The Illusion of Free
A new study found that popular free ad blockers make additional requests to tracking domains.
Think how they make 💰💰💰
Our preliminary findings indicate that though ad-blockers block external ads and third party trackers to varying degrees, they introduce various tracking services of their own. This is a novel finding and has potential impact on users privacy. We leave a detailed analysis on this for future work.
| Ad Blocker | Extra Domains Loaded |
|---|---|
| AdBlock | mixpanel.com, stripe.com |
| Adblock Plus | quantserve.com,crwdcntrl.net |
| Ghostery | selectmedia.asia, streamrail.com, adlooxtracking.com |
| Privacy Badger | cdnjs.com |
| uBlock | Twitter widgets |
This is why you should use a native Safari content blocker like 1Blocker — we can’t track you by design.