What You Gain (and Lose) by Using Ad Blockers

The average website seems to have more ads than content. There's the banner at the top, the square in the sidebar, and in most cases, a few auto-playing video ads thrown in for good measure. Ad blockers can help clean things up, but experts say that installing an ad blocker does more than make the internet less cluttered: They can also help you stay safe online.

Ad blockers can protect you from scams

In a perfect world, outright scammers and cybercriminals would not be able to buy ads from massively profitable search engines. However, we do not live in a perfect world.

"Criminals have started buying ad space," said Kim Key, senior security analyst for our sister site PCMag who has written an extensively researched list of the best ad blockers. "That means that some ads may infect your device with malware when you interact with them, or may contain links to malicious websites."

A version of this is ads designed to mimic legitimate companies in search results, a problem common enough that in 2022, the FBI put out a statement recommending the use of ad blockers.

"Cyber criminals purchase advertisements that appear within internet search results using a domain that is similar to an actual business or service," the statement said. "When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of search results with minimum distinction between an advertisement and an actual search result."

The report mentions that not all ads are scams (good?) but that installing an ad blocker is one way to protect yourself from being sucked into these scams in the first place.

(Some) ad blockers can protect your privacy

I don't think I need to tell you that online advertising is invasive—we've all noticed ads following us around the internet. Spend time researching shoes on Amazon and ads about the shoes you've looked at will pop up everywhere you go. It can feel creepy.

Ad blockers can protect you from this, but there's a caveat: Some ad blockers prevent you from seeing ads without blocking the tracking. "If your ad blocker doesn't block trackers, but just blocks ads, it doesn't protect your privacy," said William Budington, a senior staff technologist on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Public Interest Team.

Janet Vertesi, associate professor of sociology at Princeton University who publishes extensive work on human computer interaction, told me this is a reason she herself doesn't use an ad blocker. "Some ad blockers make you think you have privacy because you're not seeing ads, but you don't know if the sites are taking your data," she said.

Having said that, there are options out there specifically built to block tracking. Privacy Badger, built by the EFF, wasn't made to block ads—only tracking—but Budington told me it ends up blocking most ads anyway. "The reason why there's such conflation of ad blockers and tracker blockers is that the vast majority of ads online are also trackers," he said.

Vertesi told me that this distinction—blocking tracking versus blocking ads—might be behind Google's recent ad blocker changes in Chrome.

"What made uBlock Origin such a great ad blocker is it was blocking both coming out and going in," she said. "Chrome is a Google Product. Google is in the data-gathering business. Of course they don't want you to use uBlock Origin."

Which is all to say: Ad blockers can protect your privacy, but only if you're using the right one.

Drawbacks to using ad blockers

Having said all that, there are reasons you might not want to use an ad blocker. Supporting the things you read, for one thing.

"Some content creators rely on ads for revenue, so as a supporter, you may not always want to block all of the ads," Key said. "I recommend trying an extension like Adblock Plus in this instance, because it allows you to allow some ads while blocking others."

And some ad blockers themselves introduce privacy problems.

"I recommend reading the ad-blocking extension's privacy policy before installing it," Key said. "Make sure you know what types of data the ad blocker collects from your browser, and how the company plans to store and use your personal information."

There's also an argument to be made that using an ad blocker makes it hard to notice when you're being tracked.

"I don't use an ad blocker because I am monitoring what they think they know about me," Vertesi said. "They're like the canary in the coal mine. I want to see those shoes following me around the internet—I need to know if my guard was let down."

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