During that time, you may just sit there watching the activity log as the agent reads files, runs commands, and attempts to finish the task. Or you may step away and return later to check whether it has finally succeeded. Either way, you see the small status message displayed while the coding assistant is working again and again. It gets a surprising amount of your attention. So, one startup decided to monetize it.

Kickbacks.ai replaces or supplements that little “thinking” line with an advertisement. Advertisers pay for the views, Kickbacks takes its share, and the developer whose computer displayed the ad receives the rest. At first glance, this sounds like a fairer version of the familiar data economy. Instead of quietly profiting from your data, the company puts a price on it and gives you a cut.

The idea is not entirely new. Evidation has offered points — redeemable at 10,000 points for a $10 cash payment — in exchange for health and activity data. Nielsen has paid people to install monitoring software that collects demographic, behavioural, and preference information. Honeygain pays users for sharing their internet traffic, while UpVoice rewarded users for allowing an extension to observe the ads shown to them on major platforms. Kickbacks is part of the same family, but the stakes of installing it may be way higher.

Once you get past the promise of a 50/50 split and start reading the fine print, it begins to look far less like compensation and far more like a very small payment for taking on a very large risk.

Kickbacks.ai: what it is and how it works

Kickbacks appeared in June 2026 as a project by developer Andrew McCalip. Its slogan is “Get paid for waiting.” When Claude Code or Codex is processing a request, the extension replaces or supplements the usual spinner message with a sponsored line.

The product is aimed squarely at developers. It works inside Visual Studio Code, or VS Code — a popular desktop app where developers write and manage code — and can also be installed in VS Code-based editors such as Cursor and VSCodium. VS Code has its own extension system, similar in concept to browser add-ons, but the extensions run inside the code editor rather than inside Chrome, Firefox, or another browser. Kickbacks supports terminal versions of Claude Code and OpenAI Codex too, but with a catch: terminal ads do not earn anything on their own. The VS Code extension still has to be installed because it is the part that reports qualifying impressions. So, in a nutshell, this is not something that a regular ChatGPT or Gemini user can earn from. You need a developer setup for the extension simply to work.

Source

To get paid, the developer must be signed in, the Kickbacks extension must be installed and running, and the ad must stay visible for at least five seconds during a real coding request started by the developer. The editor also has to be open and not minimized, and Kickbacks says it checks whether the user has shown real activity within the previous few minutes. Automated prompts, repetitive requests designed to farm ads, or activity rejected by the company’s anti-fraud systems do not qualify.

There are two advertising modes. Private Mode turns on automatically when the user signs in. Boosted Mode requires a separate opt-in and uses information from the user’s conversations to target ads more precisely at them.

The difference is substantial. But even “Private Mode” is not what most people would probably expect from a truly private solution (if true privacy is even possible in a system built to track and attribute ads).

Is ‘Private Mode’ really private?

Private Mode is private in roughly the same way that replacing your name with a customer number makes a database anonymous: better than printing everything in plain text, but hardly makes you invisible.

Kickbacks says Private Mode does not send advertising partners your prompts, AI responses, source code, file contents, file names, paths, or repository identity. That protects the most sensitive part of your work. But it still falls well short of what most people would probably understand by “private.”

To serve an ad in Private Mode, Kickbacks says it shares the following with the advertising partner:

• a pseudonymous user or session identifier;
• a transformed or truncated version of the IP address;
• the operating system;
• the user-agent/editor version;
• an approximate city- or region-level location;
• confirmation of impressions and clicks.

Kickbacks itself collects more. Its telemetry can include which ad appeared, which campaign it belonged to, where it appeared on the screen, what percentage of it was visible, how long it remained visible, timestamps, extension and host versions, account and installation identifiers, click activity, request timing, request frequency, relationships between accounts and devices, and behavioural signals used for fraud detection. Most of these data points sound like nothing much in isolation. Together, over time, they create a persistent behavioural record of how a person uses an AI coding assistant: when they work, how often they make requests, how long sessions last, which editor and operating system they use, approximately where they are, and which ads they interact with.

And that “pseudonymous identifier” deserves more attention than it usually gets. It may not contain your name, but it still gives your device or account a recurring label, so companies can recognize that the same person came back, connect their activity across sessions, and keep adding new details to the same profile.

NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, warns that pseudonymous identifiers do not make people anonymous. The more information that gathers around one identifier — location, device details, timestamps, habits, and activity patterns — the easier it can become to match that profile with other data and work out who is behind it. In other words, “pseudonymous” means “your name is not written on the front.” It does not mean “nobody can work out who you are.”

Kickbacks goes further than simply admitting that data is shared. Its Privacy Policy explicitly says that, under California privacy laws, the program amounts to a sale or sharing of personal data. That wording may be there for legal reasons, but it is still worth taking at face value: your data is part of the product being sold.

Unusually, Kickbacks even puts a price tag on it. The company estimates that one participating user’s data is worth about $75 per year to Kickbacks, after the costs of running the program.

Boosted Mode: the privacy disaster upgrade

Private Mode is already hard to defend, but Boosted Mode makes the tradeoff almost impossible to justify.

When enabled, Kickbacks processes a portion of the developer’s recent AI-assistant conversation on its own servers. According to its Privacy Policy, this can include a capped tail of recent prompts and AI responses, open-file extensions, and a repository-name hint. The system then attempts to remove credentials and personal information and rewrites what remains into an advertising-interest profile: programming languages, technologies, professional topics, problem domains, region, role, or industry.

The policy says source files and file contents are not directly collected. But code, logs, customer information, internal architecture, credentials, financial details, or proprietary material may already be present inside a prompt or the model’s answer. Developers regularly paste exactly those things into coding assistants because that is how the assistant receives enough context to solve a problem.

Kickbacks says sensitive content — keys, tokens, and secrets — is stripped on the device before it is sent off. Its servers then apply more automated filters. If cleaning fails or appears uncertain, the company says the material is supposed to be discarded. But it also says, repeatedly, that this process is best effort and not guaranteed.

You have probably heard this warning before. OpenAI tells users not to enter sensitive information they would not want reviewed or used. Google similarly warns Gemini users not to enter confidential information they would not want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve its services.

Kickbacks says advertising partners receive only the cleaned, derived profile, not the raw prompts or replies. But sensitive content that slips through filtering can still be processed by Kickbacks and may influence the profile before anybody notices. The terms explicitly say the company does not promise to find or remove undetected material afterwards.

Kickbacks may also enrich the profile with information from data brokers, such as your likely role or industry. So the ad is not simply matched to a word like “Python.” It may draw on a much broader picture of your work, including the technologies you use, the problems you solve, your location and device, and information gathered from outside sources.

The advertising partners that receive it are treated as independent controllers, not as contractors simply following Kickbacks’ instructions. With Kickbacks, users can at least read its Privacy Policy; once the data moves on, they may not even know which companies received it, let alone what those companies do with it.

The risk does not end when the user changes their mind. Switching from Boosted Mode back to Private Mode stops new profile data from being shared, but it does not automatically erase what partners have already received. That is not much of an undo button.

A 50/50 split — or not?

Kickbacks’ landing page paints an appealingly simple picture: the advertiser pays a dollar, Kickbacks gets 50 cents, and the developer gets 50 cents. It even calls the arrangement a “real 50/50 split,” explicitly promising no fuzzy math and no “up to” language.

Yet Kickbacks’ own GitHub page describes the offer differently: developers receive “up to 50% of ad revenue.” That tiny “up to” directly contradicts the landing-page pitch.

And the Terms of Service introduce even more fuzz.

The user is not contractually promised half of every dollar an advertiser pays. The terms describe the reward as an estimated 50% of net advertising revenue after operational expenses. “Net revenue” means Kickbacks deducts operating costs before splitting the money, without clearly explaining what those costs include. And developers do not receive half of an advertiser’s entire payment: each person gets only the share Kickbacks attributes to qualifying ads shown on their own device.

So this is not a dollar neatly cut in half. It is an estimated share of the net revenue Kickbacks attributes to qualifying impressions shown on a user’s device, after operating costs and subject to fraud checks, eligibility rules, and usage limits. Those limits can apply daily, monthly, by region, by account, or even to individual users — and Kickbacks can change them without notice. It can also revise the revenue split, rates, and payout schedule with little more than a website or in-app notice.

Then comes the payout itself. Users cannot withdraw their money until they cross the current $10 threshold, which may also change. Stripe Connect Express is the only payout method. Most strikingly, the terms say users have no property interest in pending or accrued earnings until those earnings are actually disbursed. So the money displayed beside your account may look like your money, but they are legally not.

Underwhelming at best, a means to get you fired at worst

The most dangerous place to use Kickbacks is also the place where it is most likely to be used: at work.

The extension is designed for developers using AI tools to interact with real software projects. Those projects may involve unreleased products, customer records, internal services, confidential repositories, security vulnerabilities, financial systems, infrastructure credentials, or information covered by contracts and regulation. Kickbacks’ answer is essentially: make sure you have permission.

The company also makes clear that it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, or GitHub. The software works by modifying, intercepting, or patching elements of third-party coding tools. Kickbacks does not guarantee that this is permitted by those platforms’ terms. It warns that a provider could block the extension, break it through an update, or take enforcement action against an account — including suspension or termination.

Suppose the filtering fails and an internal client name, access token, or fragment of proprietary information reaches Kickbacks’ servers. Suppose the AI provider decides that patching its interface violates its terms and closes the account. None of the above will be Kickback’s fault, according to its terms of service. Meanwhile, Kickbacks’ own total liability is capped at the greater of $100 or the amount the user paid Kickbacks during the previous 12 months. Since an earning user will normally have paid Kickbacks nothing — the whole point is that Kickbacks is supposed to pay them — the practical cap is likely to be just $100.

Your job, client relationship, professional reputation, AI account, confidential information are therefore being placed on one side of the scale. On the other side: an estimated share of net ad revenue, subject to deductions, undisclosed caps, fraud screening, a changeable threshold, Stripe availability, and forfeiture clauses. And perhaps $100 if something goes badly enough for Kickbacks itself to be legally liable.

Kickbacks is built around a genuinely attractive idea. If companies are going to profit from our attention and information anyway, why should users not receive part of that value? But a fair exchange requires both sides to understand what they are giving and to have meaningful control over what happens next. Kickbacks offers neither a simple half of every advertiser dollar nor a genuinely private mode of participation.

Kickbacks controls the calculations, the caps, the qualification rules, and the payment schedule. Its partners may retain data already received. The AI or editor provider may decide the extension is unwelcome. The developer’s unpaid balance is not legally theirs until it reaches their account.

For somebody using an AI coding assistant purely for personal experiments, with no confidential projects, no employer rules, no valuable data, and no concern about behavioural profiling, Kickbacks may be an amusing way to turn a spinner into pocket money.

For a professional developer whose livelihood depends on access to their tools, the trust of their employer and clients, and the confidentiality of their work, the equation is different.

Risk your data, your account, your reputation, and potentially your job, while the company promising to split the proceeds limits its own liability to around $100. That is not Robin Hood. It is a very small kickback for a very large risk.

Why am I getting so much spam?

It can feel like a losing battle, but you are not alone. The constant flood of unwanted emails is a widespread problem. Your email address can end up in spammers’ hands through several common channels:

• Email harvesting (scraping): spammers use automated tools to scan the Internet for email addresses written in plain text on forums, social media, websites, and public profiles

• Data breaches: when a company’s database is hacked, your email and other personal information can be exposed and sold on the dark web. Major breaches at companies like Adobe, LinkedIn, and Yahoo! have provided spammers with millions of active email accounts

• Subscription lists & opt-ins: you might unknowingly agree to receive promotional emails when you sign up for a service. Some companies also sell your email address to third parties

• Buying and trading lists: spammers often buy lists of email addresses from other spammers or unscrupulous companies

• Dictionary harvest attacks: attackers use tools to guess common email addresses (like admin@domain.com or info@domain.com)

• Malware: if your computer or device is infected with malware, it can harvest your email contacts and send spam without your knowledge

How did spammers get my email address?

Spammers have a vast arsenal of methods for obtaining email addresses, ranging from simple automated techniques to sophisticated attacks. Understanding how they operate is your first step toward protecting your inbox.

Data breaches

One of the most common sources is data breaches. When a website or company you’ve subscribed to is compromised, user databases containing email addresses — and sometimes passwords — are stolen and sold on the dark web. These lists are repeatedly bought and sold among spammers. Major breaches at companies like LinkedIn, Adobe, and others have exposed millions of active email addresses this way.

Email harvesting (scraping)

Spammers use automated bots to scour the Internet for email addresses. These web crawlers scan websites, forums, blog comments, social media profiles, and even PDF files, looking for the “@” symbol to collect anything that looks like an email address.

Dictionary attacks

In this technique, spammers use software to guess valid email addresses. They combine common names, dictionary words, and popular number sequences with well-known domain names (e.g., john.doe@gmail.com, info@company.com). This method is especially effective against large organizations with predictable email formats and can result in a sudden surge of spam targeting common addresses.

Purchased and traded lists

Spammers often buy and sell email lists amongst themselves. These lists can be obtained through data breaches, stolen from other sites, or built through other harvesting methods. Some less reputable companies also sell the email addresses of their users to third parties.

Social media and public exposure

Any public source of information is a target. If you’ve ever posted your email address in your bio, a comment, or a public resume, it can be harvested. Business platforms like LinkedIn are particularly attractive to attackers who scrape profiles to build corporate email lists.

Social engineering and fake websites

Scammers create fake websites, contests, and giveaways to trick people into voluntarily providing their email addresses. Once you enter your information, it’s added to a database for future spam campaigns. Similarly, a malicious actor might impersonate a colleague or support staff to ask you to confirm your email address.

Malware

If your device is infected with malware, it can harvest contacts and email addresses stored on your computer, sending them back to the attacker without your knowledge.

Are spam emails dangerous?

Simply opening a spam email is generally low-risk on most modern email clients. However, spam emails can be extremely dangerous, as they have become one of the most common vectors for cyberattacks. The danger comes from what you do after you open the email.

