How to save yourself from online advertising?

Millions of people refuse from intrusive, distracting attention or simply inappropriate ads on their devices. The use of this opportunity will allow us to establish more beneficial relationships with Internet advertisers.

Blocking unnecessary data

In browsers we have automatic spam blockers. Every day more and more people activate this function to protect themselves from annoying offers. In its report for 2015, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism indicated that 47% of users polled in the US "constantly use special software that blocks spam." According to the report, the number of people in the world who seek to get rid of advertising in May last year exceeded 200 million.

To completely block all the garbage in the network, the fight must take even larger scales. Perhaps, if it is possible to completely destroy advertising, then this will be the largest confrontation in history. But we are going to this. So, Apple has built the function of blocking unnecessary content in all of its devices. This opens up additional opportunities for people, allowing them to control their movements through web pages and providing protection against spamming.

Tracking Policy

Blocking advertising is far from a novelty in the modern world. Henrik Aasted Sørensen created the original Adblock program more than 10 years ago. This user-friendly and very useful extension can be downloaded and launched by anyone in your web browser. The program appeared in 2002 and still does not lose its relevance. Why is this happening?

The main reason why people start to think about how to get rid of Internet offers is due to one word - tracking. Companies have increasingly used online advertising to hide as much data as possible from users. From the side of spammers, the story sounds a little different. They use ad delivery systems that simply track the movement of users across the vast expanses of the World Wide Web. Internet advertising basically corresponds to search requests in the browser. In other words, there is a tracking of human interests. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School called this unrestrained practice "the capitalism of observation".

Vision of researchers

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this phenomenon was made by IBM in partnership with the research firm Aberdeen Group in 2013, having printed a poster called The Big Datastillery. The diagram shows the "route of movement" of the mouse or finger cursor while using the Internet. In addition, it lists social media and other sources of data that the browser uses. All processed information "flows" through the "pipes". At the bottom of the illustrated diagram are the levels of "optimizing interaction with customers" and "marketing optimization". In this area, the data "are bottled". Each glass depicted on the poster is the right of a person to refuse to receive information that is not necessary to him.

Advertising advertising discord

Researchers conducted a survey to find out why people decided to start using adware blockers. Many of the Internet users responded that they asked for help from a defensive program to avoid "misuse of personal information."

So, from all of the above, we can conclude that we received market power on an equal basis with advertisers. But why should we bargain then?

The answer, in fact, is very simple: for ordinary advertising, which has the goal of spreading information, rather than impose it on people, tracking every step of the users of the World Wide Web. In other words, for the same advertising that you can see in the real world. Even if we do not like ads that fill magazines and interrupt films, we at least know their economic role. These messages provide information about certain brands, but they respect the privacy of users and do not try to track their activity.