Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store
adguard.com
adguard.com
Apple explicitly allows and provides APIs to develop content blockers.
Apple does not allow content blocking through custom VPN implementations, seemingly because these a) introduce a performance impact, b) may be confusing for users as it’s abusing the point of VPNs, and c) may allow more easy abuse, as VPNs can do a lot more than just block content. This is what the article linked as evidence for Apple’s policy covers, and the statement provided by Apple, while not especially clear, does match up with this.
I think the title should be reverted to remove Apple, as they do allow ad blockers on the store (I personally use 1BlockerX https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8 )
`a` is permitted for other apps; `b` is, as far as I know, not a criteria anything else gets judged on; and `c` is the point of having a curated store, because any app "may allow [...] abuse".
For instance, ad blocking also works with Feedly - my RSS reader.
There is one exception. Overcast, my podcast player. There is a no ads in app purchase, but the ads are usually for other podcasts in the same category that I'm listening to. The ads are actually useful.
This isn't theoretical. iOS apps were in fact storing and selling data that went across the ad blocking VPN solutions.
Ad blocking Chrome plugins have a sordid history. Why would I trust them on my phone when I can set up my own solution relatively easily?
The IOS solution for in browser plug ins is more secure and it protects your privacy.
I think the main reason they block apps using VPNs for other things is that it’s very easy for them to break internet on the whole phone with buggy software, and Apple don’t want lots of support time at the Genius Bar of turning off crappy ad blocking VPN apps.
Walking the line between the pro-privacy aspects of VPN ad blocking and the the very anti-privacy possibilities that such functionality enables isn't easy. There's nothing to stop any VPN from scary levels of metadata collection, but Apple did close the door to one way of promoting or selling these services.
App devs hate hearing this, but I've always found it interesting that Apple doesn't try to take a cut of ad revenue that apps receive. And yet they insist on taking a cut of "tips" and pretty much any other revenue stream. I'm glad they don't because it would put them in an adversarial position with privacy.
I guess they tried with iAds, but even that was going to be optional I believe.
Easiest way to address the claims, let me know if you need a more detailed breakdown: Note Facebook's VPN is still available - they're just not allowed to advertise it blocks ads, which they never did in the first place.
What I do now -though on Android- is using WireGuard as VPN to my home router which runs basically a Pi-Hole (and WireGuard).
The benefits:
1) I get a system-wide adblocker on top of uBlock Origin.
2) My mobile provider cannot perform DPI (Though its owned by same company as my cable company. YMMV, plus it will work when you roam internationally. Heck, I can perform DPI on it via my router.)
3) When on a public WiFi (e.g. railway station) all my data is encrypted.
4) When I switch networks it automatically swaps connection.
5) Far less performance hit and battery usage than traditional VPNs such as OpenVPN. Home router also barely uses any Watt.
Brilliant software, I can highly recommend. My only beef with it is that a full blown SDN such as ZeroTier is a lot easier to set up.
[1] https://www.wireguard.com/install/
There are still a lot of apps using the VPN API for additional purposes. For instance, AdGuard Pro for iOS is still there, and it lets users use DNSCrypt or block domains manually. The difference is that it does not do system-wide ad blocking by default.
I note from reading AdGuard’s App Store description that it seems to do as blocking with the content blocking APIs, and uses the VPN only for DNS changes.
I am not against advertising in general. It doesn't bug me that there are ads for car dealerships on TV, but the flood of personal injury lawyer ads damages the perceived legitimacy of the government and social system. (As well as the many other ads that are not aimed at getting people to spend their own money but instead to get benefits such as the "Medicare Advantage" scam.)
Web advertising and other distractions (pop ins, "will you let this site make notifications?", Taboolah, Outbrain, "This web site uses cookies...", 20 email messages a day about IBM Cloud outages that didn't affect me, "GDPR is here and our policy has changed...") are immediately harmful in terms of cognitive load (lowers effective IQ,) stress, mistakes, missed appointments, opportunities, bills not paid on time because you had to delete 200 spam messages and accidentally deleted something important. That and the phone that never stops ringing with somebody who wants to lower my interest rates...
I think long term you are training your brain to not accept the cues that "something is important". After 20 or 30 years of that who knows what that will do you? (Whenever I show my wife something from a porno site she can't see the content in the midst of all the lurid and animated advertising.)
