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How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

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Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#171

Post by ryanmerket »

hinkley wrote: post #168
rahoulb wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking, but I don't think most people know or care very much about that. I speak to a lot of people who find "retargeting" deeply creepy. The awareness of the problem is there. However, they don't understand what causes it, how it works or that it's even possible to stop it.

Its also just bad salesmanship. There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up. So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact t…

Wait. What does retargeting have to do with Amazon’s Engineering culture? Seems like a large leap in logic. Couldn’t it just as easily say “well, that’s Facebook’s caching layer not updating fast enough to remove finished campaigns?”

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#172

Post by anonymousab »

vgeek wrote: post #9
marktangotango wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought as well, google/alphabet has a real PR problem here.

They won't discriminate against all 3rd parties at first, it would be too obvious. They will quietly grow the list of blocked 3rd parties, with the intention of gradually shifting all spend to AdSense/DoubleClick platforms.

Given how many bad sites and bad ads there are out there, I think the list would quickly grow even if Google had the best of intentions.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#173

Post by kodablah »

ams6110 wrote: post #112

Slightly tangential, but: > ... Google Safe Browsing service. Chrome checks every website you visit against a list of malicious websites that it periodically downloads from Safe Browsing. So I have always disabled Safe Browsing because I assumed it was sending all my browsing activity to Google in real time to be checked. But this sounds like it's checking locally from a downloaded list. Anyone know if that's correct…

It's half and half from what I'm reading. It checks a local list for the sha-256 hash or partial hash. Then, if found, it phones home with the partial hash it found.

If you don't want to read [0], I think the Golang parser/lookup at [1] is a reasonable interpretation of what they're doing, but not sure. You can see there that the hashes generated are of different-host-combinations + different-URL-path-combinations. They do the partial hash check in a DB (local, downloaded periodically). If there's a partial hash in the DB, they phone home w/ that partial hash for the full hashes and check if it matches.

So Google gets the partial hash of a URL it had told you could be bad. They return the full hashes for that partial hash. We can hope (and see) that the partial hashes do not match a broad set (and they are host possibility + URL path combo possibility). Surely Google has something that maps the hashes to actual URL patterns, but like the other commenter said, the partial hash you send is only sent when it matches a local DB already.

0 - https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/safe_browsin...

1 - https://github.com/google/safebrowsing/

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#175

Post by fwdpropaganda »

mderazon wrote: post #145
fwdpropaganda wrote: post #99

Here's how my ad blocker works: - Install uMatrix (firefox/chrome add-on) - Manually whitelist javascript Get uMatrix folks.

Don't get how it's different from ublock or what's the benefits of umatrix

Does ublock allow to block all javascript and cookies by default, and manually whitelist javascript or cookies domain by domain?

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#176

Post by hinkley »

ryanmerket wrote: post #171
hinkley wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also just bad salesmanship. There was an electronics store called CompUSA. I didn’t always shop there but I did buy Christmas presents there. Then one year they started using transparent shopping bags. Which means you can’t shop for anybody that is on the trip with you, or lives with you. It made it a hassle to keep a secret and I just gave up. So now if I am looking at jewelry for my partner, ads for the exact t…

Wait. What does retargeting have to do with Amazon’s Engineering culture? Seems like a large leap in logic. Couldn’t it just as easily say “well, that’s Facebook’s caching layer not updating fast enough to remove finished campaigns?”

Its a casualty of their philosophy on code. If the numbers look good it doesn’t matter whose idea it was or how crazy it sounded. They tell you this pretty much at the top of the indoctrination material.

It certainly keeps them out of analysis paralysis, no question. But any armchair psychologist can tell you this is essentially numbing. Not listening to your fears or emotions can be as unhealthy as dwelling on them. Zero is not the only alternative to Too Much. These things take balance.

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#179

Post by nsgi »

rdiddly wrote: post #150
eli wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people no longer feel the need to install a stronger ad blocker why is that bad?

They're doing it, not to block ads, but to make sure ads reach you. So the question gets philosophical in a hurry. What is the "goodness" of an otherwise generous act done for self-serving reasons? Is it good or bad to write a check to an orphanage for the publicity? Is it good or bad to save someone's life because they owe you money? Is it good or bad to block certain ads to make sure other ads still reach you?

It may not be good, but it's not being done on the pretence of being good. The question is, how is it bad?

Re: How Google Chrome’s ad blocker works

#180

Post by hackme1234 »

mabbo wrote: post #89

I think there's good intentions by Google here. That said, let's talk about the worst-case scenario, the thing that Google could actually do that is entirely anti-competitive. Step 1: Google finds a large number of competitors who are doing pretty well playing by their rules. Google finds some trait they all have in common. Google then modifies their own ads to not have that trait. Step 2: Google declares the given t…

Exactly. Leave the adblocking to the third party extensions. Hopefully there will an option to opt-out.
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