Tag: trackers

Ghostery and the ethics of blocking ads

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Marco Arment, talking about the ethical dilemma of using ad blockers:

I recently started using Ghostery on my computers, and a simple homemade iOS content blocker that I may release for iOS 9’s launch. The web performance improvements with these are staggering, and the reports of quite how much Ghostery is blocking on most pages is shocking and disgusting.

I struggle with the similar ethical quandary. I have been using Ghostery for a while as well, and I’ve decided to allow Google, the Deck and a few other Ad publishers through. I want to support sites if they have chosen an ad-supported model as long as they do it in a moderately tasteful way. But to me, web tracking and retargeting is a bridge too far.

What’s great about Ghostery is that it allows you to choose to either block all 3rd party trackers/ads or specific ones, and you can even choose to do so one a per-site basis. This lets me show ads from certain networks I know of and ‘trust’ on some level, while blocking all of the shadier services. It’s a simple add on for Chrome, Safari or Firefox and it dramatically decreases the load time on most web pages, and gives you some level of peace of mind.

As others have pointed out, trackers and ads nowadays aren’t just something you can simply ignore. It’s code, executed on your machine and dramatically slows down the load time of an average web site by a few seconds most of the time. This has costs in terms of time, bandwidth, privacy and even on an ethical level.

I’ll keep tweaking my Ghostery settings to let some types of ads through, but undecipherable tracker names with no obvious benefit … you’re on notice.

Everything That’s Wrong With the Web

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From Jeremy Keith:

It’s funny, but I take almost the opposite view that Nilay puts forth in his original article. Instead of thinking “Oh, why won’t these awful browsers improve to be better at delivering our websites?”, I tend to think “Oh, why won’t these awful websites improve to be better at taking advantage of our browsers?” After all, it doesn’t seem like that long ago that web browsers on mobile really were awful; incapable of rendering the “real” web, instead only able to deal with WAP.

I’m a little late to the party with this article, but I’m glad to see such pushback against Nilay Patel’s ridiculous article about mobile web browsers being responsible for bad performance.  While there are always performance and UX/UI gains to me made in Safari and Chrome, I think anyone with even a basic understanding of how web browser performance works knows that throwing 200+ http requests at any browser is not exactly how the web was designed to work. 

Vox Media appears to have a talented group of engineers who understand they’re up against, but this is an arms race (publishers v. end users) that’s not going to end well for any of us if things continue down the path we are on. By adding more and more intrusive tracking, larger imagery and gimmicky article formats that don’t focus on good user experience but rather increasing time in site. It’s as if our friends at the Verge have decided they’re going to go all-in on user hostile behavior and even try to pin it on the browser vendors. 

I used to think Patel was a good writer. He’s a smart guy but I feel like he’s been corrupted in the search for the almighty page view. Maybe that’s giving him more credit than he deserves, but I find myself thinking “here we go again” when I see his name in the byline.