Blocking Ads and Internet Privacy

Here are multiple products/services you can use to improve your internet experience by blocking ads, increasing privacy, and fighting back against our corporate overlords.

- Brad Pitt's half of the main character, Tyler Durden, in Fight Club (Fincher)

Every day, our lives become more and more online. With big tech companies showing no interest in wanting to slow down climate change and the current political climate, it has become increasingly important to take control of your online activity, not be at the will of corporations, and stay private and secure online. By unsubscribing to the main source of income for most corporations online - not viewing ads and not willingly handing your data over - we can show companies that our futures are not something they can play with without us doing something about it.

It's also simply just really refreshing to be able to use your device how you want and to not be bombarded with ads or AI all the time. You may think they are just a necessary nuisance in the digital age, but the truth is that when you're on your own device you control what does and doesn't go on it. It doesn't take more than ten minutes max to completely disable ads across everything on all of your devices.

Also see the Streaming page to learn how to block ads while streaming. With how much data big tech collects about us every second, De-Googling and Rejecting Corporations is also a good step towards privacy.

Ad Blocking

NextDNS

• NextDNS is a Domain Name System (DNS), which, to oversimplify, does backend work when connecting your devices to addresses on the internet.
• It blocks virtually all ads, trackers, and security threats across all devices while being faster than default settings.
• It works on websites and apps by blocking connections to web addresses that have unwanted things.
• You pick what you do or don't block by choosing what blocklists to apply.
• It doesn't work on platforms that get their ads and content from the same place, like social media or streaming. Browser ad blockers and the things on the Streaming page pick up the slack.
• It allows allows you to set custom addresses to block. I've blocked sites like Amazon, ChatGPT, and Twitter/X so even if I accidentally click on a link for one of those sites, I don't add to their user counts.
• There is a monthly limit for free accounts, but I've never reached it. Available on anything with an internet connection.

AdNauseam

• AdNauseam is an ad blocker for browsers. It will block anything on a browser NextDNS doesn't already, plus the empty spaces left by the ads.
• It is functionally the same as uBlock Origin, except it also messes with the advertisers and has a gallery to visually show you everything you block. AdNauseam is recommended, but if you have a purer heart than I, maybe you'd rather use uBlock Origin. Note that "uBlock" and "uBlock Origin" are different extensions run by different people. uBlock Origin is the superior and recommended version.
• With either, you can use Element Picker mode to block specific elements that bother you. I like to block any ads put on sites by the website owner (like the New York Times advertising their own subscriptions on their own website), useless and invasive AI features, videos that autoplay in the corner whether you like it or not, and barriers that normally stop you from seeing content unless you pay or give your email.
• Google doesn't allow the full versions of either on the Chrome Web Store. For full ad blocking functionality, see Browsers and Search Engines.
• Both are free and open-source. Both are available on most browsers.

VPNs

• make you more secure and private online, but they don't make you untouchable
• change where services think you are in the world, thus giving you access to things from other countries you normally wouldn't have access to
• can make services forget who you are or make them think you're a new user
• unblock things that are blocked by the Wi-Fi network you're on, since you're accessing the internet through the VPN rather than through your Wi-Fi
• slow your internet speeds, depending on what VPN you're using and where it's servers are in the world

Proton VPN

I recommend Proton VPN. It's the industry standard, most recommended by experts, and very secure. It is owned by a nonprofit that is constantly making new alternatives to Google products. There are limits for free accounts, but it's good enough for simple privacy and location changing. Open-source. Available on most mobile and PC platforms.

Browser Extensions

These extensions are linked to and for Firefox, but they or similar versions can likely be found on other browsers. Here is a Firefox collection for all the extensions. My favorites and the ones that I especially recommend you to check out are in bold. All are free, open-source, and on most desktop and mobile platforms unless otherwise noted. Also see the Additional Extensions.

Other Things

Antivirus

You really don't need an additional antivirus software nowadays. In my experience, tech experts suggest that Windows Defender Antivirus is enough. If you really want to be extra secure, you could run a Malwarebytes check every now and then to be sure (Newman).

Blocking Cookies

They may sound tasty, but rejecting cookies is a really easy way to increase your internet privacy. Make it a habit that whenever you enter a new website, you reject cookies rather than accepting them. The site will still work (sites don't let you reject essential cookies), and you won't be sending tracking and diagnostic info.

Communication

Many popular ways of communicating online are extremely insecure and not private, like standard texting, WhatsApp, or through Instagram. For secure and private communication, use Signal or a peer-to-peer service like Briar. Both are free and open-source. Signal is available on most mobile and PC platforms. Briar is available on Android.

EXIF Image Metadata

Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) is a standard for storing metadata on images. Typically, whenever you download, edit, or snap a photo information about when, where, and how you did it will be saved to the file. This data could contain information that could be sensitive, like location, device, or time data. Before you upload images to the web, take a second to remove the image's EXIF data so you aren't exposing personal information (Germain). You can use sites and apps like Tooleroid's EXIF stripper and viewer to help you manage the information.

Link Trackers

Links you get from places across the internet often have trackers embedded in them to tell the platform you're going to where you're coming from. To give you an example, if I were to share a video from YouTube using the built-in share button, it would give me a link like this:

Everything you see after the question mark (?) is a tracker. You can completely remove it and the link will still work perfectly fine:

Most of the time there's a question mark (?) followed by a bunch of random characters, it's a tracker. This isn't true 100% of the time, though. For example, also on YouTube, when you share a link to a specific timestamp it will give you a link like this:

As you can see at the end there, the timestamp ("t=161", 161 seconds = 2 minutes and 41 seconds or 2:41, exactly when the timestamp is set for) is there in addition to the tracker. You can remove the tracking part, but removing the timestamp part will leave it to link to the start of the video like normal. The question mark (?) is important for the timestamp bit, so don't remove it. Only remove the tracking part ("si=dLPgQD59t03bd10X"). The ampersand (&) should also go, as that denotes the 2nd part of the query (in this case, the timestamp):

ReVanced has a patch to automatically sanitize links for YouTube and other apps. You can use a site like Link Cleaner or extensions like ClearURLs to remove these parts of links instead of doing it manually.

Passwords

It is crucial to use different passwords on every account you create. If you reuse passwords, use simple passwords like "1234", or even if you use variations of the same password, you're putting yourself at risk. All it takes is one service with bad security to have a data breach for your password that you use on all platforms to be out there. I recommend using a password manager and generating a completely unique password with completely random characters for every account you make for maximum security. If you're using a password manager, there's no reason not to make the passwords as long and as complicated as the service will let you; other than if you need to be able to easily type it on devices without your password manager. I recommend either Proton Pass or Bitwarden. Both have limits on free accounts and are available on most mobile platforms, most PC platforms, and from any browser. Apart from using the one built in to your password manager, the password generator I'd recommend is Proton's Password generator. Also, consider adding multi-factor authentication on your accounts.