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Comment by gregimba | Hacker News Reader

This is just going to be another arms race.

It's only an arm race if a lot of people uses it and it becomes a problem to business owners.

Sad truth is: all these "privacy" plugins break ads. Many people install them for that purpose alone and use privacy as excuse. Even if a website provide local ads because it values the privacy of its users: those are blocked too.

From a website owner's perspective privacy plugins are ad-blockers.

They only break ads if ads are big JS things that have privacy implications - most ads are, but they don't have to be.

I run a website that has one sponsor and their ads aren't blocked by privacy tools - because it's just some static HTML text, link and an image on the page. So I'm not sure what "local ads" you are referring to.

(In much the same way, I don't see a whole bunch of ads because I use a Flashblocker ... but ads don't have to be flash)

> From a website owner's perspective privacy plugins are ad-blockers.

If that's how a website owner thinks, then I'd say they have a very narrow idea of what an ad can be.

Small businesses don't reinvent ads or analytics, they rotate banners and that's it. They also don't implement their own software but use third party tools/plugins to manage their ads.

Ghosterly and Co blocks those common third party solutions even when run locally. E.g. from the Ghostery source:

    "type":"analytics",
          …
         "pattern":"\\/piwik\\.(js|php)",

    "type":"ad",
          …
         "pattern":"\\/adpeeps\\.php",

You make it sound like there was something wrong with choosing which content you view.

I was mainly referencing the privacy vs data collection arms race. In this case I don't think anyone is going to be severely affected by this.

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