Comment by pbalau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbalau | Hacker News Reader

A success story about location based ads: some time ago, my fat cat went on an adventure. She is a house cat, never been outside. She managed to jump from the 1st floor window (second floor for US peeps) and went wandering around the back gardens. I could not find her that evening and there were some bad storms coming in + a people told me there are foxes around.

I created a fb page about my missing cat and used my ads credits to promote that page around the area I live. Second day after I did this, I got a phone call from one of my neighbors that she saw the cat and that evening I had my cat back home.

It turns out that my neighbor's daughter was visiting and saw the cat in their backyard. Then she saw the ad on facebook and told her mother to call me.

Thank you, cases like this really make me want to disable uMatrix.

If there was a way to make all the ads actually display the kind of thing I like, even if it's via some network-specific checkboxes or something like that, I'd gladly disable uMatrix and any ad blocking.

But then I remember the ads with sounds, or the mining ads, or ads that don't even have anything to do with the websites I visit nor the one I'm currently in... no thanks.

Like this? https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_s...

I don't use Facebook but yes, from the url I think that's exactly the sort of thing I want. I think Google lets you tailor their ads too, but these giants are more like the exception.

Some websites use different ad networks, so ideally I'd like something like that but as a browser setting. For example some predefined list of topics (the same way there's a list of TLDs), and making the browser send a header like "Advertising: 1,20,6,78,9481" and then ad networks would adhere to those categories.

Of course that's way too idealistic and there's no way something like that will ever happen, but if people want me to disable my ad blocker, that's the only way I'd agree to it. Otherwise is an instant "no".

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