There's a setting in Adblock Plus that allows you to turn the "unintrusive ads" whitelist off. You don't need a separate add-on. I haven't felt the need to change the setting.

As far as I'm concerned, this is like a malware author asking an antivirus company to not detect some things. And the company acquiescing, because there's no real harm.

But in the end, it's all still malware.

In other words, it's a pretty massive conflict of interest.

If I wanted to look at ads, I wouldn't have installed an ad blocking plugin. Combined with the "private" list that nobody can see, there is plenty of reason to use a fork that has no such conflicts.

For your use case, acceptable ads definitely doesn't fit but a lot of people justify what they're doing as not-unethical (getting content without compensating creators) by saying that they're only protecting themselves from abusive ads, and blocking all ads is basically the only way to do this.

For these people, your malware example falls flat. A more accurate example would be a firewall whitelisting known non-malware software. At least in theory, that's how the acceptable ads feature works.

It's not a private list:

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#list

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...

There are two "allow" methods, one from the acceptable ads list, which is public, and another via an "x-adblock-key" that can be provided in an HTTP header. There is no list of which sites use the key.

as wreegab pointed out earlier

> So in fact there is really a public list and a private list it appears (through the x-adblock-key header), while the public list is presented as all there is to "acceptable ads".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103119

No, there is no private list, it's just the public one. You can check out the key header whitelist here: http://cheme.com/ Visit this site with "Acceptable Ads" enabled and disabled and you will see the difference. Notice the "data-adblockkey" in the source. This was publically announced in their "Acceptable Ads proposal" forum here and later added to the public list: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17699

> Visit this site with "Acceptable Ads" enabled and disabled and you will see the difference

Nowwhere did I say pages with the x-adblock-key were not respecting the "Acceptable ads" setting.

I said that there are more whitelisted sites than just what is presented as the only list in the section titled "How can I see what you are allowing?" on ABP's reference page regarding "acceptable ads" [1].

[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#list

That's right, you didn't say that. You said there is a "public" and a "private" list. To me this sounds like the "private" one is somehow hidden from the public and cannot be seen which isn't the case.

I don't necessarily trust the adblock developers. The whitelist can say that a sitekey is only used on certain sites, but how can I know it isn't also being used on others? If sites want to have their ads white-listed, they should be less sneaky about it and just add `ad` to the class, making it possible for the users to prove that only that ad is whitelisted.

There is no list of sites which utilize the header and do not appear on the main allow list.

It's a whitelist for parked domains...

In what world is a page full of nothing but advertisements considered "unintrusive" and deserving of whitelisting?

Ya, I'd rather not give them money if their policy is to allow some ads if given $.

ABP's free. Getting on the whitelist is also free for "all small- and medium websites and blogs". https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements

If you're ok with blocking ads, I don't see how allowing companies to pay a fee to have them unblocked hurts anyone. If it feels icky then maybe ad blocking is icky.

Yes, but whitelist is supposed to be for unobtrusive and not tracking ads. Then Google pays and… it is on whitelist! I cannot help but think that by using ABP instead of Adblock Edge you are giving ABP developers means to blackmail advertising companies. And not getting the protection you want in the first place.

That's not my understanding of how it works. You cannot pay to get obtrusive or tracking ads on the whitelist. If you are a large company (how exactly that's defined isn't clear), you need to pay to get your unobtrusive ads whitelisted.

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

Google ads are tracking ads, and the ability to track is not listed as an unacceptable criterion.

> You cannot pay to get obtrusive or tracking ads on the whitelist.

> If you are a large company (how exactly that's defined isn't clear), you need to pay to get your unobtrusive ads whitelisted.

Yeah that's a pretty clear conflict of interest, isn't it?

And it's violated right there with Google because the type of tracking ads that Google Ads are shouldn't have been allowed. For a non-paying party. As long as they stay true to their self-imposed rules for "acceptable ads".

> If it feels icky then maybe ad blocking is icky.

Or perhaps the ads themselves are the icky part, and internet complacency in finding other business models is the problem

> If you're ok with blocking ads, I don't see how allowing companies to pay a fee to have them unblocked hurts anyone. If it feels icky then maybe ad blocking is icky.

Couldn't be further from the truth. Ad revenue is icky by itself, in nearly any form. The fact that an industry sprung up to counter it (ad block software) points to the fact that the general public likely agrees with that.

If you don't feel that the psychological tracking and trickery of John Q. Public in order to sell him a new toilet paper holder is 'icky', then I don't know what to tell you. I do, and it seems many others share my feelings.

So are you saying that adblock allows certain publishers to pay them to have their ads go through adblock? How is that anything other than a extortion racket?

Adblock maintains a curated whitelist of approved, unobtrustive ads that most people don't mind seeing (text ads, etc). Last I heard, big companies wanting to submit their ads to the whitelist pay a fee, while small companies can have theirs added to the list for free - presumably this is justified based on the volume of ads that would be added to the list. There's a setting in the Adblock preferences to block even ads on the whitelist.

Some people make it out to be something sinister, potentially because "show unobtrustive ads" is on by default. Given that most people haven't even noticed that they're seeing these ads, I'm not convinced it's a big deal.

It's sinister. Sorry. Even as you describe it.

There is a huge conflict of interest with what you described.

Adblock Edge is 2.1.3 (June 12, 2014)

Adblock Plus is 2.6.4 (July 22, 2014)

I really want to use Adblock Edge instead of just unchecking the "Allow non-instrusive advertising" option, but I somehow doubt they have still the same features.

what feature is missing from Adblock edge?

You can actually compare them:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...

I just prefer the "original" addon. There are a lot more differences than one small setting.

Does anyone have any evidence against Adblock Edge?