• Phishing attacks: these deceptive emails are designed to trick you into revealing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or account details by impersonating a trusted source

• Malware infections: clicking a link or downloading an attachment from a spam email can install harmful software like ransomware, keyloggers, or trojans on your device

• Identity theft and financial fraud: by interacting with a phishing scam, you risk giving a cybercriminal the information they need to steal your identity or access your bank accounts

Modern spam is frequently a delivery mechanism for serious cyber threats. Cybercriminals are increasingly using social engineering to craft realistic-looking messages that are difficult to distinguish from legitimate ones.

How to recognize a spam email

Learning to spot a spam email is your first line of defense. Here are common red flags to watch for:

• Unfamiliar or suspicious sender: the email address contains misspellings or comes from a free service like Gmail when it claims to be from a major corporation

• Generic greetings: the email uses impersonal salutations like “Dear customer” or “Dear user” instead of your actual name

• Typos and poor grammar: while this is a common sign, remember that AI is making it easier for scammers to write grammatically correct emails

• Sense of urgency or threats: the email attempts to rush you into action by claiming your email account will be suspended or you owe a payment

• Requests for sensitive information: legitimate organizations will never ask you for your password, social security number, or banking details over email

• Suspicious links or attachments: hover your mouse over a link to see the true URL. Be wary of links that have slight misspellings or don’t match the company’s official domain. Do not open unexpected attachments, especially .exe, .zip, or .docm files

• Too-good-to-be-true offers: emails promising unrealistically high rewards, inheritances, or prizes are almost always scams

If you receive a suspicious email, do not click on any links or attachments. Report it as spam and block the sender. If you accidentally click something, disconnect from the Internet immediately and run a security scan on your device.

How to stop spam emails: 10 ways

Dealing with relentless spam can feel like a losing battle, especially since modern spam is often generated by bots that constantly change addresses to bypass simple blocks. However, there are proven ways to fight back. Here are 10 strategies that actually work.

1. Train your email filters

When you receive a spam email, mark it as junk or report it as spam instead of simply deleting it. This teaches your email provider’s artificial intelligence to recognize and block similar messages in the future. In Gmail, use the Report spam button; in Outlook, right-click and select Mark as junk.

2. Block senders and domains, not just individual addresses

Blocking a specific email address is often ineffective because spammers constantly create new ones. Instead, block entire domains that you consistently see in spam emails (e.g., @spamdomain.com). This is a more reliable way to stop repeated spam from the same source. In most email clients, you can add domains to a blocked senders list in your settings.

3. Create smart inbox rules

Custom rules can automatically delete or move emails based on specific conditions. Here are three powerful examples that can stop spam from ever reaching your inbox:

• Delete messages with

  — this catches many phishing emails that use HTML forms

• Delete messages from risky domains — add common spam domains like .site, .cam, .rest, .work, .xyz, .shop, .click, and .live to a rule

• Delete messages from random “info.” senders — many spam emails use addresses starting with info

• To create a rule in Outlook, go to settings → mail → rules, add a new rule, set a condition (e.g., “Sender address includes” or “Body includes”), choose the action delete, and save

4. Clear out old rules and blocked senders

Having hundreds or thousands of accumulated rules and blocked senders can actually make your email client slow and less effective at filtering spam. If you’ve been fighting spam for years, consider clearing out this clutter. After removing old rules, you can replace them with a few, simple, well-crafted rules that target patterns rather than specific senders.

5. Adjust your junk email filter level

Most email services allow you to adjust the sensitivity of their spam filter. Setting the filter to High or Exclusive (or a similar option) will catch more spam. Be aware that this may also increase the chance of legitimate emails being sent to your junk folder, so you’ll need to check it occasionally.

6. Report spam wisely

While reporting spam is helpful, avoid reporting spam that is already in your junk folder — this can add clutter and may not be as effective. Focus on reporting spam that actually reaches your inbox. In Gmail, you can also use the report spam & unsubscribe option to both train the filter and remove yourself from a mailing list.

7. Unsubscribe from legitimate newsletters

If you’re receiving emails from a company you no longer wish to hear from, use the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. This is a legitimate way to reduce clutter from marketing emails. However, never click Unsubscribe on suspicious or obviously spammy emails — this confirms your address is active to spammers and can lead to even more spam.

8. Use a secondary email address for sign-ups

Create a separate email address specifically for online registrations, newsletters, and less important services. This keeps your primary email clean and reduces the chances of it being harvested by spammers.

9. Be cautious with exposing your email

Avoid posting your main email address publicly on forums, social media, or websites. Spammers use automated tools to “scrape” the Internet for addresses. If you must post it, consider using a different format (e.g., “name [at] domain [dot] com”).

10. Block emails by language or region

In some email clients, like Outlook, you can filter out messages written in specific character sets or originating from certain country-level domains. This can be very effective against foreign-language spam or spam from a particular region.

Important note: delete, don’t report

If you are using a new set of filtering rules, do not report spam that lands in your junk folder. Simply delete it. Reporting it at this stage can interfere with your new rules. Allow the system 24–72 hours to settle in with the new configuration before evaluating its effectiveness.

How to mark an email as spam

Marking an email as spam, rather than just deleting it, is essential for training your email provider’s filters to recognize and block similar unwanted messages in the future. Here’s how to report spam on the most popular email platforms.
If you’ve just set up new custom filtering rules, avoid reporting spam that already lands in your junk folder — this can interfere with your rules. Instead, simply delete it and allow 24–72 hours for your new configuration to settle.

Reporting spam in Gmail

On the web version (Gmail.com):

• Select or open the suspicious email

• Click the Report spam button in the toolbar above the email list (it looks like a stop sign with an exclamation mark)

• For phishing emails, click the three dots next to Reply and select Report phishing

In the Gmail mobile app:

• Open the email

• Tap the three dots menu (top-right corner)

• Select Report spam

Reporting spam in Outlook

On the web version (Outlook.com or Outlook 365):

• Select the suspicious email

• Click the Junk dropdown in the toolbar

• Choose Junk (to move it to the Junk folder) or Block (to block the sender)

• For phishing attempts, click the dropdown arrow next to Junk and select Phishing scam.

In the Outlook desktop app:

• Right-click on the email

• Hover over Junk and select Block Sender or Junk (or Report Junk depending on your version)

In the Outlook mobile app:

• Open the email

• Tap the three dots menu

• Select Move to Junk or Report Junk

Reporting spam in Apple Mail on iPhone

In the Apple Mail app on iPhone or iPad:

• Swipe left on the message in your inbox

• Tap More

• Tap Move to Junk

Alternatively, you can open the email, tap the flag icon, then select Mark followed by Move to Junk.

Reporting spam in Yahoo Mail

On the web version (Yahoo Mail):

• Select the suspicious email by checking the box next to it

• Click the Spam button in the toolbar above your inbox

In the Yahoo Mail mobile app:

• Open the email

• Tap the three dots menu

• Select Mark as spam

When you mark an email as spam in Yahoo, future emails from that sender will be automatically diverted to the Spam folder.

How to block spam senders

Blocking a sender is one of the fastest ways to stop unwanted emails from cluttering your inbox. When you block someone, future messages from that sender are automatically diverted to your Spam or Junk folder — or in some cases, directly to Trash. Here’s how to do it on the most popular email platforms.

Block a spam sender in Gmail

In the web version (Gmail.com):

• Open the message from the sender you want to block

• In the top-right corner of the message, click More (the three-dot button)

• Select Block [sender name]

• Confirm your choice. All future messages from this sender will go directly to your Spam folder

In the Gmail mobile app (Android/iPhone):

• Open the message from the sender

• In the top-right corner, tap the More button (three dots)

• Tap Block [sender name]

Block a spam sender in Outlook

In the Outlook desktop app:

• Right-click on the message from the sender you want to block

• Select Block → Block Sender

• Future messages from this address will be moved to the Junk Email folder

In the web version (Outlook.com or Outlook 365):

• At the top of the page, select Settings

• Go to Mail → Junk email

• Under Blocked senders and domains, select Add blocked sender

• Enter the email address or domain you want to block, then select OK and Save

Block a spam sender in Apple Mail

• Open the Mail app on your Mac

• Select an email message from the sender you want to block

• Click the sender’s name at the top of the email

• Select Block this Contact from the dropdown menu

Block a spam sender in Yahoo Mail

• Open an email from the sender you want to block or select it from your mailbox

• Click More (the three-dot button)

• Select Block Senders

• Optionally, select to also delete emails you’ve received from the sender, then click Ok

The most reliable fix: stop exposing your real address

The most effective way to stop spam is not to filter it once it arrives, but to prevent spammers from getting your email address in the first place. The most reliable fix is to stop using your real email address for anything other than trusted, essential contacts. Instead, use email aliases — unique, disposable addresses that forward messages to your main inbox without revealing it.

How email aliases work

When you sign up for a service or share your contact information with someone you don't fully trust, you provide an alias instead of your real address. All emails sent to that alias are automatically forwarded to your primary inbox, keeping your personal address private.

The key advantage is control: if a specific alias starts receiving spam, you can simply disable or delete it. Since the alias is unique to that service or sender, this instantly stops the spam without affecting your real inbox.

AdGuard Mail: aliases and temporary emails combined

AdGuard Mail offers a comprehensive email protection solution that combines both permanent aliases and temporary email addresses. With over 17 years of experience in online privacy, AdGuard provides apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, as well as a web-based solution.

The service gives you two powerful tools in one ecosystem:

• Aliases are forwarding addresses that you create and link to your real email. Use them for ongoing communication with services you trust — emails sent to an alias are forwarded to your main inbox, and you can disable any alias with one click if it starts receiving spam.

• Temporary emails are disposable addresses for one-off interactions. They appear right inside the AdGuard Mail app, and you don’t need to link them to your personal inbox — they work as standalone mailboxes for receiving confirmation codes, download links, or promo codes.

The free plan includes:

• 10 aliases

• 1 recipient

• 2,000 forwarded messages per month

• 1 alias domain and 1 temp mail domain

• 1 temp mail inbox

• Forwarding from temp mail inbox to recipients

The full version offers:

• 1,000 aliases

• 50 recipients

• Unlimited forwarded messages

• Anonymous replies from aliases

• Multiple alias and temp mail domains

• 5 temp mail inboxes

AdGuard Temp Mail: web-based temporary email service

For situations where you need an email address only once — such as signing up for a trial, downloading a resource, or receiving a promo code — AdGuard Temp Mail provides a free disposable email address instantly, through its website, without requiring an account or app installation.

How it works:

1. A temporary email address is automatically generated for you

2. Copy the address and use it on any online registration or verification form

3. Check the temporary inbox for confirmation messages

Key benefits:

• Privacy protection: your real email address stays hidden, even if the untrusted service sells your data

• Spam avoidance: since the address is disposable, spam never reaches your real inbox

• Free, ad-free, and tracker-free: no ads, no trackers, completely free, and your IP address is also hidden from senders

Important notes:

• Temporary email addresses can only receive emails, not send them

• They don’t accept attachments

• Inboxes are automatically deleted after 7 days of inactivity or immediately when you generate a new address

• Deleted messages cannot be recovered

Other popular alias services

Several reputable services offer email alias protection, each with its own strengths:

• Apple Hide My Email is integrated into iCloud+ and generates random addresses via settings or Sign in with Apple. Addresses use the @privaterelay.appleid.com domain and work seamlessly across iOS, macOS, and the web

• Firefox Relay offers a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. The free plan includes five aliases, while the premium version provides unlimited aliases and custom domains

• SimpleLogin, now part of Proton, is an open-source solution with a generous free plan. It allows you to reply to forwarded emails while keeping your real address completely hidden

Critical principle: treat aliases as disposable

The core principle is to create a unique alias for each service or context. If you use the same alias everywhere, you lose the protective benefit. A single unique alias per service ensures you can trace the source of spam back to a specific entity and eliminate it cleanly.

FAQ

Why am I suddenly getting so much spam?

A sudden spike in spam usually means your email address was recently exposed. This commonly happens through a data breach at a company you use, or because you signed up for a service that sold your address to third parties. Sometimes, spammers also use automated tools to guess common email addresses or scrape them from public websites and forums.

Is it safe to click Unsubscribe on spam emails?

It depends. Unsubscribing from legitimate newsletters is safe and effective. However, clicking Unsubscribe on suspicious or obviously spammy emails confirms to spammers that your address is active and monitored by a real person. This often leads to even more spam, as your address gets added to other spammers’ lists. In these cases, mark the email as spam instead.

Should I reply to spam to tell them to stop?

Never reply to spam emails. Replying confirms your email address is active, which invites more spam. Additionally, many spam emails are sent from automated systems or malicious actors — replying will not stop them and may expose you to further risks, including phishing attempts.

Can spammers tell if I open their email?

Many modern spam emails contain hidden tracking pixels (small images) that load when you open the message. This can notify the sender that you’ve opened the email and even reveal your location and device information. Most email clients now block images by default for this reason — keep this setting enabled to protect your privacy.

What’s the difference between spam and phishing?

Spam is unsolicited and unwanted email, often commercial in nature — it’s annoying but not necessarily malicious. Phishing, on the other hand, is a cybercrime. Phishing emails are designed to trick you into revealing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or account details by impersonating a trusted source. While spam is a nuisance, phishing is a serious security threat.

Will changing my email address stop spam?

A new email address will give you a clean slate, but it’s not a long-term solution. Your new address may eventually be exposed through data breaches, public posts, or sign-ups. For a more permanent fix, consider using email aliases (see the Most reliable fix section above). If one alias starts receiving spam, you can simply disable or delete it without affecting your primary address.

Last July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that within five to ten years, people who did not wear AI glasses could find themselves at a “pretty significant cognitive disadvantage” compared with those who did. Zuckerberg has also promoted smart glasses as a device that could ultimately replace the smartphone, putting instant knowledge not merely at your fingertips, but literally at your eyelids.

For a while, the glasses appeared to be building real momentum. Meta and its manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica reportedly sold around 7 to 7.5 million pairs in 2025 alone, after reaching a cumulative two million sales across 2023 and 2024. On paper, it looked like Meta had finally turned smart glasses from a failed futuristic experiment into a mass-market product.

But commercial success has come with a growing privacy pushback. Despite Meta’s efforts to present the glasses as a universally desirable, cutting-edge gadget, they have increasingly become a liability. Some owners are reportedly now reluctant to wear what critics have branded “pervert glasses” outside their homes.