It is like Milo Yiannopoulos; it looks like communication but it is better to think about it as noise, static, or nerve gas.
We need a hard brake on adtech and a restructuring of business models, not a band-aid that only 5% of the population bothers to apply.
There are two ways that "privacy" can be violated: (1) somebody exploits your data, or (2) somebody violates your space. Something like GDPR addresses (1) and might put an end to those shoes from Zappos that keep following you around, but it does not stop the disincentives that destroyed the world wide web.
Huh? What does this mean? I've been getting the usual "Please consent to let us continue spamming you" emails, but I have no idea what your sentence above means. Can you elaborate as it's not clear what you're talking about.
I run a business directory site, or at least used to until this morning. If I was like many people I would blame GDPR, but really I figured I rather spend the money I was spending on AWS on something else.
The EU has been making moves towards financial transparency largely driven by the UK getting on the open data bandwagon. (Ten years ago they were much worse than the US in terms of seeing government data as a revenue source, now they are far ahead of other countries.)
This is endangered by Brexit and GDPR.
One part of the global governance crisis is that legislators have been captured by a "one dollar one vote" situation and in turn cannot maintain tax rates that produce sufficient government revenues. Thus the bureaucratic sectors have focused on keeping the lights on by trying to get people to pay what they owe. Given massive tax evasion by the rich that has to be a priority so general transparency around cross-border financial transactions has to increase.
Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.
This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, “if you have nothing to hide...” saw and I don’t like it.
I have an aunt who has a nursing degree, burned down a barn with horses in it and attempted to kill two people (her mother and her sister) by injecting them with insulin. At some point in between all of that she drove a school bus and for some reason decided to slash herself up with razor and claim that she was assaulted.
We heard that she'd gotten a job as a nurse and we we wonder how that happened. My father-in-law was in the hospital (not where she worked) and she changed his IV bag when it ran out and started beeping.
A week later we read in the paper that she was raiding the medicine cabinet at the nursing home she worked at and found out she was also stealing ADHD medication from her grandson.
Turned out she failed to tick the box that asked if she'd ever committed a felony and the employer was too busy to run a background check on her SSN.
Dangerous people are out there.
That kind of behavior is a direct threat to life but I think tax evasion, corruption, rent-seeking, a lack of responsiveness to problems such as global warming, homelessness, and affordable housing and similar behaviors threaten our civilization and one thing we know is that when a civilization goes down the people left behind turn their back on everything that civilization stand for. (Ex. look what happened when the Christians took over Rome)
The main thing our civilization stands for is individualism and if you like the idea of being able to decide anything at all for yourself (or people 50-100 years) you should have been helping turn the ship around 20 years ago and it might be too late now. (Eg. Listening to people like Frederick Hayek is the real "road to serfdom")
An Iranian physicist living in the UK threatened to sue me under the UK libel laws because he thought I brought attention to him that might lead Iranian grad students to come around looking for job. Well, I was chewed up and spit out by that system and I was not going to be intimidated by that -- if you are sitting pretty on a tenured job on the back of young people in an unfair situation you deserve to hear the voices and see the faces of people who are harmed by your privilege. It is not such a big thing.
Somehow your domestic intelligence service, foreign intelligence services, organized criminals, rip-off artists and other people are going to steal your information and the more that information is pushed underground the more impunity that they are going to operate under.
(To paraphrase Heinlein: a transparent society is a going concern)
Yes, and psychopaths like your aunt exist, but if we design society around authoritarian ideals designed to totally eliminate their ability to do harm society breaks every time. A balance has to be struck that acknowledges the presence of a significant minority of criminals, while protecting the rights of the majority. A thousand anecdotes will not change that.
(Loved your initial comment on this thread though.)
How is it a great solution when hacker news has ads that most ad blockers can't block?
What do you think HN is? What do you think dang, sctb and the mods do?
It works pretty well, but requires trusting them to follow their privacy policy (which is good) as with any DNS provider.
I've found it useful and lower maintenance than other approaches, but you trade power and flexibility. And is presumably less performant than preventing the lookups in the first place.
You surely don't have an agenda. /s
So much HN comments are also just noise, static or nerve gas as well. And I highly doubt you have a wife.
I'm in very early phase of the development of a search engine. I will _not_ index ad serving pages maybe sometimes even whole hosts. Adblock rulesets like easylist will help with this.
