this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
2338 points (99.3% liked)
Privacy
32120 readers
341 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I find it hard to see how they could protect content from ad blockers without also crippling pages that self modify their own content. Perhaps they could put headers akin to content security policy that forbids external modification. Assuming a browser were to honour that header I could see bad publicity and a lot of people just moving to another browser which doesn't. Additionally, ad blockers aren't the only things that modify pages - breaking accessibility add ons could be more negative publicity (just like with Reddit).
I think browsers would be best off to let websites develop countermeasures if they're so sore about ad blockers. Perhaps they could use "self healing" Javascript libraries that put back content which is removed. Or they could just refuse to work if they detect an ad blocker, e.g. they stick some canaries in the DOM or along blocked paths to see if an ad blocker is present.
Lobbyists engineering bills in Congress to prohibit this and throw people in prison for it through additions to the DMCA in 3...2...1...