Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 179 posts

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#131

Post by Nereus77 »

lostcolony wrote: post #127
PrivWeeble wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean Waterfox, of course?

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#132

Post by rtkwe »

russdpale wrote: post #78
rtkwe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little more hopeful. They have a clear incentive to keep really bad ads off their own services because if they don't a lot of people will just reinstall another ad blocker. If I didn't have to deal with unmutable autoplaying video ads or ads spouting malware I'd be more willing to browse with a limited ad blocker.

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

Sure and there'll be tons of die hards like you who won't stop using blockers. This still makes a lot of sense if it keeps new people from installing a 3rd party blanket ad blocker and eating into ad revenue from Google's own platform.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#133

Post by eeZah7Ux »

Eridrus wrote: post #130
__jal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> slightly menacing sounding

As it should be. They are aggressively capturing and selling people data from phones and browsers, as proven by large amounts of evidence. This is pretty factual, please don't call it "bias".

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#138

Post by pgeorgi »

e12e wrote: post #57
Shank wrote: 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…

What would you add or remove [from that quote] to make it more factual?

Replace "that sells personal information to advertisers" with "that uses personal information to match consumers to advertisers".

Unless Google really sells personal information somewhere, in which case I'd like to know the price tag on the file about me that's supposedly for sale. My understanding is that such a product doesn't exist.

(Disclosure: I work at Google but on Chrome OS, ie. client hardware. No idea what the servers are doing except that I've heard that there must be lots of them.)

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#139

Post by AlexandrB »

anth1988 wrote: post #34
eveningcoffee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you are too naive and part of the problem why the Google has become so dominant. I actually installed an ad-blocker because I could not stand video ads (I would call it TV-cation of the Internet) and that was the easiest way to eliminate them. You argue that people can install another browser and use an ad-blocker with that. This is true for now (given reasonably motivated and knowledgeable users), but G…

I'm not disagreeing that this is possible, but I don't think jumping straight to such a nightmare scenario really does any good. The reason being is that they just don't go that far and it's suddenly seems okay in comparison to what "could" happen. More realistically, I think Google hurts other ad blockers and expands their oligarchic position in the ads space (especially on mobile).

> I'm not disagreeing that this is possible, but I don't think jumping straight to such a nightmare scenario really does any good.

Ten years ago I thought that the level of tracking and corporate surveillance we see today was a nightmare scenario. I was clearly an optimist. Don't be me.

Re: Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker

#140

Post by saiya-jin »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #85
sowbug wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as they already do on Android! This is exclusionary detailing, wouldn't you say? Chrome on Android doesn't have an extensions platform.

That doesn't stop you from using a local proxy to filter ad network traffic, like what Adblock Plus does on android. Adblock Plus was removed from the play store in 2013 [0]. That being said there are other browsers on android that either support extensions (like firefox) or have an adblocker built in. [0]: https://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-android-remove...

This made me switch to firefox in android as my default and only browser a year ago, can't recommend enough. What is this obsession with Chrome anyway? I am a software dev (true, not really frontend these days anymore) and I can't tell the difference (apart from desktop Chrome taking much more memory due to segregated processes)
Post reply on HN