What went wrong? Almost everything. And much of it was predictable.

In search of an LED light

Meta’s latest smart glasses are the product of its collaboration with EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban. EssilorLuxottica contributes its expertise in frames, lenses, manufacturing, fit, and prescription optimization, while Meta supplies the cameras, microphones, internal hardware, software, and Meta AI.

On June 23, 2026, the partnership launched a new self-branded line simply called Meta Glasses, including a frame style designed with Kylie Jenner whose built-in Meta AI assistant spoke in her voice. By ditching the familiar Ray Ban branding, Meta appeared ready to stop piggybacking on someone else’s reputation and establish itself as a respectable eyewear brand.

That would always be difficult if not impossible, though. By the time the self-branded line arrived, the glasses had already generated a storm of controversy, much of it driven by reports of women being secretly filmed during seemingly genuine interactions. Many later discovered the footage was posted online without their consent. Some videos attracted millions of views, led to recognition by strangers, and were uploaded despite explicit objections, while the women involved said they had not noticed the recording light. Some victims reported that the videos revealed where they lived and made them afraid to go out.

What makes these cases so disturbing is that only one person knows the interaction is being recorded. The wearer is creating content; the person in front of him thinks they are simply having a conversation. That hidden imbalance deprives them of any real choice over whether their image, voice, and personal interaction are captured and shared.

Existing laws do not give smart-glasses users a blanket right to record others: in the US, consent requirements vary by state, and some require everyone in a private conversation to consent. Whether a recording is illegal depends on the circumstances, but legal uncertainty does not equal consent.

Meta’s primary answer to this problem is a small white capture LED on the front of the frames. It flashes when a user takes a photograph or records video, supposedly warning bystanders that the camera is active.

But the light is not a meaningful privacy safeguard. At best, it is a notification — and an easy one to miss. A person must know that the glasses contain a camera, know where the indicator is located, be close enough to see it, and happen to look directly at the wearer while it is flashing.

Predictably, almost as soon as the glasses became popular, people began searching for ways around even that limited warning. Stickers were sold to obscure the LED, while modification services offered more permanent ways to alter or destroy it.

On July 7, 2026, Meta began rolling out a mandatory update that disables the camera if the glasses detect that the LED has been physically tampered with or destroyed. The company said: “No photos or videos can be taken until we detect that the light is unblocked.” Meta also said it would remove advertisements and Marketplace listings for LED-modification services and could take legal action against those offering them.

Closing that loophole is welcome. It is also revealing that the loophole existed, and that Meta had to redesign its protections in response. More importantly, the update cannot fix the underlying flaw of the system: a functioning light is still useless when the people being recorded do not recognize it or notice it.

And the privacy risk does not end once the recording has been made. Meta relied on data annotators employed by Sama, an outsourcing company in Nairobi, to label footage and help train the glasses’ AI to understand what it was seeing. Workers told Swedish reporters that the material they reviewed included people undressing, using toilets, having sex, and exposing bank-card details, while automatic face blurring did not always work. Meta’s response was to sever its seven-year contract with Sama, leaving more than 1,100 workers unemployed, saying only that “they don’t meet our standards.”

The public, meanwhile, has begun developing its own form of enforcement: social ostracism. An X user shared that their friend group started referring to a Meta-glasses owner as “the pervert” until he eventually got rid of them.

The backlash has reached celebrity culture too: Kylie Jenner’s campaign for the glasses was met with criticism, while pop star Lorde bluntly told a festival audience, “Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.”.

That is not a software bug Meta can patch. It is a social verdict on a product whose appeal to the wearer partly depends on everyone else accepting that an ordinary-looking pair of glasses may also be a camera pointed directly at them.

The history of privacy failure: from Glassholes to Snap Specs and back

Anyone who has followed consumer technology long enough probably remembers the disaster that was Google Glass. The futuristic headset began reaching early users in 2013 and drew excitement from a small group of tech enthusiasts — it even featured in Vogue.

Almost everyone else, though, seemed to hate it.

Some criticism focused on the device itself. Google Glass initially cost $1,500, looked strange, had limited battery life, and simply offered too little to entice a regular person into wearing them. But its biggest flaw was arguably social rather than technical: people could never be sure whether the person looking at them was also recording them.

The backlash became so intense that bars, restaurants, casinos, and cinemas began banning the glasses. Wearers were soon labelled “Glassholes” — a term for Google Glass users who behaved obnoxiously. The word became Urban Dictionary’s word of the day in March 2013, and quickly entered the popular vocabulary.

Google Glass did not fail because of privacy concerns alone. Its steep price, awkward design, immature technology all played a role. But the term “Glasshole” captured the deeper problem better than any product review could: society had rejected not only the device, but also the behaviour it enabled.

Snap tried to learn from that failure when it launched its first Spectacles in 2016. Instead of making them look like a device from a sci-fi movie, the company made them look as unserious as possible. It also placed a conspicuous ring of LEDs around the camera that lit up while the glasses were recording.

The message was clear: these were a toy, not a surveillance device, and people around the wearer would always know when the camera was active. That did not entirely work. The light was only helpful when bystanders knew what it meant, were standing close enough to see it, and happened to be looking directly at the wearer. A 2016 YouGov survey found that nearly half of US adults would feel uncomfortable around a stranger wearing Spectacles. Just a year after launch, Snap’s first foray into hardware was officially deemed a failure.

Meta appears to have studied both failures carefully — but drawn a troubling conclusion from them. Google Glass looked too strange. Snap Spectacles looked too much like a toy. Ray-Ban Meta glasses, by contrast, look almost exactly like ordinary eyewear.

That may have helped Meta achieve what Google and Snap could not: sell face-worn cameras at a mass-market scale. But it did not resolve the original privacy problem. It merely made the device — and the fact that someone may be recording you — much harder to notice.

Pushback in action, not words

In a way, the growing popularity of this new wave of smart glasses, now enhanced with AI, has pushed authorities back toward their familiar way of dealing with face-worn cameras: banning them. Recording-enabled glasses have already been prohibited or restricted in courtrooms in New York and Wisconsin. In California, a judge even ordered members of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s team to dispose of their smart glasses during a no-recording session and warned that if they did not do so they could be held in contempt.

It may only be a matter of time before more privacy-sensitive spaces follow. Google Glass was easy to identify and ban because it looked like a gadget out of this world. Meta’s glasses are harder to police precisely because they are designed to pass as ordinary eyewear.

The same old Meta pattern: convenience without consent

The problem is bigger than one pair of glasses. What connects Meta’s eyewear to many of its other products is a familiar approach: introduce a convenient new way to collect information, place the responsibility for managing the consequences on users and bystanders, and treat consent as something that can be buried in settings, terms of service, or a tiny blinking light.

We saw the same willingness to push past privacy boundaries in 2025, when researchers found that Meta Pixel had exploited Android’s localhost functionality to connect mobile browsing activity — including activity in private browsing mode — with identities logged into Facebook and Instagram apps. Meta paused the practice after it was exposed. The mechanism was very different, but the underlying approach was the same: use whatever access the technology allows first, and deal with objections later.

There is another recurring pattern too. From the metaverse to AI glasses, Meta has repeatedly presented its preferred technological future as inevitable, assuming that public enthusiasm will eventually catch up. Zuckerberg’s warning that people without AI glasses may face a “cognitive disadvantage” takes this logic even further: reluctance is framed not as a reasonable response to a company with a long privacy record, but as a failure to embrace progress.

Yet trust cannot be forged through celebrity campaigns or software updates. It is earned by giving people meaningful control — including people who never bought the product but happen to stand in front of it. That absence of consent is not a minor flaw waiting for a better LED. It is the product’s central privacy problem.

Unlike some other sports, football has traditionally offered very few natural windows for commercial breaks. For decades, there was really only one: the 15-minute halftime slot. But this World Cup has changed that by introducing mandatory hydration breaks, effectively splitting each half into two parts with a three-minute pause. FIFA, which sold the rights to show the tournament, left it up to individual broadcasters to decide whether to turn that time into more advertising inventory. Quite a few, including Fox in the United States, as well as broadcasters in Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, India, Australia, and Turkey — didn’t hesitate to take the hint.

Why mandatory hydration breaks receive so much backlash

Hydration breaks themselves are not new in football. They were first introduced more than a decade ago during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, when extreme heat and humidity made conditions legitimately dangerous for players. A game between the USA and Portugal in Manaus, Brazil, was in fact the first ever match to have them at the World Cup level. At the time the interruption was praised by commentators as “common sense.”

Importantly, though, in that tournament, breaks were only used when temperatures reached 32 degrees Celsius (or 89.6 Fahrenheit). The idea was simple: protect players when conditions are genuinely extreme, but avoid interrupting the game when they are not. 2026 has seen FIFA abandoning this seemingly common sense logic and making a complete U-turn.

Instead of being used only in extreme heat, FIFA decided in December 2025 that hydration breaks should become mandatory in every match. FIFA has justified this blanket approach by saying that this was to ensure “equal conditions for all teams,” regardless of stadium, climate, or infrastructure — even in venues with roofs, shade, or air conditioning. In other words, FIFA mandated that the game be divided into four periods, making it a new normal, not an exception.

This approach did not strike a chord with those whom it was supposed to benefit — football players. The Netherlands and Liverpool FC captain Virgil van Dijk, speaking during the tournament, described the breaks as often unnecessary stops that ruin the flow of the game for players and spectators alike:

“If it’s really hot, obviously it would be good to put them in. But I think you have to look at it in every game separately.”

Fans have also reacted strongly, with clips circulating online of spectators booing when play is paused for hydration breaks. One group, however, has remained notably silent: broadcasters and advertisers, who stand out to benefit the most from the new rule.

The economy of hydration breaks: how much does Messi’s sip cost

But how much money can you really make from a couple of extra minutes a match? Six extra minutes in a 90-minute football match hardly seem like enough to change the economics of sports broadcasting. But scale those six minutes across the entire World Cup, and they suddenly become extraordinarily valuable.

There are certain rules governing how ads can run during the breaks. Ads can start 20 seconds after the whistle and must end 30 seconds before play resumes. Per match, this adds up to around 4 minutes and 20 seconds of additional advertising. Over the tournament, that becomes roughly 7 hours, 30 minutes and 40 seconds of extra TV ad time. That translates to eight 30-second ad slots per match, per broadcaster, or around 832 total ad slots throughout the entire tournament.

While viewers in some countries, like the UK, may see more analysis and no ads at all during those breaks, many others are shown full-fledged commercials instead, with broadcasters exploiting every second of allotted time to earn an extra buck.

Reports suggest that a 30-second World Cup ad slot on Fox Sports costs between $200,000 and $300,000, rising to as much as $750,000 during key matches. Based on these numbers, advertising during hydration breaks in the US alone could generate over $250 million. That makes one sip a player takes on the pitch quite expensive, literally. Let’s break it down.

If we take the $250 million estimate for US hydration-break advertising revenue and divide it by 104 matches, we get roughly $2.4 million per match. Split that across two hydration breaks per match, and it comes to about $1.2 million per break. Divide that again among 22 outfield players, and you arrive at roughly $54,500 per player per break.

Now translate that into drinking water. If we assume each player drinks about 0.3 litres during a break, and that an average sip is around 20 ml, that works out to roughly 15 sips per player per break. So $54,500 per player per break divided by 15 sips comes to roughly $3,600 per sip.

A single sip of water is therefore worth thousands of dollars in advertising inventory, and this is if we take the US only. It’s estimated that the global value of hydration-break advertising could approach as much as $1 billion.

So let’s recalculate.

Starting from the $1 billion global estimate:

• Divide by 104 matches → about $9.6 million per match
• Divide by 2 hydration breaks per match → about $4.8 million per break
• Divide by 22 outfield players → about $218,000 per player per break
• Divide by 15 sips per player → about $14,500 per sip

In other words, depending on whether you look at the US market alone or the global broadcast ecosystem, a single sip of water at the 2026 World Cup may be worth somewhere between $3,600 and $14,500 in advertising inventory.

Of course, this is still just an illustrative calculation. Not every player drinks the same amount, not every broadcaster monetizes every second equally, and real-world broadcast conditions are more complex than clean equations suggest. But even with all those caveats, the scale is hard to ignore.

Americanization of sports or the rise of the ad-supported world?

Everything we’ve described so far can be seen as the symptom of the Americanization of football. After all, American sports have long embraced commercial interruptions. The Super Bowl is as famous for its ads as it is for the game itself, with many international viewers watching primarily for music performances and commercials. The NBA Finals have drawn criticism for years over halftime shows where commercials often take up more than half of the break, leaving just a few minutes for actual analysis. In other words, stopping the action to sell advertising is nothing new in the US.

But framing this purely as a regional factor would be an oversimplification. Fox does run commercials during hydration breaks, but broadcasters in many other countries do the same. This isn’t one country’s television culture spreading globally; it’s the ad-supported model quietly becoming the default everywhere.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen streaming services roll out ad-supported tiers while making ad-free subscriptions increasingly expensive. Ads are now appearing across every corner of smart TV interfaces, even on idle screens and when connected via HDMI inputs. Football has simply become the latest frontier.

We wouldn’t be surprised if hydration breaks become a permanent feature at FIFA events. The next World Cups are scheduled for Spain, Portugal, and Morocco in 2030, followed by Saudi Arabia in 2034. All of them are host nations where players will likely contend with extreme summer heat. If broadcasters discover that these breaks generate hundreds of millions in revenue, it’s hard to imagine there will be much enthusiasm for giving them up. Even if monetization was never FIFA’s original intention, the organization is unlikely to ignore the fact that mandatory breaks increase the commercial value of broadcast rights. The next broadcasting deal could simply cost more because of them.

If this strategy proves successful, why stop at hydration breaks? By 2050, we might see snack breaks sponsored by McDonald's, restroom breaks sponsored by Charmin, or recovery breaks sponsored by Gatorade. These are probably the most obvious guesses, not necessarily the most imaginative ones, but even they sound absurd. Then again, so did mandatory commercial breaks during football matches just a few years ago.

