of consumers reactions to this
flawed revenue model, not attacks on content creators. Content creators need
to either find some other way to monetize, or else accept that this is the
risk they undertake by monetizing through ads.

Maybe a better way would be to draw down revenue directly from ISPs, since
people access the internet to view this content and ISPs can track which IPs a
given user points at. That does put us on dangerous ground with respect to net
neutrality.

~~~
dmoy
At least for me, NoScript is less a reaction to annoying ads, and more a
reaction to "not wanting to see your god damn web 3.0 flashy bullshit." Unless
I explicitly need to interact with a website, I'll just leave it in a dumb js-
less state so I can read without having random signup forms, broken scrolling,
moving graphics, etc. popping up in my face every minute or two. If those
flashing blinky annoying things are ads, then those are disabled too, but it's
by no means the main reason I use NoScript.

I couldn't understand if the article was serious or not. The point about
AdBlock seems sort of in the right direction, if a bit missing the point - but
the next two just left me scratching my head.

------
smsm42
These guys seem to miss one important thing. The fact they have a business and
try to earn money by doing some things does not put any obligations on me.
They try to write free content and earn money by showings ads. Great idea.
Unfortunately, ads are in 99.99% cases done so badly they really piss me off,
so I don't want to look at them. Should I feel guilty that I am denying those
nice guys earning a living by that? No more than I should be feeling guilty
not going to McDonalds because I don't like the taste of their sauce (true
story!) and this denying nice people that work there some of their revenue. If
these guys say that if I'm not going to look at ads I'm not welcome on their
site - fine, I won't come there anymore. I never heard of them before today
anyway, and didn't feel a gaping void in my life. But I won't feel guilty
because their business model makes me physically unwell. I tried browsing with
AdBlock off, and it's hell. Most ads are crappy, repetitive, annoying as hell
and completely irrelevant to me. I feel no obligation to subject myself in my
home on my computer to this abuse. You want my money? Do something I want to
buy. You want me looking and clicking on stuff? Do something I want to look on
and click on. Your business model doesn't work this way? Do it without me or
change it.

~~~
zbychuk
Is it so difficult to understant? I offer you a content which was paid by
advertiser. You pay by watching these adverts. If you block my adverts it is
like you sneaked to the cinema without bying a ticket. You do not like adverts
on my site, ok fine, just do not read/watch my content. Or as another option,
just pay me directly the same money I would get from adverts. It is a small
amount anyway, and you and I will be happy

~~~
smsm42
I didn't sneak in. I was invited in. If you don't want me in - put a gate in
front, just like any cinema theater does. I just won't visit.

> just do not read/watch my content

I'm pretty sure I don't already, and wasn't really planning in the future
either. Many content providers actually take considerable efforts to get me to
read their content. I'll stay with them, I don't have too much time to waste
on reading random stuff on internet anyway.

> just pay me directly the same money I would get from adverts

To get my money you first have to give me something that I value more than
money. What have you got to offer?

------
armored_mammal
I couldn't use the Internet without Adblock and Flashblock. Just like I
couldn't read a novel if it every page were surrounded by flashing neon and
ads randomly inserted between paragraphs, I can't read your website if the
content is dominated by ads. Let me spell it out - if your website is worse
than a newspaper, it deserves to be adblocked. Every site I've seen with ads,
well, they're worse than a newspaper.

As for feeling entitled, I just want to point out that bit torrents trackers
have never had trouble supporting themselves without ads or paid content of
any kind... (Despite which I'm happy to support things like my local public
radio station.)

(Though I'm a big fan of Ghostery, too -- the amount of trackers sites use is
ridiculous and who knows what someone is able to do with the data.)

Also, my new pet peeve: links that don't go where they say.

Google is especially bad about this -- any link in your Gmail goes to some
Google URL that then sends you to where you really wanted to go -- though
plenty of other site are doing it too. They could be sending you to malware-r-
us and making it look like a link to happy-happy-choo-choo.com. I think
browsers should refuse to display links that don't display the same location
they're targeting, however it's done. I think it might be on the way out
though -- it seems to have been 'undoned' from Google news.

------
rdtsc
> What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while
> happy to destroy our revenue stream – (...) asking for PayPal donations when
> the plugin is installed.

So put a button asking for Paypal donations on your blog then?

> Not only do you drag webpages 10 years into the past, but you prevent
> essential modern page components from loading

Actually I didn't mind the internet 10 years that much. There is quite a bit
of content out there that I consume that looks pretty good as static content
without js running.

> users enjoying our content, without creating revenue.

So? Stop posting content then.

This sounds a bit like appeal of the horse buggy maker when cars started to be
popular. "Please keep us and our families in mind everytime you think of
buying one of those new self-propelled buggies made by Ford..."

------
jbk
While I can undestand (not share) his opinion about AdBlock, I have a more
difficult time understanding his grudge against Ghostery.

Ghostery makes it very easy to block all social buttons and analytics (like
google-analytics, that fails to load 1 time out of 10), that make my browsing
slow, or even stall.

Moreover, tracking on the internet and advertisement tracking is not the same
as the one on TV, which is just grouping ads with shows of the relevant
category. On TV, even if noone was watching it, those ads would be put
together. Not on the Net.