I know about Million Short, but it's not that comprehensive and AFAIR uses Google's index.
Also I'm expecting it will result with a significantly smaller index, so maybe I will be able to finance it from my pocket. Small index will enable offline use - download via torrent the whole index and use it offline. With some incremental updates afterwards. However it would still be in the magnitude of tens of gigabytes, on the condition it would really be small enough.
The next level for me would be a HTML-only web browser that would offer permanent reader-mode like behavior. But I have too many projects already.
What tech do you guys plan to use exactly, for a start?
He's an awful person and I'm glad he destroyed his own celebrity.
Actually, they only work in the specific case of SFSafariViewController. This isn't available for any old webview to implement.
Does iOS support custom browsers like Firefox running their own engine and extension systems? They never did when I was a user.
Safari's ad blocking is piss poor compared to it, because it is technologically limited.
(Submitted title was 'Amazon follows Google and bans system-wide ad blockers on their AppStore'.)
There's technically a way to do it, but you need to plug your phone into your computer and re-push them every 7 days, unless you pay $99/year for a developer license. Or jailbreak, of course, which has its own problems.
https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios-pro/overview.html
Of course, the limits on installing software on one's own device are still a concern.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adguard-pro-no-ads-popups/id...
Tools for example: http://www.cydiaimpactor.com/
EDIT: Someone thinks I'm wrong, can you explain why? Thanks!
1. Download and install Xcode.
2. Find the source code for the application you want. You know GitHub works, right, Grandma?
3. Compile, sign, and deploy to your device. Assuming it built without error, that is.
4. Aww, shit, Apple's signing process is still a hot mess. Best get to Googlin' on those validation errors!
You can also install something like Plasma Mobile today on Nexus 5 if you really want to have a proper open source option.
I wouldn't call acquiring root access so that I can install a adblocking app "incredibly easy".
Yes precisely. And that's not a problem because F-Droid doesn't ban these sort of things.
I mean you can still install them from F-Droid, especially if you prefer open source.
You can install either:
DNS666: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.jak_linux.dns66/
or
Blokada: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.blokada.alarm/
from the F-Droid store: https://f-droid.org/en/
And achieve system wide ad blocking, without worrying about Google's selfish policies.
Blokada does track how many ads it blocks and gives you a count (and notifications if you wish to be so notified [configurable]).
Both are free (as in the GNU 'freedom' definition as well as the 'beer' definition) so you could try both and see which you prefer.
It is a simpler design and works great. It works by adding mapping to your hosts file.
Everyone basically wants to exert just enough elbow grease to get something for free rather than contribute to the world they say they believe in.
"If you need ads to make money then your business should fail" is a common thing you'll hear among people who continue using sites/apps that depend on ads instead of investing in ones that don't.
If HNers can't even be bothered, then how is anyone else? We're going to be stuck in this status quo for a long time and the only survivors will be the large businesses that can afford it until the main websites people use are about as varied as our ISPs, maybe even the same.
Google has already wedged themselves in as the "gold standard" dns provider. My gut says eventually Apple/Google/Amazon will start forcing blessed devices to use their own name services. For the good of the user, of course. Ahem.
Pfsense is one good example.
Initially they'll be implemented as DNS over HTTPS, with devices being shipped preconfigured to favor those HTTPS endpoints over name servers provided by the local network. From there the traditional DNS bits will eventually be removed in favor of whatever proprietary mechanisms defined by Google/Amazon/Apple.
The only way to use Google/Amazon/Apple services will be by bootstrapping from hardcoded list of bootstrap ips in their product, secured by a similarly hardcoded CA certificate.
Run. Your. Own. Resolver [full stop]
I'm both amazed and devastated how even seasoned privacy hackers will just pop 8.8.8.8 into their respective resolv.confs. What are they thinking?
I know how people tell stories about how 8.8.8.8 (or 1.1.1.1) are so nice and fast (which simply sounds like they are mirroring the advertising for these services by the letter), but honestly, that doesn't matter: The first visit to any site is slow, and has been slow for years (downloading all those megabytes from a dozen origins simply takes its time); waiting another half-second to have your own resolver look after some unknown hostname – which will be cached, locally, much faster than anything 8.8.8.8 could do for you – really isn't worth spilling your entire browsing history onto Google's reception desk. Not for me, anyway.
https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/blockingmode/
For hosts files, 0.0.0.0 is generally preferred, which marks the host as unreachable, rather than localhost (127.0.0.1, etc.), which might well recieve and try to process the request.
