An advertising industry worker's take on adblockers

Not a fans of these people saying how bad thing are but refuse to elaborate. Like sure, i know ads and socmed company will collect my data piece by piece and put it together to know who i am and target me with stupid ads, but i also love to know if there's more to it. It's not to convince me but it's to convince others.

I’ve worked at both Facebook and Google, and I’d second this sentiment. It is pretty disgusting that anyone with a passable knowledge of how to hide their tracks can basically get all of the information (messages, posts, photos, private information) they want about you. Sure, they might get fired if they’re caught, and maaaaaaaybe (read: probably not) face legal action, but they can do a lot of damage beforehand. And if they’re good enough, they won’t get caught.

I trust the people that I worked with there, but these are big organizations, and a lot more people than I would be comfortable with have essentially administrator access to private data.

I work in an advertising-adjacent field (we won't do any skeevy data-harvesting stuff, but still, ads) and I barely use any of the main social media sites, have an adblocker enabled on my router, use uBlock, GrapheneOS for my phone, Linux with a bunch of hardening, a VPN that's always on etc.

My work computer doesn't have any of that 'cause I need to be able to see ads on it, but sometimes if I forget and just browse around on my work computer with no ad protection... holy fuck it always surprises me how awful the internet is.

I feel like internet advertising is way overdue for a crash, its like the matrix I dont even see them anymore.

I built software around 2010-2014 around harvesting visitor data.

Shit was scary back then with how much we could predict. We were already laser targeting customers and people. I can only imagine what they're doing now.

This was before the whole "big data" push when companies were cross-referencing data sources from other harvesters.

why is this so normalized? every time some guy who knowingly does evil things and comes up and say that their work was evil like and now everyone should praise them… removed STFU, you aren't revealing anything that's not public knowledge.

"I spied on billions of people, I would avoid my ex company"

"I previously worked at amazon and made millions, now you should avoid it"

"I got rich by exploiting you, now that i'm out and doing other things, avoid my last company"

"I worked at and oversaw pushing violent narratives in developing countries, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 feet pole"

No Shit Sherlock!!

I started going DEEP into privacy protection and ad blocking maybe 8 years ago. I noticed that despite the fact that I was completely raw dogging the internet, the ads I was seeing were hilariously not my tempo. I was getting tampon ads, grindr ads, ads in foreign languages, and luxury car ads. So for every data collecting firm connecting the dots on who I am, there seemed to be 10 more than had no idea what they were doing and just casting wide ass nets.

I agree with him entirely, but the current problem is really that content creators need to get paid, but so do the hosts.

There are places to host that are creator-paid…the creator could also self-host. But if you want your content to be seen, you need to be in the big websites that get most their revenue from ads.

Get Patreon and Nebula bigger than YouTube and maybe more creators would host there. But that’s a bit of a prisoners dilemma.

And people on here have called me excessive for running NoScript + Ublock and actively researching all of the script sources that I enable. If it even has the letters 'ad' in it it is permanently forbidden. Along with everything google unless I need to sign in and tag manager is used, then I do it in an isolated environment.

Hmm maybe I’m just desensitized, but what are they going to do with that information? Going to try and sell me stupid shit?

Cant we figure out our tracking id and just feed it complete garage? Like is there an app for that?

I agree with this and yet this seems really contrived

… give them money.

This point though. Do you pay for the content you consume? If not, you contribute to creators gravitating towards advertisement to pay rent with their work.