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> They've offered ad blocking for years.

Please show me evidence to back this up and I’ll happily walk back my statements.

The “mullvad” browser is not their VPN product. And if you think DNS denylisting prevents “ad networks from spying on you”, I have some unfortunate news for you. It works to prevent the rendering of a subset of ads (especially in the browser), but isn’t worth a damn for actual behavioral analysis.

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https://mullvad.net/en/blog/how-set-ad-blocking-our-app

"How to set up ad blocking in our app"

Dated May 27, 2021

I would guess it started with something like this: they serve DNS to prevent DNS leaks when using the VPN. They realize they can use this to block domains, just like a pihole or Cloudflare DNS. They integrate that into their VPN offering.

It's pretty logical once you think about it, but it was a surprise to me too.

It blocks almost all analytics, social pixels which likely covers 90% of the market. Between DNS blocking and uBlock, whatever behavior analysis they can do beyond that doesn't seem to work because the ads I see are entirely irrelevant

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