list of reasons you should install an adblocker
- Ads track you (TODO: specify more exactly the ways ad blockers help)
- Ads attempt to make you insecure (you’re too fat/ugly/unstylish, buy our product)
- Ads are distracting.
- If you have ADHD, an ad blocker can be a disability aid that lets you focus better.
- When you see or click an ad, the website you’re on gets money. They are getting paid for participating in surveillance capitalism. This provides an incentive to not move to other monetization models. They will want to do more surveillance capitalism. Installing adblocker stops it.
- Surveillance capitalism helps legitimize state surveillance.
- Peter Hummelgaard, the Danish justice minister argued that banning E2EE in chats and requiring every chat service to implement surveillance measures was precedented by many platforms (Facebook, twitter) already surveilling you.
- Ads can be scary for children and triggering for anyone
- Ads consume bandwidth, and if you’re on a data plan, they directly cost you money
- Ads consume CPU cycles, directly slowing down your device and burning electricity (and potentially battery capacity)
- If companies can get you to give them money by spending more money on ads instead of spending money on making a better product, they will do it. Make it expensive to advertise and we will have better products.
- Ads can be used to deliver malware to your browser. This happens regularly.
- https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/06/mac-info-stealer-malware-distributed-through-google-ads/
- I mean ads are literally “pay me money and I will deliver a bundle of html, javascript and images to whomever you want”, no shit that gets abused to deliver malware to people.
- If you don’t want to click links by strangers because “what if it goes to malware”, WHY ARE YOU LETTING STRANGERS BLAST ADS AT YOUR COMPUTER
Specifically a good adblocker is ublock origin on firefox (you can even use it on android)