Re:Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to...
by nine_k on Monday September 29, 2025 @02:21AM
(#45410842)
Frankly, to me it's the other way around, I don't care too much about all that tracking (even though I routinely block most of it), but I do care about the cost of having ads on the page. The cost of my attention, first of all.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.