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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

This may be exactly what I want. I don't actually mind ads that respect my privacy and my attention. If ads didn't track my every move and didn't disrupt my workflow by making noises without permission or otherwise stealing my attention and time, I would have zero use for an ad blocking tool.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about stopping those invasive noisy ads or ads that block content, so I may still have to keep using uBlock. Maybe in some future ideal world, advertisers will learn that if they want me to see their ads, at all, they have to respect my privacy, my time, and my attention.

Maybe someone needs to make a "show only ads from people who aren't assholes" plugin.

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The "show only ads from people who aren't assholes" is basically what AdblockPlus does.

Good point. I know EFF has a mission versus the one-man show that is ABP, but isn't this mostly identical otherwise? Is Privacy Badger just APP with a political statement attached?

Maybe there's something to be said for that...put your money where your browser is and support the web you want. You could also just donate to the EFF, I guess.

ABP's default blocklist only blocks visible ads. Although there are also tracking-related ABP lists, they are manually-curated, which is different from Privacy Badger's attempts to detect trackers algorithmically.

ABP is not a one-man show, it's now developed by a company (Eyeo GmbH) that makes a lot of money getting companies like Google to buy into their "acceptable ads" scheme.

ABP also considers ads that track people (such as Google's) to be acceptable and whitelists them by default.

Thanks -- I did not know this. Is there an available list of what ABP considers "acceptable ads?"

The "acceptable ads" criteria are here:

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria

If you make a modern-looking long-scrolling article that has an ad somewhere in the middle, it's not "acceptable". If you get a crappy CMS that splits every article into 9 pages with an ad at top and bottom, then it is.

The main weird thing is that 3rd-party tracking is "acceptable" (!)

(I recently added some details on the problem to the Aloodo tracking test, because users have started to assume that ad blockers fix everything. http://blog.aloodo.org/posts/adblockers-myths-facts/ )

The backing company eyeo blackmails advertisers into paying eyeo 30% of revenues from users with adblock installed [1]. While adblockplus may not inherently be evil, I see no possibility that they don't so turn when more ads goes straight to their bottom line.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboo...

"ads (...) stealing my attention and time"

Isn't that the whole point of an ad?

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