I'm using the defaults, but from the sounds of the documentation having it return 0.0.0.0 might be beneficial. It certainly explains some weirdness that I've seen when using Pi-Hole.
Thanks!
[1] http://www.samplerbox.org/article/howtopowerrpiwith18650
[2] https://www.pianywhere.com/product/pianywhere-4g-raspberry-p...
The idea is sound but it doesn't apply to Amazon, or Google's stores. They're under no obligation to host any app in particular and it should be expected that apps that bite the hand that feeds them would be quickly removed.
If a company both controls the production of the device and the sole means by which a user can install software on the device, then maybe the company should be legally obligated to host some app, or jump through hoops to get approval to ban an app, or the app can go through an appeal process to argue if the ban is anti-consumer.
I’m not saying this applies to Google or Amazon right now, under the current mechanisms for installing software on devices. I’m sure it’s a complicated issue.
But I think it’s a fair and important question.
It does effectively apply to Apple/iOS, as it doesn't. (With a bunch of caveats.)
Sure, it is not a black and white situation and indies are certainly hurt by this. Also you can install general purpose apps on consoles nowadays; so the line is blurring.
When we are talking about a general purpose device like a phone or a desktop computer though; it really irks me that you need an approval to distribute your app.
We have already seen OS creators forbid an app before sherlocking it, or refusing to validate a satirical app.
Recently both Valve and Telegram have been unable to get their apps approved. I have worked in the music industry and this is sadly really common .. if you work on a music streaming service, it is a huge PITA to get your app approved. It is almost if the people in charge of the OS do not want the competition..
I make this distinction because I think it is way more hurtful when communication or news apps are impacted by this kind of practices and these are pretty vital.
Entertainment apps being hit by this also hurt the consumers by artificially distorting the competition.
Ads Blocker are an edge case. They interfere with other apps, which I feel is ok to forbid. I think that all apps should be obligated to provide a tracking + ads free version but I don't think they should be mandated to make that version free. Especially when ads blockers are often a racket to get your ads networks whitelisted as long as you pay.
I'm sure it's going to be a fair fight between the little guy that has a million other worries in his little life and the corporation whose business model is being threatened and therefore will have a laser like focus across years or even decades.
Direct boycotting of companies forces change very quickly.
It's really simple and doesn't involve bringing in (literal) government guns that'll just end up controlled via regulatory capture anyway.
Be responsible for your own choices.
Except the obligation created by their customers doing business elsewhere, of course.
Also you could have used the same "don't bite the hand that feeds you" argument with VOIP apps on carrier networks. And yet, most countries have passed laws against ISPs banning competing services on their networks.
The ISPs banned them from their platform. Google and Amazon allow these apps on their platform (the Android OS), but are banning them from their app distribution channels.
Taking Google's perspective for a moment, they are not willing the facilitate distribution of apps whose sole purpose reduces their revenue.
These ad-blocker apps can still be distributed and installed outside the app store. I can download from adguard.com and sideload it onto my device.
The interesting question here is if the app stores are considered a functioning monopoly on apps. I lean toward yes.
Although, if the only place you can install software (within reason) is though their store then I think we're in a different situation.
Like it or not, many popular websites and services online gain income from advertising. By using them while blocking their ads you're basically getting something for nothing by gaming the system. It's probably against their ToS (but who reads that right?). It probably says: We serve ads. If you don't like that don't use this site.
One might say that ads are distracting, annoying, resource heavy, and sometimes downright malicious. I think so too. However that is essentially the "price" of ads, and this price is known in advance. Blocking ads for these reasons while continuing to use the sites is not unlike eating at a restaurant and leaving without paying because you think their prices are exorbitant: It might seem morally justified but it's theft because the prices were known in advance.
I think one of the main reason people don't dine-and-run (yet install adblockers) is that it's hard to do a moral wrong so close to the source, e.g seeing the waiters, being there in person, risking an unpleasantness drama, etc. (This is well known psychological phenomenon which name I can't recall.) In contract installing an adblocker is fast and feels totally unrelated to the 2nd party. It makes it easy to feel like you're fighting the bad guys (ads and the terrible ad-tech) and forget whose revenue you are withholding for your own benefit.