~~~
davidarkemp2
Do you have sky? Sky know more about your TV viewing habits than you think.
And they have the technology to sell that information. Why do you think
they've been pushing new Sky+ boxes at everyone. This isn't conspiracy, I've
have a Sky representative tell me this.

~~~
jbk
No, I don't. I don't have anything more than the DVB-T and DVB-S channels.

------
regularfry
A publisher has, as I see it, three choices if they want to make money off
adverts.

1\. They can ignore AdBlock, and spend money dealing with the support problems
that the broken site causes.

2\. They can block AdBlock users, and spend money dealing with the PR
backlash.

3\. They can take AdBlock into account designing the site, and spend money on
a graceful enhancement JS system.

Option 3 is close to what Reddit do, and I think they've got the best
approach: spot when people aren't using AdBlock, and thank them for it.

AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery exist. _People will use them, and you cannot
stop them_. This is just the cost of doing business.

------
porlw
My problem with ads and social networking buttons is the latency they
introduce in to browsing.

If a page load hangs, most of the time it turns out to be waiting for a
response from a third party web site, which has no relevance to the content I
want to see.

Since I installed Ghostery I find my browsing experience is much faster.

For ads, I use Adblock but I start with an empty URL list. I add servers that
host obnoxious ads (animated or over-laying content) to the list as I go about
my browsing. As long as a site uses a well-behaving ad network the ads will
display.

------
iuqiddis
I think the problem is that the post author assumes data tracking isn't too
big a deal. E.g. he says, "If company X puts a cookie on the New York Times
and MSNBC site, and you browse to both those and Wikipedia, it only knows
about the two upon on which it was placed" but the more likely scenario is
that company X puts a cookie in a dozen more sites, and then keeps that
information on their servers for however long.

What they do do with it, how long they keep it for, whether its anonymous or
not is all unknown. I'd rather use ghostery and not worry about all that.

I actually wrote how pervasive the tracking is a while back,
[http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize-
tracki...](http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize-tracking-on-
the-web/)

------
batiudrami
The author claims that Adblock asking for donations is hypocritical. It is
not. Hypocritical would be if the Adblock+ website had advertisements which
were automatically whitelisted [1]. This is just asking for money for a useful
tool, which is where the internet is headed.

[1] I seem to recall this actually happening for a plugin, but couldn't find
it.

~~~
samuellb
NoScript used to unblock its own ads from AdBlock+ when installed:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoScript#AdBlock_Plus>

~~~
krichman
NoScript also whitelists the websites of its author by default. I have a
bittersweet relationship with that plugin.

------
tomflack
Why don't sites more often block (or just show a message to) users of Adblock?
Is that traffic more valuable than not? Are they hoping visitors will link
articles to non-Adblock using people? It seems to me like there is a value in
users who don't see your ads, or you'd just block them.

I subscribe to Arstechnica premiere to remove the ads, I have Adblock disabled
on overclockers.com.au, The Verge. I subscribe to offtopic.com at a level that
removes ads. I contributed to the Penny-Arcade ad-removing kick starter.

Everything else has its ads blocked because you need to prove your worth and
trustworthiness to me after two decades of sliding in to the abyss.

If you don't want me, block me. Don't let me see your content.

~~~
aerique
Smart sites detect Adblock and ask you to consider disabling it for their
site. That approach seems to make the best business sense to me (as in: I do
consider and disable Adblock for those sites, unless their ads are annoying in
which case it gets turned on again).

~~~
krzyk
This is probably the worst thing author can do. I personally close the page
right away.

~~~
tomflack
Why? As a user of Adblock it seems totally fair to me.

------
slavak
Here's a list of the trackers Ghostery blocks on his website: \- AWeber \-
Federated Media \- Gigya Socialize \- Google +1 \- Google AdSense \- Google
Analytics \- Twitter Button

I could see his point if he was just using Google Analytics to see traffic
statistics for his website. You want to give free access to my personal and
browsing data to all of these?! Go fuck yourself and your anti-Ghostery rant.

------
thaumaturgy
Oh look, this again.

1\. The internet was already a pretty neat place before online advertising
became ubiquitous. There was lots of good content online, lots of curated
databases of information, lots of good reference sites. If a bunch of blogs
gradually dry up and blow away because they can't be profitable enough through
advertising anymore, fine. They'll be replaced.

