Without the suggestion to install an adblocker, this is not credible advice.
Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea, independent on any decision to use ad blockers or not.
The Meta/Yandex incident in particular is straight-up malware and everyone should remove their apps.
They're more tightly bound than that. They're dependent on Google Display Ads. Which really makes their whole diatribe that much more pathetic.
Any media company that decided to traffic the ads themselves, from their own servers, and inline with their own content, would effectively be immune from ad blocking.
> Ditching these deeply invasive products remains a good idea
While still allowing random third party javascript to run unchecked on a parent website.
Lol, why are you commenting as if somehow allowing it to run negates the other good ideas in some way? Obviously some is better than none, and all is better than some, but each step takes more effort.
what I _don't_ want is to be _tracked_. show me ads all day if you want.
I’m not asking what you think makes for a successful ad campaign, I’m asking why you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good
Self-hosting ads is not really a winning game unless your ads are non-animated, non-modal static text and images.
It might be correct-and-incomplete but they just have no credibility on the topic.
They're also owned by one of the richest men in the world...
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/washington-post-lost...
Advertising revenue is less than a 1/3rd of their revenue, and dropping fast. Ad revenue from more than 50 million visitors is less than subscription revenue from 2.5 million subscribers.
If WaPo was dependent on ads, they would have taken steps to increase accessibility to articles, but they didn't and haven't. Instead, they're restricting more and more content to subscribers, because ultimately subscribers are the ones that keep the lights on.
> and dropping fast,
Just like the number of subscribers and subscription revenue?
WaPo is by no means worst here. But their omission of Adblock in this article means they can’t be credible.
But adblockers do not fully solve the problem that the article is focused on. Namely, the use, e.g., by Meta and Yandex, of websockets in closed source mobile apps to listen on a loopback address for requests by mobile browsers, e.g., for tracking pixels.
There are approaches to prevent such tracking that do not necessarily require adblockers running in browsers. If the article mentioned Adblock but omitted other approaches, then does that mean the publisher is not credible.
But the point of the comment was that there are other methods besides ad blockers running in browsers. There are often alternative methods that "tech journalists" rarely if ever mention.
Sometimes, these methods are arguably better. For example, some methods can limit _all_ connections, whether the connections are initiated from (a) browsers, (b) other applications or (c) pre-installed corporate operating systems.
I miss those days.
You can't firewall a journalist's understanding that their job depends on certain things.
That's a problem for the media outlet to solve. Ad-supported tech "news" can never be trustworthy.
It is better than nothing and definitely for the more "normies" advice. Let's start there and then we can get them onto adblock and other stuff.
Btw, the ArsTechnica article they link offers more advice[0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/06/meta-and-yandex-are...
But I am glad they are pushing people toward other browsers because that is the biggest step. Once you have taken that step, installing the most popular extensions is trivial.
Guess what the highest rated extensions are?
I know it blocks a use of your information against you (targeted ads). And any external source is a potential leak (e.g. the kinds of things that CORS is supposed to reduce).
But does an ad blocker specifically leak more, or just reduce the incentive to collect that information?
This blocks most existing tracking methods. The only thing you're not protected from is first-party tracking by the site you're actually visiting, which is impossible to fully protect against.
Incidentally, just blocking JavaScript with NoScript kills quite a lot of ads (obviously, not first-party ones if you've white-listed their JavaScript for site functionality; but I try to avoid that when there isn't real demonstrated value) without any need for an explicit ad blocker.
If that is an acceptable compromise, you could also try ditching the Internet altogether, as that not only blocks all online tracking, it also blocks a lot of fraud, misinformation and all kinds of harmful content.
You literally (actually literally) can.
Sure, images may no be present without JS lazy-loading them. Accidentaly, NoScript also fixes a lot of websites. Publishers are often paywalling posts via JS and initial HTML is served with full articles.
You're trying to imply that ublock lite doesn't do that. It does, including javascript files. The full uBlock does more things to prevent tracking that lite cannot do. But "intercept requests at the network level" isn't one of those things.
It looks very stretched, but the real magic happens when this data is sold in bulk. It allows recouping who is where. Your target person may or may not be in each dataset, their location isn’t known like clockwork, but that allows determining where they work, where they sleep and who they’re with. One ad is useless as a datapoint, but recouping shows reliable patterns. And remember most people on iPhone still don’t have an adblocker.