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Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

theintercept.com

121–130 of 179 posts

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just the facts" journalism was always a myth, because journalists inherently choose which facts to report. IMHO The Intercept has been pretty up-front about their POV: they're supposed to be the publication that speaks truth to power, meaning that they're opposed to basically all big institutions (Google, Facebook, big corporations, establishment media, both political parties, the government, all governments, etc.)…

I think journalism itself should go away in its present form (and in the form it has been for the past centuries). Because as it is today, it's held to ridiculously low standards. I mean, consider how would you handle any kind of factual investigation that actually matters to you. Say your production server suddenly overloaded and died, and everyone in your company is trying to figure out what happened. Would the sea…

Lol unfortunately reality is a little more complicated than your contrived and arbitrary scenario

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#122
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The premise that visible business failure harms brands is false. Given that many forms of visible business failure literally cause brands to cease to exist, it seems indisputable that at least some of the time they're harmed.

Some of the times they're harmed, some of the times they're not. There's no correlation, ruling out the slightest possibility of causation. Is it risk management, then? No, because a product with a well known and trusted brand has much higher chances of success. Is Google internationally reducing the success chance of their billion dollar bets? No. The only reasonable conclusion to make is that Google doesn't want to…

>There's no correlation, ruling out the slightest possibility of causation

That sounds like an interesting study, where can I read it?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#123
For me the solution is simple. More of my preferred content is offering honest donation-based support (and receiving fully sufficient funds to operate. The rest is free (the real kind) or paid.

My router just refuses to route to ad servers, and my DNS resolver refuses to resolve their domains.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#124
post #10

> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free. Or they could disable Chrome ad blocking and install their ad blocker of choice. If I'm reading this correctly then no portion of the user population is hurt by this. Power with religious objections to advertising are free to continue using them. Typical users who don't care don't ha…

> plenty of non-Google advertisers are represented in the decision making process

So, it's officially a cartel.

Private entities shouldn't be regulating markets. And the biggest internet advertiser shouldn't be in the ad-blocking market.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#125

>GOOGLE, A DATA MINING and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers Right off the bat this person couldn't even get his facts right. Google doesn't sell personal information to advertisers.

This is a really important distinction that apparently most reporters don't care about - I see this misconception everywhere

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#126
post #19

I still dont understand why simple endorsments dont work for some sites. Just put a text banner somewhere prominent that says "thanks bobs burgers for being our sponsor" there is no way ad blockers could pick that text out of all the other text and block it. And there is no reason anyone would want to block it anyway.

Yeah, but then you've got cases like this: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem... I've been using adblockers for about ten years now, but blocking that just seems over the top and I understand Troy's frustration. I want a blocker to prevent trackers from being loaded and for removing annoying crap from webpages. That includes most ads, newsletter popups, interstitials, maybe social widgets an…

Why is that thing loaded by javascript, and why is it on a different domain from the site (with www vs. without it).

It took way too many steps for me to get to see the sponsor message.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google will never be able to pry uBlock Origin from me! Stay away!

And if Google takes steps to prevent third-party ad blockers from working in Chrome? Or renders them worthless through exceptions to the filtering API? Even if you ignore Google's Funding Choices and its potential to increase adoption of view-ads-or-pay (a lose/lose for privacy, btw) you are very vulnerable if you use Chrome and/or a Google controlled OS. The Coalition for Better Ads won't be helping you by keeping G…

Hello again Firefox

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#128
> Web users will quickly recognize their only options: pay to use the internet, or uninstall the ad blockers and surf the web for free.

Or switch to an open source browser like Chromium/Firefox and go on using the ad-blocker of choice and avoid the pages that charge you.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#129

Let me tell you what will happen: - Google creates built-in adblocker that allows google ads - Google removes the adblockers from Google Store due to some reason - You don't have an adblocker anymore

- You switch to another browser that allows ad blockers or has a good one built-in.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#130
post #13
post #5

> Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers The content in this article, is, for the most part, good content. What annoys me is that The Intercept seems fit to act like a heroic good guy insofar as being completely biased against Google from start to finish in what could have been a mostly informational article. An opening lead like this serves no purpose other than m…

Google is a data mining and extraction company. That's hard to argue with. Are you complaining about the "sells personal information" part?

Google does a lot of different things, but people with an axe to grind often like to label Google as something specific that they dislike.

In this case they call it a data mining company, which is both meaningless due to how vague the term is, but also slightly menacing sounding.

Does Google do things that would fall under a reasonable interpretation of data mining? Definitely. Is it their primary activity? Not by a long shot. Even the people who want to label Google an advertising company have more of a point on a revenue basis. But these characterisations are needlessly reductive and lead you to believe false conclusions like "Google wants all of your data"

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