Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak, because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to his professors, has installed some way to ward off online ads. Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, working with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he built them works great.
Pi-hole (as in “shut your …”) is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer that’s popular with DIYers, fits in the palm of your hand, and retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps. (Two big exceptions, both for technical reasons, are YouTube and Hulu.) It can’t block ads inside Facebook, but it can stop Facebook from following you around the web. It’ll let you play Bejeweled without seeing ads between games, watch Mr. Robot ad-free in the USA app, stream NPR with silence in place of the sponsor messages, and avoid the banner ads that have become common on internet-connected TVs. If friends come over and connect to your Wi-Fi, it’ll block ads for them, too.
Drobnak discovered Pi-hole in high school in 2015, after he and his siblings had already used their Raspberry Pi to play tic-tac-toe, program an elaborate light show, and monitor their respective addictions to electronics. The ad blocker, created by a Minnesota programmer named Jacob Salmela, was 2 years old and still fairly rudimentary. Less than a month after installing it at home, Drobnak hacked together a web interface to let users more easily block or whitelist sites. Two months later, Salmela invited him to join a tiny, all-volunteer development team. “Ads are annoying,” Drobnak says. “Pi-hole gives you control over that.”
About 18 percent of U.S. web users have an ad blocker, says PageFair Ltd., a company that helps advertisers find technical ways to work around the software. (Its estimates are among the more conservative ones.) Outside the U.S., the numbers are more dramatic. Desktop ad-blocker penetration is 24 percent in Canada, 29 percent in Germany, and 39 percent in Greece, according to PageFair. The practice is growing fastest on mobile devices in Asia, where data allowances are typically lower. In Indonesia, 58 percent of users block mobile ads. “In the early days, it was privacy activists and people who had an objection to capitalism in principle,” says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive officer of PageFair. “These days, it’s just average people.”
Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. But online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits. (...)
Pi-hole is installed on only 140,000 networks. Unlike more popular ad-blocking browsers (Brave, which claims 2 million users) or browser extensions (Adblock Plus, 105 million), it requires a dedicated computer and some tech savvy to set up. Still, it has assumed an outsize role in the ad-blocking movement. Its 22,000 true believers on Reddit help a lot, says Drobnak, who’s spending 5 hours to 20 hours a week working on Pi-hole between computer science classes. The developers have discovered spying by internet-connected TVs (which collect data for ad targeting), lightbulbs (users have reported some LED bulbs mysteriously connecting with the manufacturer’s server every 2 seconds), and printers (including one that sent out 34 million queries in a day).
Drobnak’s fellow core developers, all volunteers, say what unites them most is resentment of just how far the advertising industry has overreached in building its online empire of distraction and surveillance. There’s a corollary motivator, too: Puzzling out ways to frustrate the industry’s efforts—to zap millions upon millions of ads—can be really, really fun. “There’s a huge community behind it,” Drobnak says. “It’s just tinkerers trying to figure stuff out.”
The rise of ad blocking mirrors an explosion in online advertising technology. Barely 100 digital-only ad-tech companies operated in 2011; today there are about 2,000. Most arose with what’s known as programmatic advertising, automated systems run by the likes of Google and Microsoft Corp. that promise to match every ad with the person the ad is most likely to influence.
Dissect how such systems work, and it’s easy to be outraged. When you load a website, it sends a series of requests to other web domains to auction your eyeballs to the highest bidders. The number of intermediaries involved changes with every page load, but on a recent visit, the homepage for one popular U.S.-based news site sent 20 requests to 10 ad exchanges, each of which likely offered the space to hundreds of advertisers. It also set 47 cookies with unique tracking IDs, many of which log user data such as location, gender, age, and likes and dislikes based on browsing behavior. These data give advertisers a sense of how valuable you might be as a customer, and therefore how much to bid to show you an ad. When one of the advertisers wins the auction, an ad appears on your screen. The whole process takes less than a tenth of a second.
As a side business, every company involved in any step of the process may also try to place a cookie or tracker to collect more data on you for later use. Such companies often swap data to try to identify users they have in common, and they may pull in your email address, name, public records, and credit card history. “Ad blocking has grown in response to a lot of legitimate problems,” says PageFair’s Blanchfield. His previous venture, Jolt Online Gaming, collapsed because 30 percent of its users were blocking ads. He and his co-founder were, too.
By acting as a traffic cop at the network level, rather than in a browser, Pi-hole can cut off the nested bidding and tracking processes from the start. It takes on the role of your network’s Domain Name Server (DNS), meaning it translates IP addresses into URLs and vice versa. So if a website tries to contact what the Pi-hole knows to be an ad server, “it sends a request to the Pi-hole for the ad, and the Pi-hole is like, ‘Hah, I’m just going to return an empty page to you,’ and the ad server is never contacted,” Drobnak says. In the ad slots, the user typically sees blank white rectangles. (...)
After three weeks, my Pi-hole logs reported the system had blocked more than 39,000 requests, 29 percent of the total on just two devices (a phone and a laptop). They were all ads or ad-related tracking from places such as analytics.localytics.com, static.doubleclick.net, googleadservices.com, graph.facebook.com, app-measurement.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, and capture.condenastdigital.com. It’s fascinating to look at Pi-hole’s dashboard, a colorful layout of numbers and graphs, and think about what the network is doing—and just how many entities are keeping watch.