If you are reading this article, you are probably already much more privacy-conscious than an average web user. That means you know that in the eyes of many corporations and tech giants your data is a product, and they go out of their way to get to it. And the methods they employ are endless: some are well-known, some are less obvious. What many of these methods have in common is how easy it is to overlook them and spill your data. You do something mundane, like installing an app or scanning a QR code, and already your privacy is at risk. In today’s TechTok we answer this question:

What are the most common privacy traps? What things are you doing nearly every day that can endanger your personal information?

When you post personal details on a public platform or fill in an online form with your real name or address, it’s pretty obvious that your privacy is taking a hit. These are scenarios where common sense will get you through: don’t feed your credentials to shady websites or tweet your social security number for everyone to see. But what about other, less clear cases? We collected nine scenarios that you might easily find yourself in, where you risk leaking your personal information without even realizing.

1. Scanning a QR code

QR codes are a staple of everyday life, they are the links between the physical and digital worlds. We scan them to pay for things, to download a menu at a restaurant, to share contact details. The more we do it, the less we think about what actually happens behind the camera pointed at the checkered pattern. And what happens is usually your phone opens a URL, either in a browser or in an in-app web view. The moment that page loads, your device sends a request to the server hosting it. That request automatically includes some information, and the page can also collect more through scripts running on it, depending on how it is built and what protections you use. Here’s the kind of information that can be collected:

• Your IP address. This indirectly leads to knowing your rough location, internet provider, whether you are on Wi-Fi or on mobile.
• Your browser and device information. Device type, operating system, language preferences, sometimes even browser version and device model.
• Language and region hints. If the website isn’t sure about your location or language judging from other data, it may get some additional hints here.

And these are only those things that the server gets automatically. After the page loads, it can run some JavaScript in the browser to get more:

• Screen size and display characteristics. Screen resolution, device orientation, pixel ratio, color depth — all these little details help fingerprint your device and contribute to your profile.
• Time of access. Pretty obvious, but the website can learn about your local time and time zone, it can also record how long you stayed on the page.
• Interaction signals. If the website wants, it can track which buttons you clicked, whether you copied something, how long you spent reading, and so on.

So, basically, treat QR codes as if they were links. We don’t click just any link we see in spam emails, so we should be similarly selective about which QR codes we scan. Only scan those that you see in legitimate places; thus scanning a random QR code on a sticker stamped onto a street light is a bad idea.

Also keep in mind that, after all, QR codes are physical objects linked to physical spaces. Once you scan one, you’re potentially revealing that you were in a specific place at a specific time. It can help link your offline behavior to online tracking or profiling.

2. Allowing push notifications

Another prime example of something so deeply ingrained in our lives that we often use it without any second thought. Push notifications are convenient because it’s the easiest way for an app to reach you and notify you about something important, but that’s exactly why they are dangerous. They give an app a direct, persistent channel to your device — one that can reveal a lot about your behavior, interests, and habits over time.

Over-the-shoulder onlookers. Level zero of why push notifications may be a threat to your privacy is that they may expose sensitive content on your lock screen. No invisible ‘tracking magic,’ it’s simply about someone else glancing at your screen at an inopportune moment and seeing your message previews, banking details, order alerts.

And remember that these notifications can arrive quite literally at any time, that’s their whole point, so be very picky about which apps you allow to send push notifications. Once you give the permission, it’s very easy to forget about it, so it’s best to prevent the potential disaster at the earliest stage possible.

Profiling your daily schedule. Every time an app reaches your phone with a push, it learns that your device is online. By studying when you engage with which pushes it’s relatively easy to learn your daily patterns: when you sleep, when you commute or take breaks, when you’re most accessible. All of this may not feel as privacy-threatening as leaking your email or phone number, but it does help build your digital profile and manipulate your behavior.

Not always good for your mental. It’s not about privacy per se, but feels right to mention it here — push notifications can easily mess with your daily rhythm and your routines. Getting constantly bombarded with pushes disturbs your peace of mind and elevates anxiety. Take a look at which apps on your phone have push notification permissions — we bet if you disable half of them, you wouldn’t miss anything of real importance, but would save yourself some nerves.

3. Handing out unnecessary permissions

Piggybacking on the previous point, in general, do not give apps on your phone more permissions than they need to function properly. When your maps app asks for location permission, it’s a legitimate request. When a sudoku app does the same, you can probably deny it without losing any functionality.

Most people can use common sense to judge whether an app really needs a certain permission. The problem lies elsewhere. So many of us are in a constant hurry: a friend shows you a cool app, and you rush to the store to download it. Once the download is complete, you tap the icon, and instead of the main screen you see an annoying permission popup. If you’ve never been in this situation, impatiently tapping ‘Allow’ without stopping for a second and giving it a read, you are a much more patient person than most.

Make it a habit to slow down every time you install a new app and to think for a moment about which permissions the app actually needs. If you want to take things a step further, consider reading the privacy policy. It may not be easy, though, as many unscrupulous developers make the privacy policies for their apps and browser extensions intentionally obscure or hard to find. But this is the next level — shutting down any attempts of getting unnecessary permissions is a good starting point for anyone looking to up their privacy game.

4. Installing free apps and extensions

This one is with an obvious caveat. Not all free services and apps are bad, claiming that would be taking it too far. But the simple truth is, people rarely give anything out for free. When you are about to install a free app on your device, ask yourself: why is it free? Sometimes there is a legitimate reason for that, like when a free version of an app also offers a paid pro plan, or it’s a freemium game that hopes you will later purchase in-game objects, or perhaps it’s someone’s passion project.

But in many cases, a free app comes at the cost of extensive tracking. Smaller developers often include analytics and ad SDKs (Software Developer Kits) into their apps for monetization purposes, and these SDKs collect stuff like your behavioral data, device info, and usage patterns. And in the worst cases, free apps serve as gateways for viruses and various phishing scams. It doesn’t mean that you should stop using any and all free apps right this moment, but think twice every time you’re installing a free app. Ask yourself if you really need it, and if the answer is ‘yes,’ arm yourself with your trusty ad blocker and stay alert to signs of phishing and other foul play: missing or rudimentary privacy policy, unknown developer, lack of reviews, low installation count.

5. Clicking through cookie consent popups

Cookies have earned themselves a bad reputation among privacy experts and users who care about the safety of their data. And for a reason — they can be easily abused to track you across websites, build your digital dossier, and in many countries, especially in the EU, websites are required to ask for your consent before storing any information about you inside cookies. You know what we mean — those ‘We value your privacy’ banners that pop up when you navigate through a link to read an article or browse an online shop. They usually have a highlighted Accept All button that begs to be pressed, while other buttons like Customize or Reject All take a back seat, trying to be as invisible as possible.

A typical example of a cookie consent popup with the ‘Accept All’ button highlighted. Source: Webtoffee

This is all by design, of course. Websites need to abide by the law, but they also want to track you if they can get away with it. So they present the choice in such a way that pushes you towards making the choice you otherwise wouldn’t. When you really want to read that article, you are much more likely to click on the first thing that draws your attention to make the banner go away. Instead, take a second to find a more appropriate option than ‘Accept All.’ Even in the most severe cases it doesn’t take longer than half a minute to avoid consenting to something you don’t want to, and usually all it takes is literally a second or two to avoid the initial impulse and click the less flashy button next to it.

6. Signing in with Google/Apple/etc.

On the list of things that feel way more annoying than they really are, signing up for a new service has to be close to the top. Typing in your email address and password, opening your inbox, maybe waiting for a minute or so and clicking the confirmation link — if we’re being honest, it’s not too hard or too long, but given the option, we’d rather not do it. And how convenient is it that there’s a “Sign in with Google” button right next to the Sign Up one! Why wouldn’t you select this option and bypass all that fuss?

An example of social login buttons designed by @nelsonic

But when you start thinking about it, the drawbacks become apparent. Every time you use a social login, the app or website may receive a stable account identifier from Google/Apple/Facebook that makes it easier to link your activity across services. Think of it as if you’re using the same master key to enter many different buildings — which is convenient, except you are letting a company like Google or Apple hold that master key for you. This company now knows where you go, and if the key is lost or stolen, your access to a lot of places will be affected at once.

This isn’t just about convenience or even about access. Once the website has that stable identifier, it can start treating you as the same person every time you come back, even if you’re using a different browser or device. That makes it much easier to tie together what you do on that one service: what pages you visit, what you buy, what you click, how often you return, and how long you stay. In other words, the site may not know your whole life story, but it can still build a pretty detailed one inside its own database. But from the website’s point of view, that’s not very different from the case where you sign in ‘the regular way’ by creating an account.

The real difference is that now there’s the company holding the ‘master key.’ Whether it is Google, Apple, or Facebook, it can see that the same account is being used to sign into different services, which means your activity can be linked across the web at a much larger scale. So now it’s not just one website knowing you’re a repeat visitor — it’s one big company potentially seeing that you show up at many different doors, over and over again. That’s where privacy starts to shrink: not because every site suddenly learns everything about you, but because one identity layer makes it much easier to connect the dots.

The solution is pretty simple — try avoiding using the social login feature. Creating an account doesn’t take that much effort or time, and, as a bonus, you can use an alias or a temporary mail service like AdGuard Mail to further strengthen your privacy.

7. Using Google and other non-private search engines

We use search constantly, dozens of times a day. It comes so naturally that we don’t even think about it — your mind is still thinking, but the fingers have already started typing the query. It feels quick, and it feels private: it’s just you and the search bar. If we feel like we are searching for something sensitive, we might switch to incognito mode (which hardly offers any privacy, by the way), but usually that’s about it.

And when we google something, most of us use, well, Google. It hasn’t become the synonym to online search by accident — it still holds over 90% of the search engine market share. And whenever you use Google or another non-private search engine, like Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, or Yandex, it may store your queries, tie them to your account or device, and later use this information for personalization and advertising. Fortunately, it is easy to avoid this issue — just switch to a privacy-oriented search engine like DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. They are designed not to associate your searches with you personally in the same way mainstream search engines do.

Another, maybe less obvious privacy issue tied to search engines is shoulder surfing. Even if you are aware that someone is standing next to you and cognizant of what you type, autofill makes it easy to display something that you wouldn’t want to become public. Start typing ‘how many…’ into the search bar, and it will automatically suggest you something like ‘how many countries are there in the world.’ This is a very innocent example, but in reality suggestions are based on your location, language, and past searches, and it’s very easy to conjure a scenario where autofill could leak something private about you. It is another example of the compromise between convenience and privacy, and you can make this choice for yourself, just be aware that there is a choice.

8. Talking to AI chatbots

In the previous TechTok issue we already talked about how AI chatbots can or can’t use your data for training and other purposes. Long story short — it depends on which AI you are using, but the rule of thumb is that if you say something to a chatbot, more often than not it can be used for whatever purpose the company behind it sees fit. You can opt for models that collect less information about you and look for settings that disable or restrict tracking.

Key takeaways from the last TechTok article:

• Among the popular conversational AI models, Claude is the only one that doesn’t collect your data for AI training by default
• Perplexity and Gemini have options to disable future data retention, but turning it off will not affect past interactions
• ChatGPT has an opt-out option in settings, but some data retention will continue in any case
• Ad blockers can stop third-party trackers that may run on chatbot websites. However, most major platforms rely heavily on first-party tracking that can’t be easily dealt with
• Best privacy protection when talking to chatbots is caution: choose your AI carefully and do not share personal details without a good reason

9. Using a public Wi-Fi

We will finish the list off with, possibly, the biggest privacy no-no that you can commit: connecting to an unprotected Wi-Fi network without a VPN and other digital protection tools. Everyone knows that it’s dangerous, everyone knows that you shouldn’t do it, and yet some people do it anyway. A quick reminder why exactly it’s dangerous:

• It gives anyone with technical knowledge and an ill intent an attack angle. They can potentially see which websites you visit, which requests your browser sends — this can include sensitive info like payment details.
• Public Wi-Fi can be used for man-in-the-middle attacks. A malicious actor may position themselves between your device and the internet connection so they can monitor, modify, or redirect traffic. That can be used to steal login details or push you to fake websites.
• It’s easy to trick someone with a fake hotspot. Attackers can set up a Wi‑Fi network with a name that looks legitimate, like “CoffeeShop_Free_WiFi,” and lure people into connecting to it. Once you’re on the wrong network, they may be able to intercept your data or redirect you to malicious pages.

These are just some of the reasons. There are plenty more, but the point remains: do not connect to public, unprotected networks, unless you are protected by a VPN. It doesn’t mean that the second you connect to the airport hotspot all your credit card information will be stolen, but every time you do that, you are tempting fate for no good reason at all.

The list is, of course, non-exhaustive, and there are more threats to your privacy out there. It should, however, help you shore up some of the weaknesses in your digital habits that you might have, and also set your mind on the right course. If there is one underlying thought to all of these nine examples, it’s “treat your privacy with respect.” Don’t choose a slightly more convenient option automatically just because it might save you a couple of seconds; stay vigilant, stay critical, and good things will happen to you — or, at least, less bad things will.

Some of you might notice something different about the title of this post.

You’re not imagining it: we’re bringing back the original name. What started in 2018 as the Ad Blocker Developer Summit later became the Ad-Filtering Dev Summit — but this year, we’re going back to our roots. Old-new name, same community.

And speaking of coming back: Ad Blocker Dev Summit 2026 is officially happening!

This year we're bringing it somewhere new: Copenhagen, Denmark, on November 3–4. ABDS 2026 is once again co-organized by AdGuard and eyeo, and it's free to attend.

Zoku Hotel, Copenhagen

Have something to share?

The call for speakers is open! If you’re working on something relevant to ad blocking or privacy protection, we want to hear from you.

Talk submission deadline: August 16, 2026.

After reviewing all submissions, we’ll get back to you in late August with decisions.

Just want to attend as a guest?

Join us in Copenhagen for two days of insightful talks and engaging conversations. Attending ABDS is free — just be sure to register in advance:
Register as a guest

What is the Ad Blocker Dev Summit?

If you’re new here: ABDS (formerly Ad-Filtering Dev Summit) is the annual gathering for everyone who works on making the web a less intrusive, more private place — developers, filter list maintainers, browser engineers, privacy researchers and advocates, and everyone in between. Last year’s edition in Limassol brought together speakers from AdGuard, Brave, eyeo, Ghostery, Google, Malwarebytes, Mozilla, Opera, and more.

