Recently my adblocker was broken1. Normally I rely completely on my adblocker in Firefox, the good old uBlock Origin. Luckily I still had my NextDNS filtering, which actually catches quite a few ads, but honestly the experience was less than pleasurable.
Cookie nagging
The first thing I noticed is that so many pages want me to accept their cookies. I have never seen these banners before using my browser, and I assume that uBlock Origin actually blocks a whole lot of these automatically.
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Cookie notices for NZZ (left), Der Bund (middle) and SRF, the state broadcaster (right).
What was even more surprising to me than just seeing them (and how annoying they are) was also the way they appeared. Without exception, all of them used the dark pattern of having accepting all cookies as the main action while declining the cookies was hidden behind an extra click.
And why in the hell Tamedia wants to share my data with 362 partners is beyond me. It appears they just want to sell all my data to basically everyone.
I find the extensive data sharing quite reprehensible and the dark pattern for accepting all the cookies actually indefensible—these organisations should be ashamed of their behaviour.
Pages not finishing loading
Switzerland’s largest online retailer, Galaxus, somehow seems to never finish loading a website without my adblocker. I assume that this has something to do with my blocking at DNS level, but honestly this is just plain weird. I would expect a website to load completely, even when blocking some requests at DNS level.
The morality of running an Ad Blocker
Other people have written about the morality of running an ad blocker. I generally disagree with even the question. Running an ad blocker is a necessary self-defence mechanism for using the web, and it is truly a shame that it has come so far.
In my short time running a browser without an ad blocker (or well, limited ad blocking via DNS only), I was frankly shocked by the ads I was presented. I received ads for Swiss credit cards (that’s probably fine, though I don’t really care for them), advertisement for illegal online gambling (I checked—they are not an accredited Swiss online gambling site). Further, I also received an advertisement for “the Swiss online dating alternative” using an image that I frankly don’t want to recreate here (somehow it was also targeting the completely wrong age group for me, but we’ll let that be for some other time). And these are just the examples on Swiss mainstream newspapers or other mainstream sites.
So before even mentioning the completely excessive tracking by mainstream sites, ads have mostly arrived at the point where it is very hard to differentiate between legit advertising and malvertising. And it’s only getting worse with AI-generated images that appear to generate endorsements by classical Swiss advertisement faces. And again, those are present on big social media platforms. And somehow those platforms seem uninterested in taking action against this kind of scam advertising2.
So the only thing to do really is to block all ads and the invasive tracking. Personally, I would recommend uBlock Origin for the platforms where it’s available. I would strongly recommend not using Google Chrome for a browser. And on mobile, apart from the fancy solutions such as running a custom DNS server that blocks some of the requests, for example on iOS I would recommend Wipr 2, which seems to work as well as possible with the given limitations of Safari browser ad blocking.
I assume that I broke something with the combination of add-ons I have. But it could have been that one of the lists or maybe even the add-on itself was broken; I’m not sure. ↩︎
I have a slight suspicion that they actually don’t care to that point unless there is regulation or fines for them. After all, they still make money with the ads, even if they are scam ads. ↩︎