What does your ad/tracker blocking setup look like?

13 points by realshowbiz 6 years ago | 12 comments

With the multitude of possible approaches to ad/tracker blocking, and varying personal opinions about the merit of doing so, I’m curious what people are actually using day-to-day to improve privacy of their desktop and mobile environments.

jamesponddotco 6 years ago |

Safari with JS disabled on macOS and iOS, Firefox with a custom user.js on elementaryOS. I enable JS only when necessary — looking at you, Help Scout.

For actual blocking, I run a Pi-hole on a VPS that connects to multiple DNSCrypt servers that I control, which block everything I want while improving privacy. Planning on replacing Pi-hole with AdGuard Home for DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS, since I want to have this server public at some point, for others to use.

If anyone is interested in testing, shoot me an email at root@jamespond.co. No logging, DNSSEC, disk encryption, Canonical Livepatch, 24/7 monitoring and completely open source.

paulcole 6 years ago |

I don't use one.

I like not paying directly for content and accept that ads and tracking are the price I "pay". I personally don't feel comfortable taking something without holding up my end of the bargain.

It's really not a big deal. Sometimes I see products I want to buy or things I looked at and forgot about and end up buying them.

It's also not the horrific and torturous experience I read about on here. I wonder if I'm just going to the wrong sites lol?

simonblack 6 years ago | |

It depends a lot on how much you are paying for your internet service, and/or how fast it is.

If you're paying nothing or just a little, and/or it's very fast then the extra time/cost of the ad content is negligible.

On the other hand, if your internet connection is slow, expensive or you have a small monthly quota, then any time or cost involved in downloading largish volumes of ad content becomes a huge fraction of your costs.

I once had a monthly quota of two gigabytes when travelling. An average of only 60 megabytes per day. It doesn't take many two-three megabyte webpages full of ads to soak up that 60MB daily quota.

paulcole 6 years ago | | |

Nope, doesn't have anything to do with that IMO.

I don't get to pay less at Nordstroms because I don't make as much money as a surgeon. I shop at Gap or a thrift store instead.

Either go to different sites or don't visit those sites at all.

Despite what so many posters here seem to think, it's not a god-given right to read the NYT without looking at ads lol.

karma20 6 years ago |

Firefox for iOS and macOS. I have strict tracking protection [1] enabled on the former, and NoScript + uBlock Origin set up on the latter. I also use Little Snitch on the Mac.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-ios

bigato 6 years ago |

Use the modern primitive browser mothra on 9front at home, dillo at work (linux), and then iridium on openbsd with ublock origin, when mothra or dillo are not enough for the site.

zzo38computer 6 years ago |

I have JavaScript disabled mostly. And then, I have various custom CSS rules defined. And other settings. I do not actually have a ad-blocker installed.

karthik02 6 years ago |

Firefox Focus on iPhone / iPad. Ublock Origin on Mac.

x2f10 6 years ago |

uBlock Origin at work (Chrome / Edge). Wipr at home (OSX, iOS). This gives me an ad free environment without the hassle (such as disabling JS).

e83f70479b 6 years ago |

Chrome with ublock origin advanced mode - 3rd party frames & scripts blocked by default.

iOS - Safari with AdGuard as content blocker

rolph 6 years ago |

default mode is no JS, and no 3rd party anything. 2nd parties are strongly suspect. if those criteria leave me with a white page then i drop the CSS style into no style and read text, or source code for text strings. if i get nothing after that then i search DDG for similar pages where i can see the content without problems.

stentotre 6 years ago |

Ublock origin + PiHole