Watch the trailer from 2025:

And here is the full playlist of talks from last year’s summit.

If you have any questions, please reach the org team at contact@adblockerdevsummit.com.

We hope to see you in Copenhagen this November ;)

Because that code lives in Chromium itself, the change will also affect Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi. While browser vendors are technically free to continue supporting Manifest V2 on their own, doing so would require maintaining legacy code after it has been removed upstream. Google engineers have described the remaining MV2 infrastructure as increasingly costly to maintain and pointed to bugs and security issues associated with the old platform. As a result, browsers that want to keep supporting MV2 will have to invest their own engineering resources rather than relying on Chromium to do the work for them — making long-term MV2 support increasingly unlikely.

The news has reignited a familiar narrative: that Google is finally killing ad blockers. Similar claims have accompanied almost every major milestone in the Manifest V3 transition since it was first announced in 2019. The reality is that the most significant part of the Manifest V2 phaseout happened years ago. Major content blockers have adapted, and the web did not suddenly become unfilterable. What is happening now is largely the removal of compatibility mechanisms that outlived the transition itself.

So rather than add to the noise, let me walk you through an objective timeline of what has actually been happening.

The story

This whole story about "Chrome disabling ad blockers" begins back in 2019. Around that time, Google had finally staffed up the team responsible for browser extensions in Chrome, and they set out to tackle some longstanding problems. The biggest issue was that the Chrome Web Store had become flooded with malicious extensions — Google's moderation was frankly poor, and all sorts of junk kept slipping through. A second, related problem was the abundance of low-quality extensions that hurt browser performance.

Google's solution was to launch a new version of the extension platform, called Manifest V3 (MV3), designed to replace the older Manifest V2 platform. The catch was that the new platform removed or restricted a number of capabilities that extensions had previously relied on. Whether it actually solved the original problems remains debatable.

On the security front, nobody has ever convincingly explained how MV3 helps. On performance, though, the story is different: MV3 genuinely reduces the impact that poorly written extensions can have on the browser.

To soften the blow for content blockers, Google introduced a new set of APIs intended to compensate for some of the functionality being taken away — most notably the declarativeNetRequest API. But to be honest, had Google shipped MV3 in the form originally proposed in 2019, it really could have been the death of ad blockers — and many other extensions too.

The collaboration

What prevented that outcome was years of collaboration. That same year, Google came to the annual ad blocker dev conference to present the new platform and ask what they needed to do so that ad blockers could keep working normally — and they have returned to that conference every year since. In parallel, Google joined Mozilla and Apple to form the W3C WebExtensions Community Group, a standards body through which we, the extension developers, worked alongside all of them to improve MV3 and make it something that could satisfy all parties.

It was a long road, but through that collective effort MV3 was eventually brought into a workable state. Only five years after the first announcement did Google finally complete the transition to MV3 in Chrome, by which point many extensions — ad blockers included — migrated over to it. As for how well ad blockers perform today, I won't pretend the transition was painless: compared to the previous version, our lives got a little harder and the product became somewhat tougher to maintain. But end users are unlikely to notice much of a difference. Ad blockers are very much alive.

The current state

That brings us to what is happening right now. Even though Chrome itself moved to MV3 back in 2024, its codebase still retained the ability to run the old MV2 extensions. All of that legacy code was still present — and while Chrome no longer relied on it, the third-party browsers built on the Chromium engine (such as Opera, Edge, and Brave) did. Starting with version 150, that old code is being removed from Chromium, which means MV2 extensions will stop working in those third-party Chromium-based browsers. And realistically, the developers behind them are unlikely to have the resources to maintain MV2 on their own, since the code is complex and reaches deep into a large number of browser components.

The bottom line

Google isn't suddenly pulling the plug on anything today — all the important events already happened between 2019 and 2024. Ad blockers are fine. We were never thrilled about the move to MV3, but the predicted apocalypse never arrived. The real casualties of these changes aren't ad blockers, but the third-party browsers that had kept supporting old MV2 extensions up to now (and used that as a competitive advantage over Chrome).

And if you’re someone who relies on the full power of the webRequest API — the kind of deep, flexible filtering that MV3's declarative approach can’t fully replicate — don’t forget that there’s always Firefox. Mozilla continues to support the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API alongside MV3, which means the most demanding content blockers can keep doing everything they’ve always done. Of course, switching browsers isn't something everyone wants to do. Fortunately, browser extensions aren't the only way to block ads. Network-level and system-wide solutions such as AdGuard don't depend on Chrome's extension platform at all, making them unaffected by the MV2-to-MV3 transition.

Less noise, more match

Visiting a sports page should feel like getting a ticket to the match, not becoming a witness to a parade of autoplay videos and flashing banners. AdGuard Ad Blocker reduces visual clutter and blocks intrusive ads and trackers, making pages cleaner and less interruptive for fans following World Cup 2026 live stream links. That cleaner browsing layer helps when you are looking for ways to watch FIFA World Cup free and land on ad-heavy pages that break the viewing flow.

Get AdGuard

Keep the inbox for what matters

The road to kickoff brings subscriptions, confirmations, and promotional emails from broadcasters and services, and it is easy to lose track of the messages that actually matter in the noise. AdGuard Mail provides aliases and temporary email addresses so fans can sign up for match alerts, ticketing services, and streaming trials without exposing their primary inbox, which keeps communications around the World Cup 2026 schedule tidy and manageable. This small change spares readers the post‑tournament ritual of mass unsubscriptions and inbox clean-up.

Get AdGuard Mail

Protect the connection when you’re on the move

More fans than ever will be watching away from home — in airports, hotels, and cafés — and in those moments connection security matters. AdGuard VPN masks IP addresses and encrypts traffic so browsing and streaming become more private on public networks, a practical help for anyone who wants to watch world cup from anywhere while keeping their data safer. It’s not a workaround for broadcast rights, but it is a sensible tool for travel‑age viewing habits and a relevant companion for those searching for a VPN for the World Cup.

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A home solution for every device

Not all devices support browser extensions, and some living rooms are governed by smart TVs that can’t run regular blockers. AdGuard DNS lets households filter ads and trackers at the network level, protecting any connected device and giving families a smoother, ad‑reduced experience across phones, laptops, and TVs — a useful complement to ad blockers and a way to bring cleaner viewing into the shared spaces where many World Cup evenings happen.

Get AdGuard DNS

How it fits the way people watch

People follow the tournament in different ways: some tune in to the official World Cup 2026 broadcasters by country, others look for World Cup 2026 free stream options, and many simply want to check the live score without being interrupted. AdGuard doesn’t replace broadcasters; it improves the surrounding experience — removing distractions, limiting promotional noise, and securing connections when needed — which aligns with common search intents such as how to watch World Cup in the USA, how to watch World Cup in the UK, and how to unblock World Cup stream.

Practical setup tips for fans

• If you want a cleaner browser experience while hunting for a World Cup 2026 live stream, install an ad‑blocking extension on your desktop or mobile browser to reduce popups and overlays.
• Use an email alias or temporary address when signing up for streaming trials or ticketing alerts to keep your main inbox focused on essentials.
• When watching on public Wi‑Fi, consider enabling a VPN to protect your session and reduce the risk of interception.
• For shared household setups or devices without extension support, configure DNS filtering on your router to block ads and trackers network‑wide.

A note on access and rights

It’s important to be clear: these tools improve the viewing experience, but do not create legal access to paywalled broadcasts. Availability of streams and rights to show matches depend on regional broadcasters and platform agreements, so fans should check the official World Cup 2026 broadcasters by country and the World Cup 2026 schedule when planning what and where to watch.

A finishing note

Watching the World Cup is as much about presence as it is about access. By clearing the noise, tidying the inbox, and securing the connection when you’re away from home, AdGuard products help make that presence easier to maintain — so the focus stays on the moments that matter on the pitch.

Pre-2009: The Jurassic Period of ads

AdGuard was first created in 2009, and it was designed — you guessed it — to block ads. Specifically, it was designed to block ads that existed in 2009. By that time, the internet had already evolved past its first early stages of the 90s, but compared to what it looks like today, the web was still a very different beast. And the ads were very different too.

If you were around at that time, you know what we mean: it was the era of ‘fair’ ads, at least by modern standards. You type a URL into your browser’s address bar, you press Enter, the website loads. On those websites, there may be banners advertising this thing or that thing; if you click on them, they take you to the advertised website, end of story. What you see is what you get, with the occasional scam ad here and there, but probably not on big, popular sites.

Cartoon Network’s website in 2000s

Visually, these banners could be anything, from static pictures and ‘download’ buttons to animated GIFs and popups. The ads of that era were many things, but they were not subtle or sophisticated. And, as a reflection of them, the ad blockers of the time were pretty simple as well. By 2009, ‘hosts’ files were still a popular way to combat ads. HOSTS.TXT is basically a plain text file that maps domain names to IP addresses, and it overrules whatever the DNS server tells it. This method was popular because it worked well: list all the ‘bad’ domains associated with ads and route them all to a 0.0.0.0 ‘black hole,’ and you’ve successfully blocked a lion’s share of ad banners.

The ad blockers of that time were not too different in that regard. They were more powerful than hosts files, of course, as they could do more advanced things like some cosmetic filtering or distinguishing page context, but the practical difference was not hugely noticeable for an average user.

And this is what the ad landscape looked like by the time the first AdGuard version saw the light of day. Ad blocking was on the rise, but still a very niche thing for those ‘in the know.’ Andrey Meshkov, one of the founders of AdGuard, wrote it all by himself, and this is how our story began.

A screenshot of one of the oldest AdGuard versions

2009–2011: The Flashpocalypse

Not everyone may remember Flash now, but it used to be an insanely popular multimedia software platform, used to create animation, web applications, browser games, and many other things. And it’s not to say that there was no Flash before 2009, because Flash was already kind of old by that point, having existed for well over a decade. It had been extensively used to create animated ads, but 2009 marked an important shift. In terms of its role in the ad ecosystem, around this time, Flash started transitioning from “something used to display annoying banners and popups” to “a tool used to create tracking infrastructure and execute heavy third-party code.”

A ‘Flash player required’ message

Flash had something called Local Shared Objects, also commonly known as Flash cookies. The name isn’t a coincidence: they functioned very similarly to regular cookies. They could be used to store user preferences, save data from Flash games, or even track users’ Internet activity. Unlike cookies, they could store much more data, up to 100 kB, and could not be cleared just by deleting browser history. In 2009 a group of Berkeley researchers found that over half of the top 100 websites used Flash cookies, which would sometimes even restore the deleted HTTP cookies.

Earlier ad blocking was mostly about visual clutter: hide this huge banner, block that annoying popup. But this period in time is when the threat started to turn invisible, in no small part because of Flash with its hard-to-delete tracking. Blocking the visible graphics would not do anything to stop the underlying tracking layer. The problem was prominent enough that dedicated tools like NoScript and Flashblock became especially relevant: they replaced Flash content with placeholders and required a click to run it.

Ad blockers started to adapt too, with filtering rules aimed at blocking tracking scripts and features designed specifically to block or otherwise restrict Flash. As for AdGuard, even at the earliest stages of its life we were curating our own filters, and fighting tracking in general (and Flash tracking in particular) was part of it. A bit later we added a dedicated option to block Flash entirely, which you can still find inside Advanced Settings of AdGuard for Windows.

“Block Flash” option in AdGuard

Flash was not, of course, the only thing happening at that time. Behavioral advertising and real-time bidding already existed, for example, but we will get a better chance to talk about them in later chapters. Broadly speaking, this era was characterized by the growing role of tracking compared to pure advertising, and moving forward this distinction would become more and more obvious.

2011–2013: Social tracking and retargeting

Some of the clearest examples of the rise of tracking in that era were social widget tracking and, especially, retargeting. The concept of ad retargeting is familiar to anyone now, even if the word itself is not: you browse the web and come across an electric toothbrush. Maybe you even entertain the thought and visit the seller’s website, but ultimately decide against buying it. But the machine has already started moving: now anywhere you go, the toothbrush follows you around, across news sites, blogs, even on Facebook — and this could go on for days. This is the point in time when previously invisible tracking became apparent to regular users, and it was an unfamiliar, spooky feeling.

Retargeting proved to be wildly effective, and so ad blockers had to react quickly. And they did — old filters were modified with trackers in mind and new ones emerged, designed specifically to block tracking. AdGuard also created a new separate filter for spyware and trackers around that time — it has evolved into the Tracking Protection filter that we still maintain today. As a response to the demands of the time, this period also saw tools that were not classic ad blockers at all, but were instead focused solely on detecting and controlling JavaScript tags, trackers, cookie-based tracking, and such.

Another boogeyman of this era was a different type of tracking — social widget tracking. ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons, floating share bars, counters, and so on — they were everywhere, and they were tracking you. These widgets were not just buttons. They were third-party embeds that could tell Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others which pages a user loaded, often regardless of whether the user clicked the widget or not.

Plethora of Facebook widgets from 2012

As for ad blockers’ response, you could simply block the tracking behind these widgets, like any other trackers, by using anti-tracking filtering rules and filter lists. But for many users the widgets themselves got so tiresome that some opted to remove them altogether. And for these people AdGuard offered Social media filter that removed social media integrations, which is also still available today.

2013–2016: The Programmatic web

Around that time, web advertising started being much less about manually placing ads on web pages and more about auctioning the ad space to the highest bidder to display the ‘perfect’ ad tailored to the specific user. User profiling became key and Real-Time Bidding (RTB), despite having first appeared much earlier, was scaling fast and became the defining factor for the adtech landscape of the time. It is still highly relevant, with an estimated total market value of USD 16.3 billion in 2024 and projected to reach USD 39.6 billion by 2030. So what exactly is RTB and how does it work?

RTB is a method of buying and selling ad space in real time to the advertiser with the highest bid. Imagine you visit a website, and the site owner (publisher) has an ad space on that website that they would like to sell, and so they initiate an auction. The publisher reaches out to the Ad Exchange — a place where the auction takes place — and sends over your profile. This profile may include your device ID, information about the device’s settings, its location, things like your age bracket, your likely interests — anything goes; the more, the better. The ad exchange then offers this information to advertisers who bid on how much they are willing to pay to show their ad to you. The highest bidder wins, and this is the ad you see on the website — more often than not, highly relevant and aimed specifically at you.