2\. AdBlock is not destroying the internet. The internet was destroyed by
advertising. AdBlock became popular as a direct result of the proliferation of
websites that were 20% content and 80% advertising, fluff, and nonsense. It
became popular as a direct result of blinking, jumping, moving, popping-under
advertising elements. It became popular as a direct result of users having
their browsers (and machines) compromised and infected by ad networks that did
not vet their advertisers correctly. Content owners were perfectly willing to
let the administration of advertising be somebody else's problem, and when
that somebody else decided not to do their job either, users got screwed and
they turned to AdBlock.

3\. AdBlock does not, to my knowledge, block most donation requests, so I
don't get where he thinks it's hypocritical that AdBlock is donation-
supported.

4\. AdBlock also recently rolled out a by-default "non-intrusive ads are OK"
setting for all Firefox users. This led to quite a bit of controversy, which I
think mostly illustrates just how sick of advertising a lot of people are.
But, it stuck. So, now you can't even argue anymore that AdBlock is terrible
because it's blocking all of your revenue.

5\. Users may not be entitled to your content, but you aren't entitled to your
users' attention, either. For instance: more and more sites lately seem to be
using a Lightbox on page load to ask you to sign up for their stupid
newsletter, or follow them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook. As a content
owner, you're certainly allowed to do that. And, users are certainly allowed
to install an extension that will block that, too.

6\. I happen to agree that NoScript does more harm than good, as a practical
matter, given current standards of web development. However, again, I fully
understand why it exists: a huge number of attempts to compromise web
browsers, track users against their will, or otherwise abuse their trust, is
done through Javascript. Back when compromised Wordpress websites were a
serious problem, _every single one I saw_ \-- not a small number, cleaning
them up was something we did at the time -- used Javascript in the footer of
one or more files to attempt to hit the browser. NoScript protected against
that.

7\. I didn't think Ghostery would be a very big deal, but I installed it a
while back and have been completely flummoxed at the sheer amount of stuff
blocked by it on websites. Loading a site and seeing a 20-deep list of social
network buttons is merely visually annoying; having them all load their own
little scripts and other bullshit is enough to incentivize me to block them.

AdBlock, Ghostery, and NoScript aren't ruining the internet; uninhibited
commercialism and a complete lack of respect for users is.

~~~
hollerith
>The internet was already a pretty neat place before online advertising became
ubiquitous.

It was already a very neat place when it tolerated almost no advertising at
all.

Under the restrictions on "commercial use" that were in place until 1993 or
so, although it was allowed for a job hunter to post his resume (to a
newsgroup like ba.jobs whose purpose was to connect job hunters and
employers), looking for _contract work_ rather than permanent employment was
not allowed because it was considered advertising of consulting services and
consequently a commercial use.

I liked the internet of 1992 a great deal. I couldn't use it to buy
nutritional supplements or shoes, and I couldn't use it to reconnect with old
friends from high school (since those old friends were not on the internet)
but it was a better tool for learning than the community college I was
attending at the time.

~~~
zbychuk
Really? You were happy without search engines, without google maps, without
Microsoft or Apple download pages, without any social sites, without wiki?
Maybe you were, I was not.

~~~
msfd
Wikipedia and OpenStreeMap would actually be possible since they are not
commercial...

------
bovik
"What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while happy
to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very same free
content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is installed.
Talk about hypocrisy."

    
    
      What an idiotic comparison. The adblock author is directly asking money (voluntary donations actually) for something useful he made for your use. Straightforward quid-pro-quo. You know... commerce. What the hell is wrong with that ?

------
sarnowski
Using Ghostery and Adblock feels like your Internet connection doubles in
speed.

------
vlasta2
Did not know about Ghostery (I am a lazy user) and decided to install it.
Thanks for the article ;-).

------
mbailey
As long ad ad networks contine to try their hardest to track me online I will
still unapologetically use these extensions. Maybe that all these things exist
should show you where the real problem is.

------
dekoning97
I think ads are just the things that destroy the internet! And its good there
is an thing to stop the greedy basterds who "make money" with all their
adverts!

------
nikcub
Very similar to the arguments against Tivo of 10 years ago.

Instead of dying the television and cable networks accepted the future,
accepted technology, evolved and now provide time-shifted content viewing
themselves.

And tracking may be useful, but it doesn't mean that users shouldn't have the
option to opt-out.

------
Create
ads are an euphemism; as if they would only inform you of something, that then
you would feel compelled to purchase. Instead, they track people. Build
profiles. Store profiles. Which are the to be used. Sure, you can make your
salary by being a collaborator, but history will set you in perspective:

"With hindsight, we didn't need this giant network of unofficial
collaborators," he adds. "We were too worried about what might happen. We
should have trusted people more."

But they did not trust the people when they were in power.

And thousands of fragmented lives, and fragmented documents, still bear
powerful witness to how a secret police force spread throughout a society.

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19344978>

------
nivla
Wow what a interesting conversation we have here. I was surprised to find
majority of the comments advocating against displaying ads and also against
using tracking to deliver a targeted one, yet whenever a question pops up
about the best way to drive traffic to your startup, the top voted answer
remains using adwords. facebook ads so on. Keep in mind, ads: no matter how
much we hate them, every company uses them for growth. Imagine a world where
everyone uses adblock, there would not be any place left to advertise your
product, and most will resort to spamming links across forums/blogs/emails.
Just my 2cents thought.

PS: But annoying ads on the other hand are a completely different issue and
needs to addressed.

------
bobds
> The modern Internet MUST have Javascript. So when you use NoScript, you’re
> breaking the Internet.

All the Javascript, Flash, Webfonts, etc are breaking MY Internet. Why should
I let everyone send executable code to my browser?

------
steveax
All the social buttons and 3rd party crap on that website crashed Safari on my
iPhone. Lord what I would pay to have Adblock and noscript on my iPhone.

