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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

Sidetone, but I find it a bit rich that The Independent is going all high and mighty about privacy and sharing data, when they have the most atrocious ad and tracking experience I've seen on a media site in a long time.

Ghostly found 40 trackers http://imgur.com/a/miilB, the ads are extremely obnoxious. There's literally ads on top of ads sliding down my screen, pushing the content around. https://gfycat.com/InsecureHealthyAurochs

Those in glass houses...

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Ghostery will report what it knows, what is part of its database. If we measure using distinct 3rd-party servers, I counted 92 of them:

https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/18037421/6...

All this for a 6-paragraph article.

Edit: I should mention that when blocking all 3rd-party scripts and frames for that page, the article could be read just fine, with only one connection to a 3rd-party server, standard.co.uk (probably related to independent.co.uk).

Goodness gracious, I hadn't realised adverts had gotten that bad again. You'd think with the ever-increasing backlash against web site advertisement they'd balk at such behaviour on their web site.

In the past I was against ad-blockers, thinking that websites need a business model to survive and that subscriptions can't work for everyone. But this has turned into a serious assault on privacy.

So nowadays I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, the "Tracking Protection" in Firefox enabled by default and I'm seriously considering NoScript, too bad it wasn't available for Firefox Android last time I checked.

For your information you can get the Firefox for Android NoScript porting with the cheeky (but somewhat relevant) name NoScript Anywhere++ (NSA++) here: https://noscript.net/nsa/ It's quite experimental, the UI isn't great if you have a small phone but it works.

What do privacy badger and tracking protection provide that uBlock Origin doesn't?

You can replicate much of the behavior of noscript by using the advanced mode of uBlock Origin and setting third party scripts to default deny.

The UI is cumbersome for this on Firefox Mobile, but it does work.

I started using NoScript because my poor i3-powered laptop simply can't browse a lot of sites and maintain acceptable performance otherwise. Installing NoScript made the computer feel 10x faster.

I don't know what you are talking about I don't see any ads... Oh wait adblock.

Turns off adblock and hits refresh

Jesus christ nope not again never again.

Turns adblock back on

As if the journalists agree with the ad trackers ;)

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