The ad wars

Iqbal, Umar; Shafiq, Zubair; Qian, Zhiyun

doi:10.1145/3131365.3131387

Cited by 56 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Some descriptions of cases are characterized on the internet by the users [19] in the context of website publishers preventing them from blocking advertisements [20]. One prevention option is based on legal regulations and the right to maintain the integrity of the website publisher's work, or the right not to allow the ad blocking, because it may be viewed as a change to the content and form of the website publisher's work [21], [22].…”

Section: Website Owners Preventing Ad Blockingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Adblock Software Usage

Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz

Strzelecki

Abramek

2019

CSIMQ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article shows the main factors of adblocking software usage. The study was based on data obtained by a web questionnaire. The research was focused on evaluation of ad blocking (adblock) software usage factors in five categories: (1) gender, age, and education; (2) use of advertising and sources of knowledge about advertising; (3) technical and social reasons for blocking online advertisements; (4) usage of an adblock-wall; and (5) type of online advertisement. An evaluation of adblock usage factors revealed four main technical reasons for adblock usage connected with website technology and web development problemsinterruption, amount of ads, speed, and security; and one social reason for adblock usage, namely, the problem of privacy.

show abstract

Section: Website Owners Preventing Ad Blockingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of Adblock Software Usage

Sołtysik-Piorunkiewicz

Strzelecki

Abramek

2019

CSIMQ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Since these privacy-enhancing content blockers are now used by more than one-third of web users [2,57], there are strong financial incentives for web developers to evade content blockers. The typical evasion strategy is to manipulate the URLs, e.g., change the URL path or hostname, such that filter lists are no longer effective [25,40]. This has led to an arms race where filter lists need to be promptly updated in response to such evasion attempts [30,53,71].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blocking JavaScript without Breaking the Web: An Empirical Investigation

Amjad¹,

Shafiq²,

Gulzar³

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus hoping to block privacy-invasive scripts while avoiding breaking legitimate website functionality. In this paper, we investigate whether blocking JS on the web is feasible without breaking legitimate functionality. To this end, we conduct a large-scale measurement study of JS blocking on 100K websites. We evaluate the effectiveness of different JS blocking strategies in tracking prevention and functionality breakage. Our evaluation relies on quantitative analysis of network requests, and resource loads as well as manual qualitative analysis of visual breakage. First, we show that while blocking all scripts is quite effective at reducing tracking, it significantly degrades functionality on approximately two-thirds of the tested websites. Second, we show that selective blocking of a subset of scripts based on a curated list achieves a better tradeoff. However, there remain approximately 15% "mixed" scripts, which essentially merge tracking and legitimate functionality and thus cannot be blocked without causing website breakage. Finally, we show that fine-grained blocking of a subset of JS methods, instead of scripts, reduces major breakage by 3.7× while providing the same level of tracking prevention. Our work highlights the promise and open challenges in fine-grained JS blocking for tracking prevention without breaking the web.

show abstract