Last year, Princeton researchers revealed a powerful new ad-blocking technique: perceptual ad-blocking uses a machine-learning model trained on images of pages with the ads identified to make predictions about which page elements are ads to block and which parts are not. Read the rest “Researchers claim to have permanently neutralized ad-blocking's most promising weapons”
Privacy Badger is EFF's free privacy plugin; it blocks trackers and ads from companies that practice "non-consensual tracking," in which your browser's "do not track" instructions are not honored. Read the rest “Fight back against Facebook overcollection with EFF's free Privacy Badger plugin”
The New York Times rounds up direct links to several services surveillance opt-out screens, including some I'd never thought to look for (Amazon), as well as instructions for installing tracking blockers and no-script extensions that will limit the data trail you exhaust behind yourself as you traverse the net. Read the rest “Guide to finding and erasing your online data doppelganger”
Vidangel is the latest attempt (along with services like Clearplay and Sony's own filtering tool) to sell a product that allows cringing, easily triggered evangelicals to skip swear words, sex and blasphemy in the media they watch. Read the rest “Vidangel is a stupid censorship service and we should welcome it anyway”
Mozilla has extended and improved its Firefox Focus browser, heretofore an Ios product, bringing it to Android, with auto-blocking of trackers and ads and making it easy to erase your browser history. Read the rest “Mozilla's new Android browser blocks ads and trackers”
Ad-blockers begat ad-blocker-blockers, which begat ad-blocker-blocker-blockers, with no end in sight. Read the rest “Blockers will win the ad-blocking arms race”
Brave is a new experimental browser from Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. It comes with a built-in ad-blocker that only blocks third party ads, and replaces them with non-tracking ads from its own inventory, whose revenue is then shared with publishers and users, on better terms than most ad networks give. Read the rest “Publishers call Brave's privacy-centric browser "illegal"; Brave responds”
Adzerk, who serves ads for Bittorrent, Stackexchange, Reddit and other high-profile sites, will honor Do-Not-Track messages from readers' browsers, and its ads will not be blocked by the major ad-blocking software. Read the rest “Ad server will respect Do-Not-Track headers”
