The New Oil

Many of us know we can do better on the internet. We know that we’re not using good security practices, and many of us know we’re being tracked online. Getting started can be overwhelming and intimidating for some, but I think the new year is a great excuse to take those first steps. In this blog post, I want to share one of the absolute easiest but most powerful things you can do to start regaining your privacy and security online: block ads.

Ads, Ads, Everywhere

We’re no stranger to advertising online. Many of us have come to accept it as the price for free products. And there’s certainly an argument to be made. Everything about our online experience costs money: servers, developers, bandwidth, you name it. But most of us can agree that advertising has become excessive. Visiting YouTube on devices that don’t block ads always appalls me: ads under the video, to the right of the video, overlayed over the video, at the start of the video, and sprinkled around the video. My particular ad-blocking strategy sometimes leaves blank spaces on websites where ads go, and I can’t imagine reading the news without an ad-blocker: it seems like every paragraph or two there’s a big white space that just says “advertisement” for me. We are bombarded with ads at every possible turn. And that doesn’t even being to include apps, which might interrupt you periodically or have banners for you to accidentally click on.

At first glance, ads may not seem directly related to privacy or security, but they’re closely tied to both.

Ads & Cybersecurity

For starters, let’s talk about “malvertising,” a portmanteau of “malicious advertising.” This is when someone takes advantage of an advertisement to try to steer you toward malware such as a virus. This could take several different forms, but a common one is when someone sets up a fake website with a malicious version of a popular program and then runs ads – which in search engines often look indistinguishable from legitimate search results – to try to trick you into downloading their malware instead of the real, original program. This happened with a popular password manager called Keepass, but it's incredibly common. In 2023, cybersecurity firm and antivirus maker Malwarebytes found a 42% increase in month-over-month incidents just like this. It’s become such a problem that even the FBI now recommends blocking ads.

Ads & Privacy

Unfortunately, things get even worse on the privacy front. While most of us may be attentive enough to avoid malvertising or unlikely to ever encounter it in the first place, nearly all of us are falling victim at all times to real-time bidding. What is real-time bidding? The Electronic Frontier Foundation explained it well:

RTB is the process used to select the targeted ads shown to you on nearly every website and app you visit. The ads you see are the winners of milliseconds-long auctions that expose your personal information to thousands of companies a day….The bid request may contain personal information like your unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information….A key vulnerability of real-time bidding is that while only one advertiser wins the auction, all participants receive the data. Indeed, anyone posing as an ad buyer can access a stream of sensitive data about the billions of individuals using websites or apps with targeted ads.

This is an issue that’s only recently begun to have a spotlight really shone on it. I recommend Byron Tau’s Means of Control for an in-depth dive into this issue, though Wired has a good write up from just this week about a data breach of data collected via real-time bidding that shows just how much data companies can gather and from a wide variety of sources. Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons has also covered this topic a few times, if you prefer podcast format over reading.

The Solution

Blocking ads will not only make browsing the internet a more pleasant experience, but it will offer a layer of protection for your privacy and cybersecurity. There are two solutions I recommend for blocking ads.

The easiest solution is simply to switch to the Brave browser. Brave comes with a built-in ad- and tracker-blocker that will not only make your online experience better, but also protect your privacy in additional ways, all right out-of-the-box with no adjustment required from the user. Brave is available on all operating systems. (You could also switch to Firefox, which some people prefer for a number of reasons, but Firefox doesn't come with any ad-blocking by default, so you'll have to add the uBlock Origin extension I discuss in the next paragraph.)

If you feel like you aren’t ready to leave your current browser yet for whatever reason (though you should really try it, it’s probably easier than you think), I would urge you to at least add the uBlock Origin extension to your browser. Brave’s blocklists are based on many of the same ones used by uBlock Origin, so you’ll still get a lot of the same ad- and tracker-blocking but without some of the more advanced privacy features offered by Brave.

Brave and uBlock Origin will only protect you in the browser, however, and won’t defend against any in-app ads or tracking. For this, I recommend looking into AdGuard. AdGuard claims to be able to block ads even inside apps on mobile devices, and they have a good reputation in the privacy community.

Final Thoughts

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that the internet is not free. It costs money to develop an app or website, pay for hosting and bandwidth, and all the other things that come with running an online product or service. It seems only fair to admit that by blocking ads, we are robbing many of the sites we visit out of income, even if only a few cents (or fractions of a cent) at a time. In large enough numbers, that really ads up. So please, if there are any websites you visit regularly or creators you watch often, find other ways to support them like buying merch, signing up on Patreon, buying a subscription, or other methods available.

Tech changes fast, so be sure to check TheNewOil.org for the latest recommendations on tools, services, settings, and more. You can find our other content across the web here or support our work in a variety of ways here. You can also leave a comment on this post here: Discuss...