TMH #2: Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder

In this episode, I got to chat with Pete Snyder (Brave) about ad and content blockers, and their impact not just on user experience on the web but also the engineering decisions a privacy researcher working on a web browser might have to make daily. Ad blockers are used to prevent the web browser from communicating with domains and URLs that have been flagged as harmful or malicious in various filter lists . This blocking makes the web browsing experience faster , more private , and more secure . However, there are lost of questions around how ad blockers work. Some of the things we discuss in the interview include: – Who decides what gets filtered out? – Who is responsible if things break on the web? – What is the future like for blocking technology? From Pete’s words I got the impression that there’s still a lot of work to be done in this space. Not just technology-wise, but also in terms of the research that’s required to figure out the appropriate mix of compromise that browser engineering, specifically in the privacy space, seems to be. We also talk about the Brave browser , as it has truly been a pioneer in privacy protections, with one of the most aggressive stances when it comes to protecting the browser user and being true to the browser’s mission as the user agent . Listen to the episode using the player or find it in your favorite podcast service . Topics 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:06:28 – Pete explains the basic functionality of ad and content blockers 00:08:20 – What are the main motivations for people to user blockers? 00:09:35 – The Brave browser’s history with ad blocking technology 00:10:20 – How Brave’s blocking mechanisms work 00:12:20 – Who owns and maintains the filter lists used by ad blockers? 00:14:40 – Standardization efforts for filter lists 00:16:35 – Addressing web breakage and compatibility issues 00:17:56 – Resource replacement, or stubbing the APIs used by blocked scripts 00:18:55 – Prevent scripts from e.g. accessing storage instead of blocking them outright 00:20:31 – New ideas for shipping site JavaScript to make it easier to determine potential privacy and security issues 00:23:30 – Algorithmic heuristic approach for preventing scripts from collecting potentially harmful information 00:26:54 – Brave’s small(er) size vs. market leaders and its ability to ship things faster and with less red tape 00:29:11 – Brave’s third-party cookie blocking 00:30:12 – Partitioned storage vs. preventing storage access altogether 00:33:02 – Brave stripping tracking parameters from URLs 00:34:15 – Bounce Tracking 00:36:28 – The future of browser privacy 00:38:32 – Legislation and browser (privacy) engineering 00:40:10 – If you could change any aspect of the internet or the web, what would you do and why? 00:42:54 – Outro Notes and references Brave’s Adblock lists The Chromium projects Who Filters the Filters: Understanding the Growth, Usefulness and Efficiency of Crowdsourced Ad Blocking Adblock Plus EasyList EasyPrivacy Peter Lowe’s list Disconnect.me list uBlock Origin Brave’s resource replacements Firefox resource shims Cliqz browser SugarCoat: Programmatically Generating Privacy-Preserving, Web-Compatible Resource Replacements for Content Blocking Brave Search Cliqz anti-tracking logic WebKit / Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention The Privacy Sandbox Brave’s fingerprint farbling Global Privacy Control Pete Snyder’s website Research at Brave Pete Snyder on Twitter (@pes10k) Brendan Eich (Brave CEO) on Twitter The post TMH : Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder appeared first on Simmer .

You can listen to TMH #2: Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

TMH #2: Ad Blockers with Pete Snyder is an episode from Technical Marketing Handbook by Simo Ahava.

This episode is 43:27 long.

This episode was published on Jul 13, 2021.

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