~~~
saidinesh5
[http://mathdotrandom.blogspot.com/2010/12/block-ads-on-pc-
an...](http://mathdotrandom.blogspot.com/2010/12/block-ads-on-pc-android-with-
uber-hosts.html) this should probably appply to iOS too...

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting to read the comments here. It is an interesting dilemma that the
web site finds itself in. My personal opinion is that if it cared that much
about things like adblock it should just not load. I totally agree that it
should have the right to not load and I have the right to not show ads if it
did.

I agree with the author that nothing on the Internet is 'free', its just not
necessarily paid for by the person kicking off the transaction. As advertising
evolves you'll find that a whole bunch of sites will go away because they
aren't worth advertising on (user's don't engage) and the owners can't afford
to pay the costs. I saw an article in an advertising trade magazine that
suggested nearly 25% of the current ad supported sites would go off the air if
there was no click fraud. I've done a bit of research but not enough to
confirm or deny how close that number is to reality. There was a pretty good
sized group of smart people inside Google dedicated to ferreting out stuff
like that.

------
alter8
<http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Disguised_Ads> are by far the worst ones,
pretending to be part of the navigation. Browsing without blocking them is
like driving on a road with posters covering the traffic signs.

------
dude8
Advertisers have a financial incentive to track you as much as possible and
are constantly engineering their trackers to do it even better. Users are on
the side of a losing team if they don't stand up. I read 3 sentences one was
"They can't track you in different tabs" baloney.

------
scriptproof
My advice is AdBlock would have been a honest tool if the users were allowed
to block the ads on a site when they are annoying rather than unblock them on
a site when they are not - that rarely someone does.

------
nugget
I'm confused why there's no effective, tech-driven advertiser response to
Adblock. Code wise, it seems to me that only a whitelist based blocker should
work; blacklist based blockers can be subverted by ad networks routing through
dynamic proxies. If I'm a DSP, I simply obfuscate my code and domains every
two hours, forever, and defeat all blockers. Am I missing something here?

~~~
regularfry
It's a slippery slope and an arms race that doesn't end well for the
advertiser. By using AdBlock, the user has expressed a definite preference
_not_ to see adverts. If you manage to get your advert past that, what have
you gained? You've associated your content with scummy practices and given a
member of the public a negative impression of whatever it is you're
advertising.

Of course, it's possible that you just don't care, but fundamentally what
you're proposing is a technical solution to a human problem, and we all know
how well they end up working.

------
givan
If your content is valuable then people will pay, advertising is not the only
revenue model.

------
rizumu
Hopefully add-art will have a new release soon. "Add-Art is a Firefox plugin
that replaces ads on websites with rotating curated art images." <http://add-
art.org/>

------
tete
To all the folks with nice ads. Get them added to this list:

[https://easylist-
downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...](https://easylist-
downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.txt)

------
SwearWord
Here's is my ONE issue with adblock.

We have a clothing recommendation engine that helps people discover clothes
and we wanted to provide the service ad free. We chose a platform called
viglink which affiliates the existing outbound links to the clothing vendors
and if the user ends up purchasing something we are given a commission.

I think this is a fair model where we are compensated for our service and the
user is 100% unaware and not bothered.

However, in the past month adblock has decided to block this despite the fact
it provided zero nuisance to the end user. We managed to create work arounds
but it's a frustrating issue.

~~~
nodata
When you brought this up with the Adblock folks, what did they answer?

~~~
SwearWord
We did not receive any response from them, I figure they get plenty of
complaints about people's sites being blocked and ours just got lost in the
mess.

------
Toshio
What I find most annoying about ads is their repetitiveness.

How would you like to be asked the same question twice?

On a related note ...

How would you like to be asked the same question twice?

See, I managed to annoy you just by being mildly repetitive.

If an ad is only shown to me once and then never again, I'm more willing to
look at it / click through.

