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Privacy Solutions (Part 2): Adblock Plus

by on September 8, 2008 · 16 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

The goal of our “Privacy Solution Series,” as we noted in the first installment, is to detail the many “technologies of evasion” (i.e., user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online—and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes.  These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that, in our view, provides an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.

In this second installment in this series, we will highlight Adblock Plus (ABP), a free downloadable extension for the Firefox web browser (as well as for the Flock browser, though we focus on the Firefox version here).

Adblock Plus

Purpose: The primary purpose of Adblock Plus is to block online ads from being downloaded and displayed on a user’s screen as they browse the Web.  In a broad sense, this functionality might be considered a “privacy” tool by those who consider it an intrusion upon, or violation of, their “privacy” to be “subjected” to seeing advertisements as they browse the web.  But if one thinks of privacy in terms of what others know about you, Adblocking is not so much about “privacy” as about user annoyance (measured in terms of distracting images cluttering webpages or simply in terms of long download times for webpages).  In this sense, ABP may not qualify as a “technology of evasion,” strictly speaking.  But, as explained below the fold, ABP does allow its users to “evade” some forms of online tracking by blocking the receipt of some, but not all, tracking cookies.

Cost: Like almost all other Firefox add-ons, both the ABP extensions and the filter subscriptions on which it relies (as described below) are free.

Popularity / Adoption: While there are a wide variety of ad-blocking tools available, Adblock Plus is far and away the leader.  ABP has proven enormously popular since its release in November 2005 as the successor to Adblock, which was first developed in 2002 and reached over 10,000,000 downloads before being abandoned by its developer and even today garners nearly 40,000 downloads a week.  This history of Adblock provides further details.

ABP was named one the 100 best products of 2007 by PC World magazine and is now the #1 most downloaded add-on for Firefox with over 500,000 weekly downloads, up significantly for just a few months.  In a blog post last month, ABP creator Wladimir Palant estimated that “no more than 5% of Firefox users have Adblock Plus installed,” but that percentage is bound to grow larger as more people discover Adblock.  As one indicator of ABP’s popularity, the number of Google searches for “Adblock” has nearly eclipsed the number of searches for “identity theft,” which seems like a far more serious concern than having to look at web ads. Continue reading →

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Privacy Solutions (Part 1): Introduction

by on September 5, 2008 · 10 comments

By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

Whatever ordinary Americans actually think about online privacy, it remains a hot topic inside the Beltway. While much of that amorphous concern focuses on government surveillance and government access to information about web users, many in Washington have focused on targeted online advertising by private companies as a dire threat to Americans’ privacy — and called for prophylactic government regulation of an industry that is expected to more than double in size to $50.3 billion in 2011 from $21.7 billion last year.

In 1998, when targeted advertising was in its infancy, the FTC proposed four principles as the basis for self-regulation of online data collection: notice, choice, access & security. In 2000, the Commission declared that too few online advertisers adhered to these principles and therefore recommended that Congress mandate their application in legislation that would allow the FTC to issue binding regulations. Subsequent legislative proposals (indexed by CDT by Congress here along with other privacy bills) have languished in Congress ever since. During this time self-regulation of data collection (e.g., the National Advertising Initiative) has matured, the industry has flourished without any clear harm to users and the FTC has returned to its original support for self-regulation over legislation or regulatory mandates.

But over the last year, the advocates of regulation have succeeded in painting a nightmarish picture of all-invasive snooping by online advertisers using more sophisticated techniques of collecting data for targeted advertising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded cautiously by proposing voluntary self-regulatory guidelines intended to address these concerns, because the agency recognizes that this growing revenue stream is funding the explosion of “free” (to the user) online content and services that so many Americans now take for granted, and that more sophisticated targeting produces ads that are more relevant to consumers (and therefore also more profitable to advertisers).

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