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Comment by BubRoss | Hacker News Reader

I think if regular people start to care about this the next step will be pi-hole or some other filtered dns in the router. It makes a massive difference. Sites load in half the time, use half the CPU and some sites like anandtech, techradar, and just about any other news site trying to get a wide audience actually becomes usable.

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The flip side is something like trying to sign up for an Instagram account when you have a pi-hole running: completely broken experience, a cryptic "Something went wrong, try again later." message followed by an insta-ban for the account/email, with no indication that is was because you're blocking ads/trackers, nor any indication anywhere that you should not try to sign up whilst running any blockers.

The pi-hole is too aggressive when it blocks stuff. For example, on the Fandango mobile app, the payment gateway is blocked by the pi-hole. A user should use the white list functionality to add the domain or two to get back the site's functionality.

I have had that happen a lot when using ad blockers, but not as a result of pi-hole.

That's great whilst you're at home but as soon as you go out and switch to your mobile network you're back to being tracked again surely.

Is there any easy way around that?

There should be a plug and play mobile app for that?

Have a look at dnsadblock.com. The mobile app is not so great but I'm getting there.

Create your own VPN and install the DNS blocker there. [Algo VPN](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo) is a great start. Furthermore, you could repave the VM daily or in any time interval. Using WireGuard as VPN protocol as opposed to OpenVPN and others will increase your browsing speed to the point of making it feel you are not even connected anywhere.

Not every piece of the puzzle is going to be a silver bullet. You can still run ad blocking extensions in web browsers.

Thanks for the replies all. I do appreciate the time taken out of busy lives. However, I did specify "easy" and as soon as you start talking about creating your own VPN and the like you've lost about 99% of the people out there who are perfectly intelligent in there own right but when it comes to computers they barely know what a sub-directory is.

Hell, I've been a software developer for years, and once built my own PC, but I balk at the idea of building a pi-hole. For a lot of people you may add well ask them to change the engine in their car.

Until there is a plug and play solution to privacy I do believe it belongs to the digital 1%.

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