Here's the codebase[1], feel free to point out where in there it is so you can be headline news on HN/Reddit/{Insert News Outlet} tomorrow. Maybe you will be the one to finally kill AdBlock Plus, wouldn't you like that?
1: https://github.com/adblockplus/adblockpluscore and https://github.com/adblockplus/adblockplus
This would allow this to be done remotely, and without a user being aware as happened, when a very popular browser downloaded a binary blob, which was noticed by Debian maintainers. Read Chromium's privacy policy. There is nothing that would legally preclude them from doing this.
Also, an older supporting example of company greed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavasoft#Controversies
Either they're keylogging, which has to be done client side, or they're not. Which is it?
I linked you to the client source code. Tell me where in that source code you see a keylogger, and I will personally guarantee your name will be on the front page of this website tomorrow as uncovering what is almost certainly one of the largest keylogging networks in history.
Your "server side" handwaving is bullshit and constitutes evidence that you know nothing at all about how the technology actually works.
If AdBlock were making connections to some server to send back keylogging info, that would be headline news, but requires evidence to be taken seriously.
Right now, you cannot be taken seriously. You can only be taken as a spewer of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
At the very least, one would be able to see the data (or suspicious data, if it is obfuscated) being sent from the web browser to the server in the 'Network' tab of the web browser's inspector/developer-tools. Do you see any such suspicious data being sent from the web browser to the server? Can you post a screenshot if you do?
More fundamentally, your claim is not falsifiable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
i.e. you can't claim something true on the basis of the other person not being able to reasonably have a way of disproving it!
edit: upvoted you because you probably are on smoking something and these people are picking on you for it
N.B. At the time of this comment, the time-stamp of the above comment is 9hrs ago and the account is 13hrs old.
* Ad impressions have gone up - its getting easier and easier to launch sites so the absolute number of ads on the internet is definitely going up. That doesn't speak to either side of the 'ads are dying' claims.
* CPM rates are more or less going down
* As CPM goes down, publishers are looking to recoup their losses, so they use bigger/more invasive ads, and/more ads more .
* Again, this leads to 'Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years'
* Just because there's a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean it's gotten better.
* Native advertising is good and all, but it's out of reach for _a lot_ of people. There's a huge opportunity here to bring quality native advertising to smaller publishers. Maybe there already is, I don't pay too much attention to that specific space.
* Even still, it's naive to say that display advertising (banners, mrecs etc) is limited to just porn sites.
* Feel free to 'name names' - it's no secret that Adblock Plus has it's Acceptable Ads program https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads
* As ads get more invasive and out of control and start to detract from the browsing experience of sites in measurable ways, user's are wanting to take back the control. That's not a scam.
Ad Networks and Publishers (at least the larger ones) have clearly brought this problem on themselves by building great products and websites, and then sticking a really shitty ad network on top of it and suck the performance all out of the site. I've measured this directly by disabling ad code on certain sites and seeing a very significant improvement in performance.
But instead of trying to understand _why_ users are using adblockers, they're instead just sticking their head in the sand and saying that what they're doing now is the only way forward when clearly it's not. As well, I feel while publishers definitely deserve a lot of this criticism, I'm constantly shocked by how little blame Google and other ad networks get.
I get the predicament that smaller publishers are in though. The only way for them monetise their site so it slap Adwords on and call it a day. They see adblockers as a direct assault on them but they can't do anything about it as they have no other way to make money or to improve the quality of the ads. But I think there is a huge opportunity for ad publishers (Google) to accept their responsibility in making the internet better by fixing the reliability and performance of the ads they serve.