Pi-hole (as in “shut your …”) is a free, open source software package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer that’s popular with DIYers, fits in the palm of your hand, and retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps. (Two big exceptions, both for technical reasons, are YouTube and Hulu.) It can’t block ads inside Facebook, but it can stop Facebook from following you around the web. It’ll let you play Bejeweled without seeing ads between games, watch Mr. Robot ad-free in the USA app, stream NPR with silence in place of the sponsor messages, and avoid the banner ads that have become common on internet-connected TVs. If friends come over and connect to your Wi-Fi, it’ll block ads for them, too.Drobnak discovered Pi-hole in high school in 2015, after he and his siblings had already used their Raspberry Pi to play tic-tac-toe, program an elaborate light show, and monitor their respective addictions to electronics. The ad blocker, created by a Minnesota programmer named Jacob Salmela, was 2 years old and still fairly rudimentary. Less than a month after installing it at home, Drobnak hacked together a web interface to let users more easily block or whitelist sites. Two months later, Salmela invited him to join a tiny, all-volunteer development team. “Ads are annoying,” Drobnak says. “Pi-hole gives you control over that.”
About 18 percent of U.S. web users have an ad blocker, says PageFair Ltd., a company that helps advertisers find technical ways to work around the software. (Its estimates are among the more conservative ones.) Outside the U.S., the numbers are more dramatic. Desktop ad-blocker penetration is 24 percent in Canada, 29 percent in Germany, and 39 percent in Greece, according to PageFair. The practice is growing fastest on mobile devices in Asia, where data allowances are typically lower. In Indonesia, 58 percent of users block mobile ads. “In the early days, it was privacy activists and people who had an objection to capitalism in principle,” says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive officer of PageFair. “These days, it’s just average people.”
Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. But online advertising has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile, the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every user based on web habits. (...)
Pi-hole is installed on only 140,000 networks. Unlike more popular ad-blocking browsers (Brave, which claims 2 million users) or browser extensions (Adblock Plus, 105 million), it requires a dedicated computer and some tech savvy to set up. Still, it has assumed an outsize role in the ad-blocking movement. Its 22,000 true believers on Reddit help a lot, says Drobnak, who’s spending 5 hours to 20 hours a week working on Pi-hole between computer science classes. The developers have discovered spying by internet-connected TVs (which collect data for ad targeting), lightbulbs (users have reported some LED bulbs mysteriously connecting with the manufacturer’s server every 2 seconds), and printers (including one that sent out 34 million queries in a day).
Drobnak’s fellow core developers, all volunteers, say what unites them most is resentment of just how far the advertising industry has overreached in building its online empire of distraction and surveillance. There’s a corollary motivator, too: Puzzling out ways to frustrate the industry’s efforts—to zap millions upon millions of ads—can be really, really fun. “There’s a huge community behind it,” Drobnak says. “It’s just tinkerers trying to figure stuff out.”
The rise of ad blocking mirrors an explosion in online advertising technology. Barely 100 digital-only ad-tech companies operated in 2011; today there are about 2,000. Most arose with what’s known as programmatic advertising, automated systems run by the likes of Google and Microsoft Corp. that promise to match every ad with the person the ad is most likely to influence.
Dissect how such systems work, and it’s easy to be outraged. When you load a website, it sends a series of requests to other web domains to auction your eyeballs to the highest bidders. The number of intermediaries involved changes with every page load, but on a recent visit, the homepage for one popular U.S.-based news site sent 20 requests to 10 ad exchanges, each of which likely offered the space to hundreds of advertisers. It also set 47 cookies with unique tracking IDs, many of which log user data such as location, gender, age, and likes and dislikes based on browsing behavior. These data give advertisers a sense of how valuable you might be as a customer, and therefore how much to bid to show you an ad. When one of the advertisers wins the auction, an ad appears on your screen. The whole process takes less than a tenth of a second.
As a side business, every company involved in any step of the process may also try to place a cookie or tracker to collect more data on you for later use. Such companies often swap data to try to identify users they have in common, and they may pull in your email address, name, public records, and credit card history. “Ad blocking has grown in response to a lot of legitimate problems,” says PageFair’s Blanchfield. His previous venture, Jolt Online Gaming, collapsed because 30 percent of its users were blocking ads. He and his co-founder were, too.
By acting as a traffic cop at the network level, rather than in a browser, Pi-hole can cut off the nested bidding and tracking processes from the start. It takes on the role of your network’s Domain Name Server (DNS), meaning it translates IP addresses into URLs and vice versa. So if a website tries to contact what the Pi-hole knows to be an ad server, “it sends a request to the Pi-hole for the ad, and the Pi-hole is like, ‘Hah, I’m just going to return an empty page to you,’ and the ad server is never contacted,” Drobnak says. In the ad slots, the user typically sees blank white rectangles. (...)
After three weeks, my Pi-hole logs reported the system had blocked more than 39,000 requests, 29 percent of the total on just two devices (a phone and a laptop). They were all ads or ad-related tracking from places such as analytics.localytics.com, static.doubleclick.net, googleadservices.com, graph.facebook.com, app-measurement.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, and capture.condenastdigital.com. It’s fascinating to look at Pi-hole’s dashboard, a colorful layout of numbers and graphs, and think about what the network is doing—and just how many entities are keeping watch.
by Adrienne Jeffries, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Scott Gelber, Bloomberg
[ed. Still too complicated for the average user, but nice to see the technology heading in the right direction.]
[ed. Still too complicated for the average user, but nice to see the technology heading in the right direction.]
