The more you know

An ad blocker of the nearest future is yet another personal assistant, that guides you to your profit and safety through the labyrinth of marketing technologies. Today ad blockers hide ads from you — tomorrow they will have to hide you from ads.

"Instagram is listening to you and uses the contents of your offline discussions for targeting ads", thinks entrepreneur and developer Damián Le Nouaille. One day he saw an ad in his Instagram news feed featuring a product that he had never googled, liked or discussed on social networks. He talked about it with his friends in a cafe, though.

This article is for AdGuard Pro for iOS users exclusively. If you are one, there’s a chance you would like to revert to version 1.2.1. How and why — find out here.

Facebook should pay us a basic income, states John Thornhill from Financial Times. Look at Alaska: for more than 30 years an investment fund financed by oil companies pays all the state’s residents from $878 to $2,072 annually (the sum depends on the success of fund’s investment efforts, not on anything a resident does or achieves).

How does an ad blocker work? What does the quality of blocking depend on? How do some ads get past it? What differentiates ad blockers from one another?

Such questions are not just a matter of curiosity. Knowing the answers can help one select and use a blocker more efficiently.

Understanding the importance of our personal data, we are forced to maintain a certain balance between security and openness. We have to share our data if we want to buy online, use apps and services. But, trusting our data to a certain business, we expect that it would use it within laws, ethics, and would take our interests into consideration.

We decided to investigate several popular mobile applications and see which third parties have access to the personal data of their users.

For as long as advertisements have existed, people have been trying to avoid them. No surprise there. An advertisement is an unwelcome communication that distracts attention and intrudes at its own discretion and for its own purpose.

Marketing experts writhed in agony when video cassette recorders first started gaining popularity. "It’s over now," they thought. "TV advertising is dead. People will no longer just switch channels (where they can be caught) or go to the kitchen (where they can still hear the ads). Now they can avoid an ad altogether by just cutting it off!"