Also agreed. I've already long since pulled almost everything I use away from Google, with the exception of my cell phone (I'm a Fi subscriber).
Now I'm beginning to look into alternative cell phone plans, simply because Google's insistence on advertising doesn't sit well with me.
I currently work at an advertising agency (doing IT stuff), and I'm in the process of job hunting for this exact reason. I can't justify spending my time helping people who are insistent on finding new, increasingly intrusive ways to advertise.
If google moves forward with this we should all start randomly clicking on ads until advertisers start to realize that they're basically throwing their money away on advertising that doesn't work :) Let's hit 'em where it hurts.
Yes, let's beat Google by giving them more money by increasing the overall advertising hit rate in an organic, nearly untraceable fashion. Wait, what was the logic of that again?
From my experience, many advertisers do so little QA, they'll hardly notice that their conversion rate dips a little. And if they do, they'll look for problems elsewhere: Google is never wrong.
There are people who click on random ads professionally, and Google has been fighting them for a long time. Whatever equilibrium has been reached is probably stable. The best thing to do is block ads and to do our best to stay off the grid - the only thing that no statistician can work with is the absence of data.
They can absolutely work with the absence of data, because you are still doing other things around the web that generates data. They will see you doing other interactions but not ad requests, and they can figure things out from that.
Disabling JS in your browser is like cutting off your leg because one of your toes hurts. It might solve the toe problem, but it's not an ideal solution.
It does not allow blocking Google\any tracking and Google ads, essentially, and gives the Ad industry (and malware) a way to circumvent the blocker with modern tech, because it is a non smart ad blocker but a dumb filter list from 2002.
This is fully intended to give Google the ability to use sophisticated scripts to serve ads and track you despite blocking. Everything else Google says about this is bull!
They probably already have the tech set up. And that real blocking still works for Enterprisr customers is the nail in thr coffin.
If you care about a usable Web, STOP USING CHROME.
Google is has become the #1 anti user and anti freedom company. They want to make money from Ads and tracking, so dont think they will allow you to block ads.
> It does not allow blocking Google\any tracking and Google ads
As per the article, you can still use a rule set to block. Whilst undoubtably less powerful, I would expect that could still be used to block Google stuff.
Why would you expect that? It seems to me that Google does this precisely because they have tech to circumvrnt dumb- style list blocking, but not more advanced heuristics.
Except that list really is just bloated with rules that don't do anything anymore.
> We measure how EasyList affects web browsing by applying EasyList to a sample of 10,000 websites. We find that 90.16% of the resource blocking rules in EasyList provide no benefit to users in common browsing scenarios.
Part of the point of an adblocker is to protect you in uncommon browsing scenarios. This is almost like saying that a malware list is bloated because some of the hashes its storing are uncommonly downloaded. Having as close to full coverage as possible is important.
It also opens up an attack vector for advertisers that they absolutely will exploit. With unlimited rules, there's no reason for ad networks not to use a few domains and serve their ads from a few sources. With a hard limit, there's a strong incentive for networks to collectively try and flood the lists with tons of different domains until we run out of room to include all of them.
> the possibility of tweaking the 30k limit.
This has been the number one complaint about the proposal from day one. If at this point the Chrome team still hasn't decided to tweak the limit, I just don't see how there's not gonna be any new argument past this point that anyone can make to convince them.
Comparing it to a malware list is a bit extreme, isn't it? In one case, you actually get infected, in the other, you see one ad. Your next point about advertisers abusing it is a good one though.
I believe in the response, they said they are running benchmarks to see the performance hit, so they are definitely still looking at tweaking the limit.
I don't think the consequences are the same, but I do think the underlying idea is applicable.
Two things to keep in mind:
A) uBlock Origin doesn't just protect me from ads, it also protects me from many trackers. I'm in the (maybe minority, I don't know) camp that says that excessive tracking and de-anonymization attempts cause people tangible harm. They're not as drastic or as harmful as installing malware on my computer, but I put these practices in the same category as a malicious attack.
B) Under the most recent stats I've checked, Malvertising has almost surpassed general unsafe sites like porn/torrents as a source of consumer malware. Even Google Ads aren't immune from some of these attacks[0]. So for less computer-literate friends that I have, I consider a gimped adblocker to be a malware risk source.
But to your point, maybe a less emotionally charged comparison could be Chrome's automatic whitelist for autoplaying videos. Nobody is going to die if a video autoplays on their tablet, but at a fundamental level the point of blocking autoplay is to actually block it, everywhere. Not to block some of it. People didn't want Google trying to guess which video sites were the most annoying, they just wanted Google to turn off autoplay.
In the same sense, if someone installs an extension that says it's going to block ads and trackers, I don't think it's unreasonable for a consumer to want it to block all of the ads (or at least as many as is possible to detect), not just some of them on the X most popular websites.
It has the advantage of being faster, with the disadvantage of being less dynamic. Existing rule lists will need to be slimmed down. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because all they ever do is grow without being pruned of old rules.
It seems to me people are upset because they read the title and misinterpreted it to me that adblocking as a whole is going away. But to be fair, even the article itself does a poor job of clarifying that.
Google has not shared any actual evidence that there's a performance gain to be had. Non-google benchmarks of uBO show it not being a performance problem in the first place, so there simply isn't much room to be faster than it.
uBO is not the only adblocker around. It's likely not even the most popular. These changes will apply to all of them, bringing the baseline of performance up.
The article says that current ad blocking extensions stops the request from even being made to the ad server, while the new version of Chrome will remove the ability for a plug in to stop a web request.
No, I don't think that is correct. You can still stop a web request, but you can only stop it by providing chrome with a list of url patterns to block. The current method passes the url being requested to the extension, which can then decide to block it or not.
The new way has the extension give a list of patterns to block to chrome, and from there it will block any request that matches.
The stated reason is that this is for privacy, to prevent extensions from being able to gather data about every request a browser makes. Currently, a malicious extension could send every url a user visits to some central collection server. The new way prevents that.
Is the trade off worth it? I personally think no, but I do think many people don't realize that as blockers have the capability to collect every url you visit if they wanted.
It's not for privacy, the people who were saying that are either mistaken or intentionally lying. It's clear to see because the observational capabilities of the API aren't being removed -- only the blocking capabilities. So the privacy issue is still there. Supposedly, this change is just for performance.
What I mean is the fact that they are deprecating the blocking API. That wasn't an action taken for privacy's sake. Otherwise, why wouldn't they deprecate the observational API too?
the internet without an adblocker is simply not usable for me.