Personally I resisted installing adblockers for a long time though eventually I caved in (ad-tech got really bad). I honestly don't know what the solution is.
Ad blocking, in my view, is analogous to muting your radio. The content provider delivered the ads, how the user interacts with them is up to each individual.
While cutting the ads you'll get such a good look at them, ads companies will be thrilled and beg you to do it :-)
> If I mute my radio while ads play, am I a thief?
The behavior of people watching TV or listening to radio is well studied. Here's some facts:
1. even if you change the station, you'll still see or hear some ads, especially if you want to get back to what you were watching, as people keep changing back and forth — and those ads are for brands mostly, therefore it's enough for you to see Coke's logo for you to pick it in a store as the "safe" choice
2. many TV and radio stations synchronize their ads breaks
So are you committing theft when skipping commercials? If you use automation for it, the jury is actually still out and there have been several lawsuits already.
Also skipping ads might be legal still, but there are always legal loopholes. For example circumventing DRM is not legal and it's only a matter of time before media networks wise up.
And note there have been other doomsday scenarios in the past. For example the rise of VHS was a similar event, allowing people to record shows and skip ads. But even so, ads kept being efficient and publishers and media networks survived. However this time the automation has reached a level unprecedented in history.
What do you think will happen if companies start going out of business due to ad blockers? They'll start lobbying of course and lobbying works.
Yes, if it's part of the content and they want more of that content. But they have no obligation to want that content.
> in the manner that the content provider dictates
They don’t dictate how you consume ads, they try to predict it and adjust for it, but they don't dictate your actions
>And if so, how should this be enforced?
Legally it shouldn’t be. The advertiser can do whatever they want to their content to get you to consume ads, but they shouldn’t be able to do anything past the boundary of their content.
Do we really have to replay all the arguments we had during the Napster days about the difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods?
These analogies to real-world objects never work. If you have a case, it's not going to rest on "you wouldn't steal a car" type arguments [0].
[0] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-its-a-crime
Edit: well this is hilarious:
However blocking ads (especially when done by prevent them being fetched) directly damages the 2nd party at a known price. Each individual pageview has a cost to serve it, and a revenue gained from it (via ads). In that sense what we're stealing is actually pageviews, which have (IMO) more in common with physical real-world objects (rivalrous) than a digital copy of a file.
In that case, it seems like adblockers are _not_ theft, but more compared to a plate of cookies with a sign that says, "donations welcome".
Now what if I use ad nauseam and "click" on every ad on the site? Is that theft too? What if I'm blind and use a screen reader, am I stealing from the site?
Finally, if the answer is yes, why is stealing the other way ok? I don't recall any sites paying out victims after serving ads containing malware. What about sites (or ads) stealthily using my computer's resources for bitcoin mining? They're stealing measurable resources from me and I am not being compensated.
In a previous comment you called malicious ads "the price of ads" that is "known in advance". This doesn't seem fair. Why does the end user bear all the responsibility for keeping the ad economy afloat and healthy while the sites serving the ads bear none?
Edit: One last thing. If ad blocking is truly analogous to retail theft. Content providers and ad networks should be regulated just like retailers are to make sure they are not ripping off their users by serving malicious or harmful ads or using their data in ways not agreed to in advance (i.e. effectively charging users above and beyond the stated price).
- it costs very real money to produce, and
- it costs very real money to be served and to remain online.
These costs may be covered by ads, by subscriptions, by sponsors, taxes, voluntary contribution or anything else, but the they still need to be paid for.
[edit: fixed formatting]
If this is not your argument, please clarify, but it seems like the inevitable conclusion of your claim that visiting a web page obligates me to download and execute other resources that the web page publisher desires. If, at the end of a meal, my waiter brought me a check and a USB drive with software that the restaurant wanted me to install on my computer, I would pay the check, but I wouldn't install the software. If, before the meal, the restaurant informed me that I could not dine there unless I installed the software, I would gladly do neither.
If you want to exploit your technical capabilities to deny publishers their revenue, don't fret when publishers do the same with DRM, walled gardens and other such measures.
