I wrote another post about how influential advertisements can be. Ads are ubiquitous, screaming for our attention from all sides and sources – television, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and most alarmingly, the Internet. I say the Internet ads are the most alarming because they are often tailored to our individual preferences, and I don’t like that idea of Big Brother watching and knowing me so well. This problem can be remedied somewhat by doing things like disabling cookies on your browser, but in my experience, advertisers somehow seem to find a way around that.
AdBlock is here to shield Google Chrome and Safari users from some of those invasive Internet ads, including sidebar ads and those pesky YouTube ads. Advertisements can be influential in many areas, but our political views can definitely be one of them. I prefer to have my political views influenced by content I seek out myself, rather than advertisements that seek me out, so I was excited when I found out about this. I encourage everyone to go check it out and download the program. It works like a charm, and the program creator claims that it “requires no personal information to run, and doesn’t monitor your browsing.” I cannot vouch for the truth of that statement, but advertisers are tracking me anyway, so I’d rather run the risk of being tracked by one more party in order to avoid seeing many annoying advertisements.
Just to be clear, this program does not claim to stop advertisers from tracking your browsing data. That’s up to you and the settings you enable on your browser. But it does largely stop those marketers from reaching you, and that’s worth a lot.
You can also find AdBlock on Facebook.
Hollywood, D.C. 