How real-time bidding works. Image credit: Adjust

In reality, it’s a fair bit more complicated than that: for example, both publishers and advertisers have their own ‘representatives,’ called Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), and they add a whole new layer to this scheme. But despite being so complex, this entire process is highly automated and takes mere fractions of a second from start to finish. And these auctions happen all the time. Just in Europe and the U.S., 178 trillion auctions take place every year.

RTB doesn’t operate in a vacuum — it feeds on, and in turn accelerates, the broader infrastructure of identity tracking built around it. One of the scariest things about all this is how easy it is to obtain information about any individual. Notice that in any RTB auction, in order for advertisers to be able to know how much they want to bid, the ad exchange shares with them all the information about you that it received from the publisher. If you’re an advertiser, you may receive valuable data even if you never win the auction. In 2017, the researchers from University of Washington conducted an experiment in which they were able to track the movements of a specific person by participating in RTB auctions — all they had to do was spend about $1000.

RTB went hand in hand with the expansion of analytics, tracking pixels, and identity infrastructure. The more an ad system could infer about a visitor — their interests, device, location, browsing history, or likelihood to convert — the more precisely that impression could be valued and bid on. This period was characterized by heavy cross-device and cross-channel measurement: Universal Analytics, the then-new version of Google Analytics, pushed it further toward a “multi-screen, multi-device” model, while Facebook’s tracking pixel, launched in 2015, turned ordinary websites into sources of conversion data, audience building, and retargeting. All in all, this was the period when today’s adtech landscape began to take shape — and in many ways, it still follows the same logic.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to illustrate how ad blockers in general and AdGuard in particular reacted to the new challenges. Just as the threat itself was invisible to a user, the response was too. The advancement of ad blocking syntax, new filtering rules, new anti-tracking filters — unless you were a hardcore ad-blocking user who frequented specialized forums, you wouldn’t know much, if anything at all, about the constant struggle that was going on behind the scenes.

Stealth Mode module in one of the older AdGuard versions

A big step forward for AdGuard was the addition of Stealth Mode module in early 2016 — before it, the tracking protection filter was the only line of defense from tracking. Stealth Mode was designed to protect users’ privacy in various ways, including blocking third-party cookies, preventing WebRTC leaks, and many others. It is now known simply as the Tracking protection module and has accumulated dozens of new features over the last decade, some of which we will touch on later.

2016–2019: Fingerprinting fiesta

For years, websites relied on cookies to collect information on internet users. But by that time, browsers and ad blockers had become pretty good at limiting or blocking cookies, and so trackers looked for ways to recognize people without storing anything obvious on their devices. This is where fingerprinting enters the stage. The naming is not random: just like you can identify a person by the unique pattern of their finger ridges, it is possible to identify a user by a unique combination of factors: time zone, language, browser settings, installed plugins, fonts, screen size, device characteristics — the list can go on and on. None of these signs are good enough to definitively identify a person, but combine enough of them into a single user profile, and you can reach a very high degree of certainty.

The idea of collecting information about users’ browsers and devices first appeared a long time ago, but it took some time for it to become widespread. For example, in 2013, out of Alexa top 10,000 websites only 40 were using fingerprinting scripts. It wasn’t long until this tracking method skyrocketed in popularity, though — and it remains popular even today, as it wasn’t affected by the increased cookie restrictions.

There are different types of fingerprinting, and the poster child is definitely Canvas fingerprinting. The idea is surprisingly simple: a website asks your browser to draw something invisibly, then reads the subtle rendering differences caused by the OS, GPU, drivers, fonts, and browser. It was so effective that, according to a study by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan of Princeton University, by 2016 nearly all prominent trackers stopped using canvas fingerprinting because the public backlash got so strong; the overall number of domains employing it, however, had increased considerably compared to 2014 (but its use was already shifting from behavioral tracking to fraud and bot detection).

An example of an image generated for canvas fingerprinting

Fingerprinting is not just about making your browser draw invisible images and measuring the result. Canvas fingerprinting is only one example of a much broader technique: collecting small details about your browser, operating system, and device, then combining them into a profile that may be distinctive enough to recognize you later. We already mentioned a lot of parameters that can be measured, here are some more examples: your audio stack, screen resolution, touch support, battery status — these and countless other signals can all become pieces of the puzzle.

And as devices became more capable, the puzzle gained more pieces. Modern PCs, laptops, and especially smartphones exposed more sensors, APIs, rendering features, and hardware characteristics to websites. Each new capability was introduced for legitimate reasons — richer graphics, better media playback, responsive design, mobile-friendly interfaces — but many of them also gave fingerprinting scripts another field to fill in. Even the fact of using a specific ad blocker could become another line in your profile.

Speaking of, is it possible to fight fingerprinting with a trusty old ad blocker? Yes and no. When it comes to recognizable third-party fingerprinting scripts, it’s as easy as adding necessary rules to the filter list. But ad blockers struggle when fingerprinting is embedded into ordinary first-party code. It is possible to block script execution or limit JavaScript with an ad blocker — which would help against fingerprinting — but it could easily lead to site breakage, so it isn’t a solution for everyone.

A random User Agent enforced via AdGuard’s Tracking protection module

As for AdGuard, the aforementioned Stealth Mode/Tracking protection module offered (and still offers) a number of settings, like Custom User-Agent, that could mitigate fingerprinting in theory, but truth be told, this is one area where browsers are much more well-equipped for the fight, just by their nature. They could much more easily implement things like fingerprint randomization — this is a good illustration of why you should treat ad blockers as one of the tools in your privacy-protection suite, and not as an be-all and end-all solution for all problems.

2019–2022: Tracking hiding in plain sight

By this point, more and more users were becoming aware of the dangers of tracking. Having an ad blocker extension installed in your browser became the norm. More privacy-oriented apps and extensions were popping up, and even historically ‘privacy-neutral’ software like browsers shifted more and more toward adding privacy protection features. Trackers were facing serious pushback and had to adapt to the new reality. One of the ways of doing so was making third-party tracking look like first-party traffic by using techniques like CNAME Cloaking.

To understand how CNAME cloaking works, you need to know what first-party and third-party mean in the context of browsers. Normally, browsers treat subdomains of the same site as belonging to the same party. For example, if you visit www.company.example, a request to stats.company.example still looks like a first-party request. It can receive the site’s cookies and may even set cookies that belong to company.example.

A diagram of how CNAME cloaking works

CNAME cloaking (CNAME stands for canonical name) abuses this trust. A website owner can configure a subdomain, such as stats.company.example, so that behind the scenes it actually points to a third-party tracking service. To the browser (and to the ad blocker), the request still appears to go to the original website. But in reality, the tracker is hiding behind a first-party-looking subdomain, gaining many of the privileges that browsers normally reserve for the site itself.

CNAME cloaking wasn’t dangerous because it invented some new breakthrough way of data collection. It was dangerous because it blurred the line between the site you visit and the third parties attached to it, and this distinction was one of the core ideas that privacy tools like ad blockers relied on. For example, first-party cookies are often necessary for websites’ proper functioning, and messing with them can be dangerous. Even if you open AdGuard’s Tracking protection module, you will find “Not recommended” in bright red letters next to the Delete first-party cookies setting — nothing like that next to the same setting for third-party cookies.

Another prime example of tracking moving beyond traditional methods is server-side tracking. Instead of loading every tracker directly in the browser, a website collects data through its own first-party endpoint and passes it along behind the scenes. In fact, this endpoint can be used for something completely legitimate, like loading image or video assets, and so blocking it entirely would effectively render the website useless for the visitor.

By 2020, ad blockers and advertisers were firmly caught in a never-ending arms race. As you can see, these new, inventive ways of tracking users and showing ads were nothing like naive banners of the 2000s, and simply installing a browser extension wasn’t cutting it anymore. This is when DNS filtering moved to the forefront of the battle against trackers. It could see domain resolution, including CNAME chains, and it could protect devices like smart TVs and routers that were impossible to shield with regular ad blockers. AdGuard DNS was officially released in late 2018, and by 2020 it was integrated with all AdGuard apps.

AdGuard DNS dashboard

Advanced filter rules also played their part — they were not just blocking ad URLs, but identifying trackers hidden behind first-party-looking domains. But it became clearer than ever that filtering rules alone were not sufficient for all-round protection; your ad blocker had to cover all fronts. This was also the time when network-level blockers like AdGuard Home rose in popularity, as users became much more knowledgeable and technically competent and wanted full control over their network, rather than delegate it to someone else.

2022 onwards: AI arrives on the scene

AI took the internet by storm and quickly spread into every corner of the web, including advertising and tracking. However, AI didn’t suddenly allow advertisers to discover a new way to follow users. Instead, it gave them better tools to interpret, predict, generate, and optimize around the data they were already collecting.

Remember retargeting and how the same ads followed you around the web based on what you’ve already seen and what you clicked? AI elevated this to the next level with predictive targeting. Instead of showing you the same ads over and over based on what interests are listed in your profile, AI analyzes signals such as browsing history, clicks, purchases, and looks for patterns in that data. Then, based on these patterns, the AI predicts the likelihood of you responding to an ad and even tailors the ad personally for you. This includes not just how the ad looks, but also its timing and the specific offer. To put it briefly, the targeting now is not about what you’ve done, but about what you are likely to do next.

Another boon that AI gives to advertisers is that they don’t have to know that much about you to achieve the same (or even better) precision. Whatever they don’t know, they can now predict with a high degree of certainty. Trackers use cross-platform profiling to build a better picture of you, meaning they connect your activity across different apps and websites by using logins, device signals, ad identifiers, and browsing patterns to decide which signals belong to the same person. AI makes this method more powerful because it can link weak signals across different sources and infer hidden traits from patterns that may look unrelated at first glance. Now it’s much more valuable to have many weaker signals than very few strong ones, and so platforms with logged-in ecosystems have a natural advantage.

In that sense, AI didn’t change very much about how ad blockers deal with the ads and trackers themselves: filter lists remain the foundation for ad blocking, DNS and network filtering still matter, cosmetic filtering still matters. What became far more important than before is how much personal data you leak in the first place. Every website login, every permission request approved, every bit of information about yourself that you make available online now feeds the machine. Privacy tools can help here, too, but the onus is more and more on the users themselves to be vigilant and very conservative about how they interact with the web — although it is not an easy task at all in our hyper-digital age.

AI also opened up one potential ‘new frontier’ for ad blocking: ads being woven into chatbot conversations. As of now, almost all ads associated with chatbots are separate from the responses and labeled as sponsored, but this may become an issue in the future.

Screenshot of ChatGPT ‘Sponsored’ tag by Tibor Blaho on X

Functionally, they are not very different from any other ad you may encounter on a news website, for instance, so blocking them is a matter of promptly updating the filter list. But it is technically very possible to incorporate an ad into the very text of the chatbot’s response. Unless you already know the bot is trying to advertise something to you, there would be no way of knowing if some recommendation is genuine or was forced into the answer for advertising purposes only. Luckily, for now it seems that AI companies value their public image and fear the backlash enough to avoid this tactic, but it’s not out of the question that it will become reality at some point. You would think that this is where ad blockers will throw a white flag, but not necessarily. It will require a completely new approach, though — ironically, involving the use of AI as well. Ad blockers will have to move from understanding code to understanding meaning. Even as far back as three years ago we wrote about possible ways of dealing with this issue, so ad blocker developers keep their finger on the pulse: this may become a real threat sooner than you might think.

But AI is not a net negative for ad blocking. Far from it, in fact: the use of AI in content filtering was one of the main topics of last year’s Ad-Filtering Dev Summit. The devs discussed how AI can be recruited to automate blocking cookie popups, how it can help with quality assurance, and even how AI can assist in actual identification and blocking of the ads. Maxim Topciu, Browser Extensions Team Lead at AdGuard, created and showcased several working prototypes that used different methods to distinguish the ad content on the page and block it. It is absolutely clear that AI will remain one of the main points of discussion at the next Summit, and, to be honest, probably at every Summit going forward.

It is impossible to fit 17 years of web threats into one blog article, even if you stretch it a bit, and it wasn’t the goal anyway. The goal was to demonstrate how different the challenges were that the ad blockers had to face over time, how it wasn’t straightforward at all to bring you the best tools for protection against ads and trackers, but how we tried our very best at every point in time. We hope that you were happy with AdGuard no matter how long you’ve been using it, whether it’s just a year, or maybe five, or, who knows, all seventeen.

We can’t wait to see what the next seventeen years will bring! One thing will remain certain: we will continue doing whatever it takes to keep up with any threats of the future and to protect you.

LayerX researchers analyzed privacy policies of 6,666 extensions. Using a combination of AI classification and manual review, they identified at least 82 extensions whose policies explicitly allow user data to be sold, shared, licensed, or commercially transferred to third parties. Of them 75 were still listed in the Chrome Web Store at the time of the research which came out in April 2026.

Many extensions disclose the fact that they may sell or “share” users’ data in somewhat vague language hidden deep inside privacy policies. Some of the wordings include:

“We may sell or share your personal information with third parties.”

“This information may be sold to or shared with business partners.”

That little word “may” does a lot of heavy lifting.

Some extensions openly state that they collect browsing activity, behavioral profiles, streaming history, demographic information, and inferred interests for “analytics,” “marketing,” or “commercial purposes.”

Others go a different route. According to the researchers, the majority of extensions in the Chrome Web Store do not publish any privacy policy at all — which may be an even bigger red flag. According to LayerX’s earlier report, around 71% of Chrome extensions do not publish a privacy policy whatsoever. Under Google's Chrome Web Store policies, extensions that handle user data are required to publish a privacy policy. While some of these extensions may genuinely not process user data, most likely do since many popular extension categories inherently rely on access to browsing activity or webpage content to just work.

If an extension developer did not even bother publishing a privacy policy despite Chrome Web Store rules, there is little reason to expect they will suddenly become careful or transparent when it comes to handling your information. Realistically, such extensions are far more likely to collect, share, or monetize user data than the ones openly admitting they do it.