Current adtech practices need to be made both illegal and technically impossible, but that obscenity does not make ad blockers more moral. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Using that content without paying for it (with ad impressions or direct sales) when those payments make the creation you consume possible in the first place – there is no moral high ground in that.
By ad blocking you're just taking things for yourself while relying on others to pay for your share of the cost to produce the content you're consuming. Zero marginal cost is not such a big intellectual barrier to understanding that this is unfair and unsustainable.
People are quite content with ad blocking only because someone else has to pay for creation of the content they consume. Of course people are content getting a better deal than other people.
But you can't translate this individual selfishness into a general society-level desire because ad blocking only works when not everyone is doing it. On a society level, if you don't pay for something, you don't get it, because there is no one else to pay for it. Whereas what people want is to get something without paying for it.
And if you claim the society is in agreement that ad based business models are unacceptable, I'm yet to see any indication of that. People really like not paying for things with money, and ads let them do that.
But what people like to do even more is taking without giving in the name of some unconvincing ideology.
No. The price is absolutely not known in advance by design. There's no way to me to audit which "partners" a site I visit will share my browsing data with. If ad providers were transparent about how my data would be used and who it would be shared with you might have a point. But most current TOSs leave the door open for tracking data to be shared with anyone for just about any purpose in the future.
It's as if I walked into a department store and the price on goods was unknowable - the store just reserved the right to take money out of my account at any point in the future but assured me that amount would be "small" with nothing contractually binding them to that.
The real truth is nobody really cares about how much money these people are losing. We're looking out for ourselves because companies won't. Just because you're serving some content I may or may not be interested in doesn't mean you get to rape my ears with loud autoplaying videos I don't want to watch.
Every step in this process is voluntary:
- What if I decide I don't want to make requests to the advertiser's servers just because an html document suggested it?
- What if I decide I don't want to render an ad, just because I downloaded it from somewhere?
Contracts, like the one you're proposing here, are agreed upon by both parties. I agree to download your ads, if you agree to provide me access to the site. Paywalls work like this, ads don't. Ads are a polite suggestion that I'm free to ignore.
It is very rare that I will use such strong language, but to anyone who truly believes such things: fuck you, and I very much hope you will be the one someday tied into a chair and unable to escape with your eyelids forced open to watch and listen to a barrage of unescapable ads and answer questions correctly about everything you were forced to consume before being allowed to consume the actual content itself in the same way. Because that's what you're implying the world should become --- literally a form of torture and mind-control.
A business model does not entitle you to force people to adhere to said business model.
These websites are free to ask me to contribute to them via patreon or via donations or a subscription service.
I am not supporting that, just saying that it is more complicated than so.
- cause lots of weird networking issues (impacting perceived stability)
- are often "Free" b/c they are swapping in their own ads and malware [1]
- are just in general a poor way of loading a hosts/dns file that in many cases they don't even own (they're just pointing to a freely available one)
Adguard was/is a paid app that didn't substitute any ads nor collect data.
Related, I cannot wait for the Librem 5
System-wide blockers on both iOS and Android do use the VPN API, but the idea is to intercept your outgoing traffic on the TUN interface, emulate the TCP/IP stack, and filter it locally, right on your device.
Of course, it could change its behavior if it detects a cellular connection...
EDIT: Point is that many apps receive a ban because they conflict with the interest of the phone vendor, but they can still be of great use to users.
Because they're in the business of selling things, and many of the "things" they sell monetize via ads. It's an indirect way to killing their rev.
Also, yes, Amazon does lots of retargeting/ad purchasing, so it means they're wasting those dollars as well, again killing their rev.
There's no reason for them to support ad-blocking (other than like, being opposed to massive corporations doing nefarious things, but how could THAT thinking infect a massive corporation)
* https://developer.amazon.com/mobile-ads
* https://aws.amazon.com/mobileanalytics/
Not as large as Facebook or Google (at the moment ~5% of top Android apps connect to their servers). Apparently, they are going to grow.
I mean sometimes that is what I only see and i am like happy with the fact that I am forced to see ads. And then other times I am starting to see things that I really don't care about simply because I had a whim to go down some rabbit hole on Google.
I think some developers use ads very responsibly and I think that overall denying those developers the right to generate money off your usage prevents them from growing their business and creating better products. I tend to think of flappy bird when I think of great ad placement. The ads don't get in the way of the game. They don't pop up while you are in mid game to try and trick you into clicking. They only appear after you died and they aren't full screen and annoying with a tiny little x you might miss.
