Chris Dragan's Corner

AdBlock is a wonderful little browser plugin. It does not get in the way. If you have it, you may not even know it’s there.

All it does to you is a favor. By blocking the ads, it removes all the unnecessary bling bling from your view. The result is that the websites that you are browsing contain only what you are interested in.

The functionality of AdBlock should really be part of browsers. Obviously Google would shoot themselves in the foot if they added it in Chrome. I suppose other browsers are trying to be politically correct by not including similar functionality.

There is a group of people who are against using AdBlock, because it strips them from potential income by preventing visitors from clicking on ads on their websites.

But I like AdBlock a lot, you wanna know why?

Let’s take Facebook, which is one of the most popular websites. It started off as a website who helped people get back together. Had a friend in school? Now it’s easy to reconnect! But Facebook accumulated a lot of users who upload a lot of information about themselves. It turned out to be a great source of information for which many companies pay prime money. After cashing on selling information about their users, Facebook also started serving ads to their users. Double win!

But I am not really against Facebook, I only don’t like their clunky web UI. If you are using Facebook, do you check out the things your friends post? So sometimes they post links to videos on YouTube. Unfortunately lots of YouTube videos are censored in many countries. Germany, for instance, is one of the countries leading in Internet censorship (among other countries). People from certain countries may in fact find it ironic!

So here are the two biggest problems the Internet has in this day and age:

1. People are the product. We, the users of the Internet, anything we produce and any information available about us are being traded.
2. Censorship is gaining strength, even in “highly developed” countries.

To me, AdBlock is our little means of getting back at them, a way of getting censorship onto our side.