Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssss11 | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing of this Chrome ad blocker, but you have to ask yourself, is it really an ad blocker if it’s owned and maintained by the largest adtech company on earth hellbent on maximising profits from ads?

View on HN

I’d probably base my determination more on its actual functionality in practice, rather than soapboxing by a drive-by commenter that themselves admits that they haven’t used it.

I’m not even a Chrome user, but come on…

No, you come on. Chrome's "ad blocker" is objectively laughable, and the person you are responding to is pointing out that additionally there is a conflict of interest. Wouldn't matter even if the functionality was at parity with Ublock.

60% of Google's revenue, $175 Billion came from advertising. Google Chrome will never implement a feature that threatens the company's primary source of revenue.

And to the surprise of nobody, they do the opposite. Google Chrome selectively sends more data when vising Google domains compared to regular domains.

Yes, it's in Google's best interest to maximize the amount of time people spend on the web, doing searches, to go to different websites. Websites with spammy ads can cause people to use the web less, causing them to search less, causing Google to be able to show less advertisements.

It’s in googles best interest to maximise the amount of time people spend on the web not viewing their adverts?

What on earth?

It's correlated. When people spend more time on the web, they do more Google searches, which will show more ads. So both the time spent not viewing their ads AND the time spent viewing their ads both increase.

Except if they're blocking ads and the ad blocker actually works (as e.g. uBlock Origin does), they're spending zero time viewing ads.

I never see any Google ads ever. Does the built in adblocker in chrome do that? Or does it... not block ads?

Chrome only blocks ads that violate the Better Ads Standards https://www.betterads.org/standards/

The ads that are shown on Google searches follow this so they are not blocked by Chrome.

Right so it doesn't do what an adblocker is supposed to do, which is block ads. It doesn't do that because it's not in Google's interest for it to do that.

It does block ads. It blocks ads that are harmful to the web ecosystem. Chrome blocking all ads would hurt the web ecosystem tremendously as it interferes with how many sites are monetized. It is not in Google's interest to kill the web. They want to ensure that it keeps growing.

Looking at the site you linked, it's clear that the objective of the standard is to show you ads without annoying the users enough to force them to install ad blockers. So the standard isn't about preventing targeted ads at all. And the ads don't have to cross the 'annoyance threshold' to be harmful to its audience. For example, cross-site tracking used by ad tech is a privacy nightmare in itself. There are good reasons to block all targeted ads altogether.

So… it’s not really an ad blocker then. Because it’s developed by the world’s largest advertising company.

It blocks ads so buy definition it is an adblocker.

Putting a sheet of paper over my computer screen is by definition an adblocker as well?

Except it’s definitely not, because that’s not its intended purpose.

>Except it’s definitely not, because that’s not its intended purpose.

Chrome's adblocker's purpose is to remove ads though so your example isn't the same.

So it’s a selective ad-remover, not an ad-blocker then.

Those are the same things. What do you think filter lists are which is how pretty much every ad blocker works? They literally are a list of a selectors for ads that should be removed.

Sure, and while you may pedantically argue that an antivirus software that selectively allows specific viruses on your computer depending on the author is still a antivirus software, most people wouldn’t.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com