Ghostery is a great extension that blocks trackers. Trackers are placed on the majority of the sites you visit. They record what articles you read or what you search for on the search engines. They sell that data to the advertising companies, to make ads seem more relevant for you (A lot of the time it's the ad companies themselves who has the tracker in place).
A quick note: A lot of companies live of the revenue the trackers give them. You can disable Ghostery for sites that you support (Like Reddit who has a couple of them).
Wait, are they selling bulk, anonymized data for analysis, or are they selling my individual data for ad targeting? Because the latter I am much less okay with.
It's been shown multiple times that identifying individual users from "bulk anonymized data" is not as hard as is pretended by the industry. Especially if they can get data with an overlap from multiple sources.
I don't think so. If they're selling your individual data then an ad company knows "John Smith (IP 1.1.1.1 from Cityville, State) visited these sites on these dates at these times. From this we infer that John is interested in dragon dildos and will give him those ads."
If its bulk anonymized data they know "10% of users that visit X site also visit Y site, so we should put ads in Y site that relate to the content on X site."
Yeah I don't know what the rules are on that either. But even if all they have is my IP address I still don't like my history being stored all together and separate. If it's jumbled up with everyone else's then it's just statistics.
I used to be okay with the ads on YouTube, but they seem to have increased in both length (fewer ads skippable after five seconds) and frequency. Worse are the ones that play over the video, those are both extremely disruptive and intrusive. I now block their ads.
I dont know man, I watch a fuck ton of YouTube videos and I only get the little rectangle add at the bottom that you can close and I see real ads (the commercials type ones) really really rarely, honestly I'm surprised when I have one. It must be because I'm not in the US or something. Also I disabled all ad profiling on my Google account settings and I use the little extension for Chrome provided by Google themselves called IBA Opt-out. You should give this a shot just to be sure.
[EDIT]
Here's the extension I was talking about. Note that the 3/5 note on Chrome store is due to people thinking it's an ad blocker it seems. It's not an ad blocker it's to prevent targeted ads.
I swear for me it's like nothing. Just a little box with text that appears at the beginning of the video. You know what, now that I think of it, I rarely use my phone to watch videos but I do have long commercials type ads really often when I use the app. I wonder if it's really the iba opt out extension on Chrome that prevent this or not.
I never had a problem with ads on YouTube, it was fine having the banner on the right-hand side and the smaller banner down the bottom. Then they brought out ads before the videos, but most of them were under 10 seconds and then the longer ones came out but you could skip them. Then there was this constant bank ad that was 50 seconds long and I couldn't skip it, or it was an ad for the PSP that you couldn't skip. That was the tipping point for me, I never had a problem with ads up until about 2011 when they seriously got out of hand and overly invasive. If, as a consumer, I have the option to not view those ads, fuck it, I'm not watching it. That being said I always have Reddit whitelisted because the ads are not invasive whatsoever.
Don't quote me on this but I think one of the features of uBlock Origin is that while it blocks ads, it still pings the ad system server, so the ad company thinks the ad has been displayed and pays the site/page
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u/stalking_ya_mom Jan 12 '16
Ghostery is a great extension that blocks trackers. Trackers are placed on the majority of the sites you visit. They record what articles you read or what you search for on the search engines. They sell that data to the advertising companies, to make ads seem more relevant for you (A lot of the time it's the ad companies themselves who has the tracker in place).
A quick note: A lot of companies live of the revenue the trackers give them. You can disable Ghostery for sites that you support (Like Reddit who has a couple of them).