What You Gain (and Lose) by Using Ad Blockers
It seems like the average website has more ads than content. There’s a banner at the top, a square in the sidebar, and in most cases, a few auto-playing video ads thrown in for clarity. Ad blockers can help clean up the mess, but experts say installing an ad blocker doesn’t just make the Internet less cluttered: They can also help you stay safe online.
Ad blockers can protect you from scammers
In an ideal world, outright scammers and cybercriminals would not be able to buy advertising from profitable search engines. However, we do not live in an ideal world.
“Criminals have started buying up ad space,” said Kim Kee , senior security analyst at our sister site PCMag, who compiled a well-researched list of the best ad blockers . “This means that some ads may infect your device with malware when you interact with them, or may contain links to malicious websites.”
A variation of this is advertising designed to imitate legitimate businesses in search results. This problem is so widespread that the FBI issued a statement in 2022recommending the use of ad blockers .
“Cybercriminals buy advertisements that appear in online search results using a domain that looks like a real business or service,” the statement said. “When a user searches for that business or service, these advertisements appear at the very top of the search results with minimal difference between the advertisement and the actual search result.”
The report mentions that not all ads are scams (okay?), but installing an ad blocker is one way to protect yourself from getting sucked into this scam in the first place.
(Some) ad blockers can protect your privacy
I don’t think I need to tell you that online advertising is invasive: we’ve all noticed that advertising follows us all over the Internet. Spend time searching for shoes on Amazon, and ads for the shoes you were looking at will appear everywhere you go. This may seem creepy.
Ad blockers can protect you from this, but there is a caveat: some ad blockers prevent you from seeing ads without blocking tracking. “If your ad blocker doesn’t block trackers and just blocks ads, it doesn’t protect your privacy,” said William Budington , senior technologist at the public interest group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Janet Vertesi , an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University who has published extensive work on human-computer interaction, told me that this is the reason she doesn’t use an ad blocker herself. “Some ad blockers make you think you have privacy because you don’t see ads, but you don’t know if sites are collecting your data,” she said.
However, there are options specifically designed to block tracking. Privacy Badger , created by the EFF, is not designed to block ads, just tracking, but Budington told me that it ends up blocking most ads anyway. “The reason there is such a conflation of ad blockers and tracker blockers is because the vast majority of ads on the Internet are also trackers,” he said.
Vertesi told me that this distinction—tracking blocking versus ad blocking—may be at the heart of Google’s recent changes to ad blocking in Chrome .
“What made uBlock Origin such a great ad blocker was that it blocked both outbound and inbound ads,” she said. “Chrome is a Google product. Google collects data. Of course they don’t want you to use uBlock Origin.”
There you have it: ad blockers can protect your privacy, but only if you use the right one.
Disadvantages of Using Ad Blockers
Despite all this, there are reasons why you might not want to use an ad blocker. First, support what you read.
“Some content creators rely on advertising to generate income, so as a supporter, you may not always want to block all advertising,” Key said. “In this case, I recommend trying an extension like Adblock Plus because it allows you to allow some ads and block others.”
And some ad blockers create privacy problems of their own.
“I recommend reading the privacy policy of an ad blocking extension before installing it,” Key said. “Make sure you know what types of data the ad blocker collects from your browser and how the company plans to store and use your personal information.”
An argument can also be made that using an ad blocker makes it more difficult to detect that you are being tracked.
“I don’t use an ad blocker because I track what they think they know about me,” Vertesi said. “They’re like the canary in the coal mine. I want to see these shoes following me around the Internet – I need to know if my guard is down.”