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Bloomberg Businessweek May 14, 2018
with every page load, but on a recent visit, the homepage
for one popular U.S.-based news site sent 20 requests to 10 ad
exchanges, each of which likely ofered the space to hun-
dreds of advertisers. It also set 47 cookies with unique track-
ing IDs, many of which log user data such as location, gender,
age, and likes and dislikes based on browsing behavior. These
data give advertisers a sense of how valuable you might be
as a customer, and therefore how much to bid to show you
an ad. When one of the advertisers wins the auction, an ad
appears on your screen. The whole process takes less than
a tenth of a second.
As a side business, every company involved in any step of
the process may also try to place a cookie or tracker to collect
more data on you for later use. Such companies often swap
data to try to identify users they have in common, and they
may pull in your email address, name, public records, and
credit card history. “Ad blocking has grown in response to a lot
of legitimate problems,” says PageFair’s Blanchield. His previ-
ous venture, Jolt Online Gaming, collapsed because 30 percent
of its users were blocking ads. He and his co-founder were, too.
By acting as a traic cop at the network level, rather than in
a browser, Pi-hole can cut of the nested bidding and tracking
processes from the start. It takes on the role of your network’s
Domain Name Server (DNS), meaning it translates IP addresses
into URLs and vice versa. So if a website tries to contact what
the Pi-hole knows to be an ad server, “it sends a request to the
Pi-hole for the ad, and the Pi-hole is like, ‘Hah, I’m just going to
return an empty page to you,’ and the ad server is never con-
tacted,” Drobnak says. In the ad slots, the user typically sees
blank white rectangles.
Installing Pi-hole took me about an hour with the help
of a friend who’d done it before, and much of that time was
spent setting up my new Raspberry Pi. The Pi-hole can run
on any computer, but in general you probably want it to be
a cheap model that can be left powered on and online. Even
the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, the most full-igured Pi, ships
naked and blank: no case, no operating system, no apps, just
a single green circuit board with components and ports stick-
ing out of it. Spring for a case if you like, plug in a monitor
and keyboard, and install an operating
system. Then it’s simply a matter of con-
necting the Pi to the internet, installing the
Pi-hole software with a single line of code
(curl -sSL | bash),
and setting it as the DNS server for the
network. In case of trouble, Pi-hole fans
tend to respond promptly to questions
on their forums.
Turn the Pi-hole of after you get used
to it, and you ind your brain engaging
more with the ads than it used to because
it’s forgotten how to glance past them.
Were they always so garish? Who needs
that many razors a month? And why
would anyone set a video to autoplay
with sound?
After three weeks, my Pi-hole logs reported the system had
blocked 29 percent of the more than 39,000 requests made to
my two devices (a phone and a laptop). They were all ads or
ad-related trackers from places such as
,
, analytics
. and It’s fascinating to
look at Pi-hole’s dashboard, a colorful layout of numbers and
graphs, and think about what the network is doing—and just
how many entities are keeping watch.
Salmela, the creator of Pi-hole, is a 33-year-old Linux
administrator who lives outside Minneapolis with his wife
and son. He has buzzed brown hair, favors black T-shirts,
and rarely volunteers information. He worked at a Target for
12 years before he got bored enough to go to college, where
he studied computer networking. With a bachelor’s in hand,
he got a job in the IT department of a high school, quickly
automated everything he needed to do, and got bored again.
In the summer of 2014, facing three months in an
empty school, Salmela massively upped his internet
time. Lifehacker, OS X Daily, and Macworld were among
his go-to sites, and he started to notice the ads more and
more. He doesn’t remember what the pop-ups or autoplay
ads were for, just that they were annoying. On Kickstarter,
he’d backed a device called AdTrap that sounds a lot like
Pi-hole: blocks ads at the network level, shows you what it
blocked if you want to know. After using it for a while, “I
thought, ‘I could probably make something better with a
Raspberry Pi,’ ” he says.
Salmela spent the rest of the summer writing the code
for Pi-hole. A few months later, Lifehacker wrote about it.
He published a 6,000-word install guide on his blog, and
Lifehacker wrote about it three more times. By fall 2015,
Salmela was getting a lot of bug reports and feature requests
and needed help. Luckily, he’d hosted Pi-hole on GitHub,
a website that allows programmers to collaborate on code.
GitHub is popular for open source projects, because it allows
anyone to submit suggested changes, which means it also
functions as a recruiting tool. Salmela
began to assemble some extremely dedi-
cated and like-minded volunteers.
“It really is a project of love for me,”
says the irst recruit, Dan Schaper, who
claims to spend 50 hours to 80 hours
a week on Pi-hole in addition to his
work as a consulting network engineer.
He wouldn’t divulge personal details,
except that he lives on the West Coast
and is obsessed with the pervasiveness
of tracking. “I’m the tinfoil-hat guy of the
group,” he said in an email.
Another Pi-hole developer, an
Australian who consented to a video
interview on the condition that he be
identiied only by his internet handle,
The typical Raspberry Pi ships as bare-bones as possible