I don’t care for online ads much. I’m not morally opposed per se, & am overly aware of the whole death of all newspaper thing yada yada but I’ve seen far too many fat/skinny folks bikini weight-loss ads in my yahoo sidebar to care anymore. Too many persistent Netflix pop-unders despite having being a subscriber for years. Normally, Adblock takes care of most of these for me but since I’ve been using Chrome as a secondary browser at work (with Firefox reserved as a default for SAS-generated ODS html output) I’ve been re-exposed to more flashy slippy slide-y ads than I know what to do with. That’s how Privoxy came to my attention. Privoxy is free, open source and works great to block all ads in Chrome or Firefox. I even checked it in IE, if you’re still on that kick. Highly recommended.
Also, if you’re the kind of person bothered by online privacy issues, Privoxy could be extremely useful for helping you feel more secure. Particularly so if you’ve got first hand knowledge of the kind of data being captured about you as you browse around. If you run your own site and have access to any kind of analytic tools to know how this all works, you know how easy it is to see who looks at what, when, where and so on. The fact that you’re reading this right now is likely obvious to me from my own analytic package, unless you’re running some privacy software. Installing Privoxy on your machine and pointing your browser at it will render you virtually invisible to common observational tools, blocking google analytics, statcounter and innumerable other tracking cookies. This just makes like better for everyone.
ps – if you’re on a mac try the Vidalia/Tor/Privoxy bundle.
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