I mean that is the kind of ads that I can live with and I think everybody else should have to live with too. Hell I even might give them a click every now and then despite the fact that I am not interested in buying the advertised product.
I just think of it like throwing some change in the hat of a busking street artist. It's the least I could do to encourage them to continue pursuing their art.
I continue to find it ironic that the very same technology, often detested in discussions here, and present in the middleboxes that companies use to block/filter/inspect the traffic between their networks and the Internet, can also be used under your control to enhance your computing experience. I believe that everyone should have complete ability to modify the traffic that flows to/from the devices they own, and this is something which those who strongly support making connections "more secure" and harder to MITM often fail to consider.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron
[2] https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo (Japanese)
Of course the feature goes unused; I simply refuse to install an application that includes advertising code. Instead, if available, I pay for the ad-free version of the app. Bonus points if that's the only option. The play store helpfully points out most advertising built into apps, so this is pretty easy to do. Combined with Firefox for Android which lets me run uBlock Origin, I have a completely ad-free mobile experience.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id69121579?mt=8
Creates a fake VPN that does the filtering
I find iOS content blockers work decently but it is still possible to have an overwhelmingly better experience on the desktop due to the multiple crap-blocking mechanisms available.
https://github.com/BobNisco/adblocking-vpn
Why trust a third party that can monitor your traffic?
With the built in web and web view ad blocking framework on iOS, the ad blocking app doesn't see your browsing history. It installs a JSON file that Safari uses to know what content to block.
It's not a complete system wide solution but it does protect your privacy.
If it didn’t mean a revolt from countless app devs I’m sure they’d be perfectly happy to implement something similar to Safari’s content blocker system for the entire OS.
What about Android itself? The entire reason for Android's existence is for Google to make money on advertising.
Whether most people will use it or not is not relevant to how easy it is. Just go to https://f-droid.org, click the download button, click on the downloaded notification, and follow the prompts.
> and now you have one central app that has your entire data usage history to sell to the highest bidder....
The apps on fdroid are open source and use a reproducible build system.
So now "easily" has turned into going to a third party App Store and either blindly trusting an app wont surreptitiously store and forward all of your data or either trusting that someone else has audited the code or audit the code yourself and to be doubly sure, build the code yourself.
The thing with open source reproducible builds of popular software is that somebody else has already done that verification, so you don't have to do anything. That's how easy it is.
To get the same level of assurance on an iOS device, you would have to reverse engineer the app binary. Of course, it's not even possible to begin with because Apple doesn't allow system-wide adblockers at all.
I mean, if enough people are dodging ads, and the site can't make any money, you'd be going without anyway.
"What about Android itself? The entire reason for Android's existence is for Google to make money on advertising."
Then why are you using it?
Let me turn this on you: Why do you feel you shouldn't be paid for your work?
Isn't the more practical and impactful option not patronizing services/apps that rely on advertising to raise revenue?
Then why are you using it?
Let me turn this on you: Why do you feel you shouldn't be paid for your work
I am not using Android, I buy products where the value proposition is simple -- I give Apple money and they give me stuff. Neither my computer or phone has third party crapware and my computer doesn't look like a NASCAR car with dozens of stickers you can't remove.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7jhr53/a_vpn_based_a...
I just object to how advertisers screw things up. Moving text while I'm reading. Hijacking the page and navigating away. Auto-playing loud videos.
(These problems are really symptoms of poor design in JavaScript)
All I want is a good ad blocker for my mobile browser!
Tabbed browsing on Firefox is abysmal. I also like going back into my browser history.
It's like Firefox was only designed for viewing porn.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Firefox has browsing history, if that's what you mean.
There is a different product Firefox Focus which erases your history when the browser closes, maybe you're thinking of that.
It does require root, however.
Can an app intercept the network communication at will? Can an app call any operation system function?
I would rather pay for the apps I use (with money, not eyeball time) than continue this course to the bottom.
I prefer low quality ads because I can be more confident that they won't effectively manipulate me. I like to avoid the influence of pure product-propaganda on my decisions.
I personally like getting paid for my work, and being able to buy food and pay rent.
Except they get bonus points for inventing their own coin which only exists to make the creator money, along with replacing ads with their ads.