This all may sound abstract until you remember how valuable behavioral data has become. We have already covered how seemingly harmless commercial datasets increasingly fuel surveillance industries, profiling systems, and even law enforcement investigations through data brokers and location intelligence firms. What starts as “analytics” can eventually end up inside giant behavioral databases far removed from the original purpose users thought they signed up for.

Ad-blocking extensions that ‘sell’ your data

Among the most ironic findings in the report were ad blockers. Researchers identified multiple ad-blocking extensions whose privacy policies explicitly allow user data collection and sharing with third parties. Combined, these extensions reportedly reach more than 5.5 million users.

Some examples highlighted in the report include:

• Stands AdBlocker (3 million users)
• Poper Blocker (2 million users)
• All Block — ad blocker for YouTube (500,000 users)
• TwiBlocker (80,000 users)
• Urban AdBlocker (10,000 users)

According to LayerX, some of these extensions disclose collecting browsing activity, behavioral profiles, ad interaction data, and even inferred sensitive interests derived from visited URLs.

To be clear: these are not mainstream privacy-focused tools like AdGuard, uBlock Origin, or Ghostery. But they still have massive audiences numbering in the millions. And this is likely only the visible tip of the iceberg. In fact, the problem is far from new. More than five years ago, we identified dozens of fake ad blockers that amassed millions of installs while engaging in deceptive behavior, ranging from collecting user data to injecting ads and tracking scripts into web pages.

That is why transparency should be one of the first things users evaluate before installing any browser extension. AdGuard Browser Extension can serve as an example of what users should look for. In the AdGuard AdBlocker Chrome Web Store listing, it is clearly stated whether user data is collected, shared, or sold, alongside additional disclosures about how that data is handled. And for users who want to dig deeper, the full AdGuard Privacy Policy is publicly available and linked directly from the listing itself.

Netflix, streaming extensions, and the data economy behind entertainment

The report also uncovered a network of streaming-related browser extensions operating across Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and other major platforms. The extensions were all linked to a single publisher network operating under the “dogooodapp” brand and registered through HideApp LLC in Wyoming.

Some of the largest extensions included:

• Custom Profile Picture for Netflix (200K users)
• Hulu Ad Skipper (100K users)
• Netflix Picture in Picture (100K users)
• Ad Skipper for Prime Video (60K users)
• Netflix Extended (60K users)

According to the researchers, the associated privacy policies disclose collecting viewing history, content preferences, streaming behavior, subscription information, demographics, and engagement patterns. This data can later be shared or sold to advertisers, analytics firms, and media research companies.

And that is where the irony becomes hard to ignore. Many of these extensions exist around platforms that are themselves rapidly turning into advertising ecosystems. Netflix has been aggressively expanding ad-supported tiers while making premium ad-free plans more expensive. Amazon Prime Video automatically introduced ads for users who are not willing to pay to remove them. Across the industry, streaming platforms are increasingly betting on advertising growth and behavioral profiling rather than subscriptions alone.

And then there are the screens carrying all that entertainment: smart TVs, where most streaming happens anyway, and which have long since cemented themselves as some of the most aggressive players in the data-harvesting and ad-targeting economy. As we recently wrote on the blog while covering smart TVs inserting ads over HDMI inputs and gameplay, TV vendors are no longer just monetizing apps and home screens — they are steadily moving toward monetizing the viewing experience itself.

These extensions are effectively piggybacking on the exact same ecosystem — harvesting data around what people watch, click, skip, and engage with because that information has become far more valuable to advertisers and analytics companies than the hardware or subscriptions themselves.

Why this matters

It might be tempting to see browser extension tracking as harmless compared to malware or outright theft of your credentials like a password or a PIN. The thing is, modern data collection is just one piece of a much larger surveillance puzzle.

The data collected through seemingly harmless analytics can have real-world consequences. It can lead to higher insurance premiums, make it easier for companies to charge different people different prices for the same products, and expose users to increasingly aggressive ads and scams tailored to their interests. Browser extensions may not know your exact physical location the way mobile apps do, but they can still collect enormous amounts of behavioral data. This includes browsing history, search queries, shopping activity, streaming habits, clicked links, opened tabs, interests inferred from visited websites, and sometimes even the contents of pages you interact with.

On their own, these datasets may seem relatively mundane. But once enriched with information from advertisers, data brokers and public records, they can become surprisingly revealing — exposing financial situation, political affiliation, health concerns, the list goes on.

We recently wrote about how commercial location and advertising ecosystems increasingly enable this kind of large-scale profiling and surveillance, and how the modern ad-tech industry effectively operates as a real-time data broadcasting system where user information is constantly shared, traded, and analyzed behind the scenes.

And unlike a hacked password, behavioral profiles cannot simply be changed once exposed.

What to do before installing browser extensions

No extension is automatically trustworthy simply because it appears in an official browser store. Browser extensions also often require extremely broad permissions, including the ability to read and modify data on every page you visit. That does not automatically mean this kind of extension is about to steal your data, though. Some categories of extensions legitimately require broad access to function. Ad blockers, for example, need permission to read and modify webpage content in order to remove ads, block trackers, and filter malicious scripts before they load.

Before installing an extension, it’s worth running through a quick checklist:

• Read the privacy policy for red flags, especially phrases like:

  • “may share”
  • “business partners”
  • “analytics purposes”
  • “commercial purposes”
  • “affiliates and third parties”

• Be wary of extensions with no privacy policy at all

• Check who developed the extension

• Look at install counts, but remember they can be artificially inflated

• Read reviews critically: fake reviews are common and a large number of similar-sounding positive reviews should be considered a red flag

• Avoid installing unnecessary extensions entirely

• Go for well-established open-source privacy tools when possible

Interestingly, the report also highlighted a few extensions that openly compensate users for voluntary data sharing. At least there the arrangement is transparent: users knowingly trade data for money. The bigger problem is the far larger ecosystem quietly collecting and monetizing user behavior behind deliberately vague legal language most people never read. And ultimately, an ad blocker that profits from selling browsing data back into the advertising ecosystem is not really fighting ads. It is simply feeding a different part of the advertising system.

A more comfortable interface

We polished the interface, gave the app a fresh look with new colors, and improved the overall experience to make everything feel cleaner and more intuitive.

We also simplified navigation by removing swipe animations and replacing them with visible action buttons. Less hidden functionality, fewer accidental gestures, and quicker access to the actions you actually need.

Keeping AdGuard Mail up to date is now much easier

Starting with v1.5, the app can notify you whenever a new version is available. Once you see the update prompt, simply click it to begin the update process directly from the interface.

What if you’re already using the latest version? Then nothing changes — which means users updating to v1.5 won’t notice this feature just yet.

Temp mail takes the spotlight

We’re gradually shifting more focus toward temporary email addresses, and the app’s main screen now reflects that. From now on, the default screen opens with Temp mail instead of Aliases.

Aliases are still very much part of AdGuard Mail and, to make sure they remain easy to find, the new home screen includes a reminder that your aliases are still there whenever you need them.

Tell us what you think

Your feedback plays a huge role in improving AdGuard Mail, and we’d love to hear what you think about the new release. If you have suggestions, ideas, bug reports, or just want to share your experience, send us your feedback via the
AdGuard Mail form.

Upd. This promotion is over. If you didn’t get a chance to buy AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN or AdGuard DNS at a discount, don’t worry — we often run other promotions. Not to miss the next one, subscribe to our newsletter — we’ll keep you in the loop!

Long, long ago, when the Internet was a very different place — full of Flash animations and clumsy ad algorithms, with no Instagram and no mobile-first everything — AdGuard was born. Hard to believe, but that was 17 years ago!

AdGuard then and AdGuard now are worlds apart. But some things have stayed with us from the start: we believe in the cleaner Internet and better privacy for everyone. And yes, no AdGuard birthday is complete without discounts.

This time, we’ve prepared discounts for:

🎂 AdGuard Ad Blocker: 50% off 1-year licenses and 45% off lifetime ones
🎂 AdGuard VPN: 83% off 2-year subscriptions
🎂 AdGuard DNS: 60% off Personal and Team yearly plans

Mark AdGuard’s birthday by removing annoying ads, protecting your traffic from third parties, and blocking unwanted DNS requests. Extend or upgrade your current subscriptions and licenses — or get new ones for yourself or as a gift. Either way, we’ll be happy to have you celebrate with us.

To celebrate our 17th anniversary, we’ve put together the most honest collection of exactly those features. From the ones that are always front and center to those buried deep in settings. This includes our developers’ favorites and the features users most often rave about in social media comments and forums.

Get comfortable — we’re sharing our most beloved and useful picks.

Smart routes for your traffic

You’re the kind of person who takes their privacy seriously — VPN always on, no exceptions. Until some app decides it simply won’t cooperate with it, and on occasion some other one won’t work without it. So there you are, toggling VPN on and off like it’s your part-time job, slowly losing your mind.

These features will free you from that headache forever.

1. Exclusions in AdGuard VPN

When we asked the team which feature they love most, several people immediately named this one. In Exclusions, you can configure which apps and websites open directly and which work through the VPN. Traffic splits on its own, without your involvement — meaning no more finger gymnastics constantly toggling VPN on and off.

2. Saved locations in AdGuard VPN

AdGuard’s Head of Product admits that at first, Saved Locations seemed like just a nice bonus. There weren’t many servers, and who really jumps between countries every day? But gradually the use cases piled up: checking a banking site from abroad, watching football, paying for a subscription in the right currency. “At some point I caught myself always connecting to the same countries,” he says. “Now I open the tray menu and everything I need is right there in one click.” A small thing that saves real minutes.

3. Allowlist in AdGuard Ad Blocker

The Extensions team lead calls this feature simple but very useful. The Allowlist resolves a dilemma familiar to everyone: you like a website, you want to support its creators by seeing their ads, but turning off protection entirely is like going out in the rain without an umbrella. With the Allowlist you simply add the site to your blocker’s exceptions. One click — and filtering is disabled for that site, while the rest of the internet stays protected.

4. Inverted Allowlist in AdGuard Ad Blocker

Wait, haven’t we seen this one already? Not quite — here we’re talking about the inverted Allowlist. This feature was born from user feedback, since users play a decisive role in which features make it into AdGuard. It’s a mode where AdGuard takes a break on all sites except the ones you’ve added to the list yourself. Say you know a couple of particularly spam-heavy resources: you add them — and protection works precisely on those, leaving everything else untouched. A gem for those who don’t want total blocking but are tired of screaming banners in a few specific places.

Perfect order on the page

You open a favorite website — and there’s a banner taking up half the screen. Or an empty block left over because the blocker cut out the ad but forgot about the container itself. The screen looks like someone took a bite out of it. The next features bring perfect polish to your pages.

5. Custom filtering rules

For those who want to build their own protection system, there are custom filtering rules. Our CTO describes them philosophically: “The whole rules story is complicated, but very flexible.” Essentially, you take control of content into your own hands. You can create rules that will let some page elements load just fine while cutting others off before they even arrive. This is the choice of advanced users for whom standard filters aren’t enough, and who want to tune the internet down to the millimeter.

6. Block element on page

If hardcore scripts aren’t your thing, but you really want to remove that annoying banner and that other floating strip from your screen, a new hero steps in. Blocking elements on pages is one of the features in the AdGuard Assistant and a crowd favorite that gets praised frequently. You simply click Block ads on this website,” click on whatever is bothering you — and it disappears. Forever. Perfectionists call this their favorite feature, and we get it: the page becomes clean as an airbrushed magazine cover, and all without writing a single line of code.

7. Disable protection for 30 seconds

The favorite feature of our Editor-in-Chief. Sometimes a site breaks because of a poorly integrated script (and applying filtering to such elements may make things even worse), or you urgently need to see a page in its “original,” if spammy, form. Rather than fetching up the UI every time you want to turn the protection off and risk forgetting to turn it back on later, you simply pause protection for a short moment. Exactly thirty seconds later, AdGuard will silently return to its duties.

Full control under the hood (level: geek)

On milestone anniversaries like this, you think not only of the headline features but also of those that have quietly been working somewhere in the background all along, deep under the hood.

8. Userscripts

For geeks who always find the browser’s capabilities lacking, we have userscripts. AdGuard for Android and desktop can work as a full-featured script manager. This means you can expand website functionality directly through the blocker — add new buttons, redesign interfaces, and feel like a bit of a wizard. This topic periodically explodes in Reddit discussions, and for good reason.

9. Filtering log

One of the PR team lead’s favorites. Here’s how she describes her feelings: “You can watch in real time which trackers are knocking on your door and from where. You open a page and see the requests and blocks flying... All from one tiny little page!” The sight is mesmerizing and gives you a complete picture of what's happening.

10. Access to services on your terms with AdGuard Home

The Go team lead names one of his favorite scenarios: blocking services like YouTube, Reddit, and other social networks (including on a set schedule, only during certain hours). This helps you stay focused and eliminate distractions during work time.

11. Traffic control across all devices with AdGuard Home

Another favorite from the same colleague: the ability to monitor and control what’s actually happening on your devices — “to understand what [censored] is reaching out to what and block all of that stuff,” to give the exact quote.

12. TrustTunnel

The tool our CTO launches every day. TrustTunnel is our open-source client for custom connections. When a regular VPN isn’t enough — when you want not just to pick a server from a list but to build the entire route yourself — TrustTunnel gives you complete freedom. The CTO says: “I use it almost more than a regular VPN.” And these aren’t just empty words — for those who value independence online, this tool quickly becomes their primary one.

13. Connection log in TrustTunnel

Where does your traffic actually go? Connection log will tell you. The mobile development team lead explains: “This option is very helpful for analyzing where traffic went, so you can quickly add the necessary IPs to exceptions.” Essentially, you get an X-ray of your own connection.

Security, cleanliness, and quiet

These features work on the “set it and forget it” principle. Like superheroes fighting ads and tracking, bringing order to the internet while you sleep. The Extensions team lead calls this very philosophy the coolest part when talking about AdGuard Ad Blocker: “It works by itself, until one day you accidentally turn it off — and suddenly you see just how much advertising actually exists in the world.”

