Facebook rolls out code to nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. This isn’t a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue.".
Ad-blocker can be easily uninstalled so how can they "punish" anyone. Facebook should just silently block ad-blockers and not act as if they are working in their user's interest.
This sort of cat and mouse game is going to accomplish nothing in the long run.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
Something like Fakespot for ads could be the next adblock integration. Then, the content could be literally identical on a mark up level but still be blocked by the program.
At which point, it's another cat and mouse game. How much do you try and 'hide' that something's an ad before the adblocker starts blocking real content?
Of course, it's questionable whether trying to hide an ad too much is even 100% legal. Remember, the Advertising Standards Authority and others like them require sponsored posts and content to be clearly marked as ads.
So then Facebook ends up in an awkward situation. Do we leave the legally allowed disclaimer (which provides a great ad blocking hook), or remove it and potentially get sued?
Using the official Facebook API, doing this is very much possible in a custom client. To do in with a browser addon, you may not always have access to internal user IDs, but can still fall back to imperfect name comparisons, which should still give decent results.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat...
I suppose the end game is when ad block scrapes your friends list and determines whether a post was actually from a friend or not, assuming Facebook never goes beyond the pale and impersonates a friend, posting ads under their name.
At that point, the only advertising available is submarine sponsored stuff: paying popular people to post about your product.
> At that point, the only advertising available is submarine sponsored stuff: paying popular people to post about your product.
Which violates FTC regulations and will get Facebook slapped down. Ads are required by law to be clearly identifiable as ads.
Couldn't one just add fb ad server dns entries to their host file as 127.0.0.1? What could facebook do in that case besides bring up ad servers on new domains?
Could we set up an ad blocking DNS service? (Again..another game of cat and mouse.)
In either case, you are playing a losing game on a ball court owned by Facebook. If you don't like the ads, don't use the service?
It is not valid to assume ads will come from one host and content from another.
I couldn't care less about what they do within their own garbage heap, but if this enables to their junk across the rest of the web, it's a problem.
https://www.privacy-news.net/news_article/57ab2d7184f6fd5f5a...
http://news.softpedia.com/news/blocking-ad-blockers-may-be-i...
Edit: To anyone who downvoted this: you're perfectly welcome to disagree or even adamantly disagree with me - but it's much more productive to explain why you disagree than downvote. I'm genuinely curious to hear an argument that consumers should have a legal right to view FB without ads.
First, you can simply disguise your ads. You can disguise them for everyone. That doesn't require you to peek into what software is on the machine. You've simply made it difficult for an ad-blocker to detect the ads.
Second, you don't have to peek into the software on a machine to determine that content isn't loading. Let's say that someone is blocking my ad server via /etc/hosts. I shouldn't be able to write code that tries to read a user's /etc/hosts, but I can load content via AJAX, see that the content isn't loading, and then take action based on that (maybe loading from a secondary source, maybe not displaying the page if not all content can be loaded).
I'm not saying that Facebook is circumventing ad-blocking in this way, but you certainly can attempt ad-block circumvention without reading a user's local configuration. Facebook can install the ad-blockers like anyone else on their own machines and see how they can disguise the ads as content so that the ad-blockers don't detect them.