I use ad blockers and open source privacy focused software whenever I can but occasionally I have to use computers that don’t belong to me or an older phone where my usual applications aren’t installed and seeing all the advertisements just feels dirty and dystopian.
I think the worst ads are the text to speech ones that say “Download this app today”. The unblinking energenic people saying you can make a living at home are probably a close second.
Absolutely. And it’s getting even worse, since some ad networks also broadcasting executable code in the form of javascript snippets intended to make interactive banners, where e.g. you move the mouse cursor over it, and an in-ad mouse button moves along. A bunch of those have been used to run malicious code on the machines and actually cause harm to the user, from crypto miners to keyloggers and trojans.
In this day and age, I consider a system without adblock to be compromised by default.
This makes me wish noscript wasn’t a game every time I loaded a new site. What a pain in the ass to figure out how to make the site load properly without loading garbage scripts.
I’m using uBlock origin with the cosmetic filter activated in combination with Ghostery, that gets most of the shit sorted without a whole lot of manual interventions.