Study claims more than half of Americans use ad blockers
www.theregister.com
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  • Godort@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 year ago

    Good. Ad blocking is security and anyone that tells you different both doesn’t care about your computer security, and also wants to sell you something.

    That 2/3 to 3/4 of computer programmers, computer security experts and advertisers seems low. I feel like that should be closer to 90%

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    76 percent of cybersecurity experts use ad blockers.

    I’m a bit worried about that other 24%. How expert are they if they don’t recognize the risk?

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      maybe they don’t enable js at all /s

      jk, maybe they value fingerprinting over that? even tor browser doesn’t have one built in.

    • psivchaz@reddthat.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

      I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.

  • OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    What I wonder is… how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.

    • viking@infosec.pub
      2·
      1 year ago

      My mom knows nothing about adblock, and is still blocking ads. You better believe all of the kids having to fix their relative’s computers will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.

      Can’t comment on the sample size though, Ghostery might indeed be somehow biased and measure devices where their software is installed vs. total number of internet users or something? But users of ghostery are more likely to be tech savvy, so there’s a higher chance of them having more devices that are equally sanitized.

      I’d have to dig through the study and see if the sampling mechanism is made public.

  • Einar@lemm.ee
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s almost as if companies have gone a bit overboard with advertising. Huh. Didn’t see that coming…

  • deadcatbounce@reddthat.com
    1·
    5 months ago

    Does anyone actually believe this garbage?

    I don’t think that that is true in any so-called developed world nation. Think of your friends; how many know what an ad-blocker is? Who don’t use the browser that came installed on the pc/phone?

    • Howdy@lemmy.zip
      1·
      1 year ago

      Can confirm. Been using with freetube, invidious and clipious as it’s built-in and it’s fantastic.

  • ProfessorYakkington@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.

    Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.

    Anyways ad blockers are the best.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Data like this makes me wonder what Firefox is doing. If Nord can sell a VPN surely Mozilla could get some market share

    • CameronDev@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      I’m not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
        1·
        1 year ago

        I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there’s a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.

        You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you’ve still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.

        I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.