59 / 84
57
May 14, 2018
Anyone who works in the $200 billion digital advertising
industry should be scared of people like Mark Drobnak,
because the ad blocker he uses is way more powerful than
yours. The college freshman says it feels as though everyone
at Rochester Institute of Technology, from his roommate to
his professors, has installed some way to ward of online ads.
But Drobnak is one of the die-hards who goes further, work-
ing with a handful of comrades to build what they call “a
black hole for advertisements.” His parents say the one he
built them works great.
Pi-hole (as in “shut your…”) is a free, open source software
package designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, a basic computer
that’s popular with DIYers, its in the palm of your hand, and
retails for about $35. Most ad blockers have to be installed on
individual devices and work only in web browsers, but Pi-hole
blocks ads across an entire network, including in most apps.
(Two big exceptions, both for technical reasons, are YouTube
and Hulu.) It can’t block ads inside Facebook, but it can stop
Facebook from following you around the web. It’ll let you play
Bejeweled
without seeing ads between games, watch
Mr. Robot
ad-free in the USA app, stream NPR with silence in place of
the sponsor messages, and avoid the banner ads that have
become common on internet-connected TVs. If friends come
over and connect to your Wi-Fi, it’ll block ads for them, too.
Drobnak discovered Pi-hole in high school in 2015, after
he and his siblings had already used their Raspberry Pi to
play tic-tac-toe, program an elaborate light show, and moni-
tor their respective addictions to electronics. The ad blocker,
created by a Minnesota programmer named Jacob Salmela,
was 2 years old and still fairly rudimentary. Less than a
month after installing it at home, Drobnak hacked together
a web interface to let users more easily block or whitelist
sites. Two months later, Salmela invited him to join a tiny, all-
volunteer development team. “Ads are annoying,” Drobnak
says. “Pi-hole gives you control over that.”
PageFair Ltd., a company that helps advertisers ind tech-
nical ways to work around the software, says about 18 percent
of U.S. web users have an ad blocker. (Its estimate is among
the more conservative ones.) Outside the U.S., the numbers
are more dramatic. Desktop ad-blocker penetration is 24 per-
cent in Canada, 29 percent in Germany, and 39 percent in
Greece, according to PageFair. The practice is growing fast-
est on mobile devices in Asia, where data allowances are typ-
ically lower. In Indonesia, 58 percent of users block mobile
ads. “In the early days, it was privacy activists and people
who had an objection to capitalism in principle,” says Sean
Blanchield, chief executive oicer of PageFair. “These days,
it’s just average people.”
Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw using
ad-blocking software as akin to stealing. But online advertis-
ing has grown so predatory that while blocking is estimated
to cost publishers billions of lost revenue a year, it’s started to
seem less like robbery than self-defense: Ads slow devices, eat
up data plans, and sometimes deliver malware. Meanwhile,
the industry is building ever-more-detailed dossiers on every
user based on web habits.
Among other things, the online advertising business model
has incentivized clickbait—and worse—at enormous scale.
Facebook Inc. and YouTube LLC igure out how to make peo-
ple spend more time on their sites to maximize ad inventory.
This has abetted the spread of fake news, violent children’s
content, and Logan Paul.
Enforcement of the European Union’s General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires companies to
get consent before tracking users, is set to begin on May 25.
And with members of Congress grumbling, Silicon Valley,
which has ignored complaints about invasive ads for decades,
is beginning to acknowledge the scope of the problem. Google
and Apple Inc. have added features to their browsers that
limit the most intrusive and invasive ads. In response to its
Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has taken steps to
limit its rampant data-sharing and also ended partnerships
with companies that combine online proiles with oline
credit card transactions, public records such as voter registra-
tion and home purchases, and store loyalty programs. Even
the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group
unsurprisingly hostile to ad blocking, now says the practice
is “a crucial wake-up call to brands and all that serve them
about their abuse of consumers’ goodwill.”
Pi-hole is installed on only 140,000 networks. Unlike more
popular ad-blocking browsers (Brave, which claims 2 million
users) or browser extensions (Adblock Plus, 105 million), it
requires a dedicated computer and some tech savvy to set
up. Still, it has assumed an outsize role in the ad-blocking
movement. Its 22,000 true believers on Reddit help a lot, says
Drobnak, who spends 5 hours to 20 hours a week working on
Pi-hole between computer science classes. The developers
have discovered spying by internet-connected TVs (which
collect data for ad targeting), lightbulbs (users have reported
some LED bulbs mysteriously connecting with the manufac-
turer’s server every 2 seconds), and printers (including one
that sent out 34 million queries in a day).
Drobnak’s fellow core developers, all volunteers, say what
unites them most is resentment of just how far the advertis-
ing industry has overreached in building its online empire of
distraction and surveillance. There’s a corollary motivator,
too: Puzzling out ways to frustrate the industry’s eforts—to
zap millions upon millions of ads—can be really, really fun.
“There’s a huge community behind it,” Drobnak says. “It’s
just tinkerers trying to igure stuf out.”
The rise of ad blocking mirrors an explosion in online
advertising technology. Barely 100 digital-only ad-tech com-
panies operated in 2011; today there are about 2,000. Most
arose with what’s known as programmatic advertising, auto-
mated systems run by the likes of Google and Microsoft Corp.
that promise to match every ad with the person it’s most
likely to inluence.
Dissect how such systems work, and it’s easy to be out-
raged. When you load a website, it sends a series of requests
to other web domains to auction your eyeballs to the highest
bidder. The number of intermediaries involved changes