14. AdGuard Mail and Temp Mail integration

It’s not entirely fair to list a whole product as one of the top features, but we simply have to tell you about this one. While traffic flows along all the right routes, somewhere on the surface your personal inbox keeps filling up with spam. Every one-time site registration, every online store with a suspicious order form — and hello, a hundred unwanted emails.

For this we have AdGuard Mail with Temp Mail integration. Here’s how our content manager describes her experience: “I don’t even give my real address to anyone anymore. I get all the promo codes and newsletters on my temp address with a silly name (thanks to the devs for having a sense of humor!).”

You can also set up email relays to forward messages to your private address. This way, your main mailbox stays safe and practically gleams with cleanliness.

15. Tracking protection in AdGuard Ad Blocker

Privacy advocates particularly love this feature. The anti-tracking module doesn’t just remove ads — it strips UTM tags from links, hides your search queries, masks your IP address, and prevents sites from building your digital profile.

16. Phishing protection

The feature you completely forget about until it kicks in at the most unexpected moment. You click on an ordinary, unremarkable link, and in a fraction of a second AdGuard checks the site against its database. If the site is masquerading as a bank page or online store to steal your data, you’ll see a warning. Phishing protection is the feature you don’t think about — until it saves you from a fraudulent site.

17. Ad blocking inside apps and games

Mobile gamers feel the benefit of this feature most vividly. Anyone who has ever launched a free game knows: the ads don’t ask for permission. They burst in between levels, pop up over the interface, and steal precious seconds. In-app ad blocking is the feature for which our developers receive the warmest thanks from the gaming community.

A word from the author instead of a conclusion

As for me? I, as an SMM manager, value TrustTunnel and Exclusions in AdGuard VPN most of all. I spend a lot of time posting and replying on various social media platforms, and I wouldn’t want to get caught there with VPN protection off. But I also don’t want to toggle the protection every time I need to check my banking app or if I feel like watching an episode of my favorite show on a streaming platform, so Exclusions are a lifesaver. And the speed of TrustTunnel — have you seen it? Everything flies so fast that it’s easy to get addicted!

Of course, there are other favorites — Custom filters in AdGuard Ad Blocker, for instance. A while back I did a series of posts where I showed subscribers how to create their own rules and implement them in the app without deep coding knowledge. Honestly, I really struggled with it at the time — but that’s exactly why I came to love this feature. It taught me so much!

Thank you for staying with us all these 17 years. The internet keeps changing (and not always for the better), but we promise to keep clearing away the digital noise for you. Happy birthday, AdGuard!

As frustrating as it sounds, this is increasingly becoming the reality of modern high-end smart TVs.

What happened

That exact scenario recently played out for the owner of an LG OLED TV who shared a screenshot on Reddit showing a promotional banner appearing in the bottom-left corner of the screen during a PlayStation 5 startup sequence. The ad, promoting “pizza and movie-night favorites,” appeared directly over the console feed delivered through HDMI rather than within LG’s own smart TV interface. According to the user, the banner only started appearing after a recent firmware update.

The incident also does not appear to be isolated. Around the same time, another LG OLED owner posted on Reddit complaining about “pop up Instacart ordering ads” appearing on their $1,500 TV while using a PS5. The user explained that they had already gone through the settings and disabled advertising features when they first bought the TV, only for the ads to seemingly return later anyway.

“I had to dig in settings to turn it off, at least I thought I did, but I turned my TV on, booted up my PS5 and another popped up. Buy a flagship TV and I get fed ads. Unreal. Not buying LG again, and if every other manufacturer is doing this then I just won't buy a TV. I'm heated.”

Another commenter in the same thread described a nearly identical experience, saying they had disabled all ads as soon as they purchased the TV, only to later encounter another promotional overlay while using their console:

“Yesterday I turned it on along with my PS5, and had some sort of ad pop up on the bottom of the screen… Pissed me off immensely.”

Why it feels especially unfair

What makes this different from the usual smart TV clutter is where the ad appears. This is not an ad inside Netflix, YouTube, or LG’s home screen. It is being overlaid on top of content coming from an external device the user already paid for.

We have already been conditioned to tolerate ads and recommendations inside streaming apps and smart TV menus, but advertising layered over a console input arguably feels significantly more invasive. At that point you are no longer interacting with LG’s platform or a streaming service, you are simply using your PlayStation. That is precisely what makes the whole thing feel so intrusive, and a little depressing.

Another particularly frustrating aspect is that these changes apparently arrived through a firmware update, meaning owners did not originally buy the TV in this state. They purchased one product, and over time software updates quietly transformed it — or rather degraded it — into something else entirely. A premium TV is no longer behaving like a static product that fully belongs to the person who bought it, but increasingly like a remotely controlled advertising platform whose behavior, features, and level of intrusiveness can be altered at the manufacturer’s discretion long after the purchase has already been made.

Crossing the line

The problem is not simply that ads exist on smart TVs. That battle was largely lost years ago. Home screens filled with sponsored content, autoplay trailers, recommendations, and streaming promotions have already become a staple across most major TV platforms. The problem is that manufacturers are no longer limiting advertising to their own software ecosystems.

Displaying ads over HDMI inputs fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the device. If someone is using a PlayStation, Xbox, Apple TV, Blu-ray player, or PC, the TV is supposed to function as a display, not as an active advertising layer sitting between the user and their own hardware. At least that is what still intuitively feels right, even if the boundaries of what is considered “acceptable” on smart TVs have been steadily eroding for years.

But in many ways, we saw it coming. A few years back, we wrote about Roku filing a patent describing technology that would display ads over devices connected through HDMI inputs, including game consoles, streaming boxes, and media players. The system outlined in the patent would essentially allow the TV to detect pauses or certain moments during external content playback and temporarily inject advertisements directly onto the screen, even if the user was not interacting with Roku’s own software ecosystem at all. At the time, many people dismissed it as just another speculative patent filing, but it reflected a much broader direction the smart TV industry has been moving toward for years: treating every possible surface, including HDMI inputs traditionally considered “safe” from platform interference, as monetizable advertising space. What is now happening on LG TVs shows that this future is no longer hypothetical.

LG being one of the pioneers of turning TVs into ad platforms

This did not happen overnight. LG has been steadily expanding advertising and viewer monetization across its smart TV ecosystem for years.

Back in 2021, it was reported that LG OLED TVs had started autoplaying video ads with sound inside the company’s app store while users were simply updating applications. At the time, the experience was dubbed as surprisingly aggressive even by smart TV standards.

In 2024, reports emerged that some LG TVs had started displaying ads during idle screensaver mode. More recently, LG went even further by integrating AI-driven advertising technology capable of analyzing viewer behavior and emotional engagement in order to personalize ads. The idea that a television is not only tracking what people watch, but also attempting to infer how they emotionally respond to content in order to serve more effective advertising, pushes smart TVs into territory that feels less like consumer electronics and more like invasive surveillance infrastructure embedded directly into the living room.

LG’s forays into the ad industry are indicative of a much larger industry shift that has been happening over the past decade. Television manufacturers increasingly stopped treating smart TV software as a secondary feature and started treating it as a long-term advertising business. Roku became one of the clearest examples of this transition, openly positioning itself as an advertising company built around television engagement data. Samsung, Vizio, Amazon, Google TV, and LG all followed similar paths.

Regardless of what these companies say, the real long-term value for them increasingly comes from collecting behavioral data, serving ads, tracking engagement, and monetizing viewers long after the TV leaves the store. Some manufacturers are no longer even trying to hide this shift. In 2023, a company named Telly began offering consumers “free” 55-inch 4K TVs built entirely around constant advertising and data collection, with a second built-in display permanently dedicated to news tickers, sponsored content, and ads. At least in that case the tradeoff is explicit from the beginning. At the same time, you might still subconsciously expect premium products to remain somewhat exempt from these practices. While aggressive monetization on cheap budget hardware may seem fair, hardly anyone expects a flagship OLED TV costing well over $1,000 to behave like a digital billboard that increasingly turns into an ad vending machine after purchase.

What powers smart TV ads

The reason smart TVs can do this at all comes down to the amount of data they collect about users and their viewing habits. Modern smart TVs rely heavily on a technology called Automatic Content Recognition, or ACR. This system allows televisions to identify and analyze content playing on the screen regardless of where it comes from: streaming apps, cable boxes, live TV, media players, and even devices connected through HDMI.

According to LG’s own privacy policy, the company may collect:

• Information about viewed channels and programs
• Streaming services and apps used
• Viewing duration
• Playback actions such as play, pause, stop, and clicks
• Input methods, including HDMI devices
• Information related to gaming consoles and media players
• Ad exposure data
• Subscription activations and cancellations
• Voice command interactions
• Device identifiers and behavioral analytics

LG explicitly states that its ACR technology can identify content “regardless of the source,” including gaming consoles, set-top boxes, and external media devices connected through HDMI.

Its advertising business, LG Ad Solutions, openly markets this capability to advertisers. The company promotes targeting based on gaming behavior, app usage, viewing habits, streaming preferences, subscription activity, and even exposure to specific ads.

Among the targeting categories promoted by LG are:

• Gamers using specific consoles and gaming platforms
• Viewers of particular streaming services and genres
• Users exposed to competitor advertisements
• Heavy or light TV viewers
• Subscription activations and cancellations
• Regional and location-based targeting

LG describes this information as “deterministic viewership data” collected “at the glass level.”

All in all, this incessant collection of granular data is what makes modern smart TVs fundamentally different from older televisions. They are not passive displays anymore. They are connected analytics platforms constantly collecting behavioral data to optimize advertising, recommendations, and viewer targeting.

How to get rid of smart TV ads

The most effective way to limit smart TV ads, tracking, and unwanted promotions is to disconnect the TV from the internet entirely and use it purely as a display paired with external devices like Apple TV, Chromecast, gaming consoles, or streaming boxes. Without internet access, the TV loses much of its ability to download new advertising modules, fetch promotional content, transmit analytics, and silently introduce additional features through firmware updates. Of course, this is also a massive tradeoff and in many ways defeats the entire purpose of buying a “smart” TV in the first place.

If you want to keep your TVs connected, you can still try disabling some of LG’s advertising and recommendation features manually. On LG TVs, this can usually be done by opening the Settings menu, navigating to General > System > Additional Settings > Home Settings, and turning off options like “Home Promotion” and “Content Recommendations.” The problem is that firmware updates have repeatedly been accused of re-enabling promotional systems or quietly introducing new advertising behavior later on. It’s worth noting that even with ACR disabled, your smart TV will still be able to collect some data about you, potentially including information about your location and the apps that you use.

Another option is blocking ads and trackers at the network level by changing the TV’s DNS server. Since LG TVs run WebOS, users cannot simply install traditional ad-blocking apps or browser extensions directly onto the device, which makes DNS filtering one of the few practical ways to limit ads on TV. DNS filtering works by stopping the TV from connecting to known advertising, analytics, telemetry, and tracking domains in the first place.

However, it is not a perfect fix. Some ads and promotional elements may already be built directly into the TV’s software and can still appear even without contacting external servers. DNS filtering also cannot block ads delivered through the same domains as legitimate TV services or apps, since blocking those domains entirely would also break the services themselves.

Services like AdGuard DNS let users apply this kind of filtering simply by changing the TV’s DNS server. Users who want more control can also use Private AdGuard DNS or tools like AdGuard Home or Pi-hole to set up their own private DNS server with customizable filtering, analytics, blocklists, and rules tailored specifically for smart TVs and other connected devices.

AdGuard Mini has always worked quietly in the background — and that’s exactly how it should be. But in v2.2, we’re giving you a way to check in on all that invisible work. Meet the new statistics stories.

New statistics stories

AdGuard Mini now includes two statistics stories in the menu bar popup — one for blocked ads, one for trackers. Check the exact count since you first launched the app.

AdGuard Mini now shows the number of blocked elements directly on the icon in Safari. Click the icon to see a full breakdown of blocked ads and trackers for the current page.

The count resets each time you open a new page. If you’d prefer to hide it, click the AdGuard Mini icon → gear icon → Settings and toggle off Indicate the number of blocked ads on the AdGuard Mini icon in Safari.

Share your feedback

Have a suggestion or spotted a bug? Let us know on GitHub or through our social media channels. Your feedback helps us make AdGuard Mini better with every update.

Filtering: Faster, stronger, better

Custom filters in MV3 can now update independently from extension updates again, so ad blocking stays accurate and responds to changes more quickly.

We’ve also fixed several issues where filters could be added but wouldn’t work properly. For example, the extension now validates sources when you add a custom filter by URL — this prevents situations where a filter appears in your list but doesn’t actually apply.

Beyond filter improvements, we’ve refined Allowlist: if you add a full page URL to your exclusions (say, copied straight from the address bar), the extension will automatically extract the domain, and the exclusion will work as expected.

Settings import: Show, don’t tell

You can now share your extension settings. This makes it easy to set up AdGuard on a new device or after reinstalling your browser. You can also help a friend configure their extension, or share your setup with the support team — they'll see your exact settings instantly. Just go to General and click Share settings.

If you’re an active GitHub user, you can now import settings directly from Issues — especially useful for filter developers and those helping test fixes.

Interface: Better prompted than puzzled

We’ve added a few small improvements to prevent confusion and make the extension behave more predictably.

• Warning for Opera users. Opera doesn’t grant extensions access to search engine pages by default, which prevents AdGuard from blocking ads in search results. The extension popup now shows a notice prompting you to allow this access. Click Go to Settings in the popup — you’ll be redirected to the extension settings in Opera, where you can turn on the Allow access to search page results toggle.

• Confirmation for Invert Allowlist. The Invert Allowlist feature reverses how the extension works: blocking is disabled everywhere except sites on the list. To prevent accidental activation, we’ve added a confirmation dialog that explains what will happen when you enable it.

More sharing: This time, your thoughts

Enjoying the update? Have ideas for what’s next? Share your feedback on our social channels or start a conversation on GitHub. Every comment helps us improve.

Although Location History is technically off by default, Google repeatedly prompts users to turn it on across Android setup screens and apps like Maps, Photos, and Assistant. Once enabled, it keeps collecting location data in the background, even when you are not actively using Google services. Over time, it builds an extremely detailed timeline of your movements, routines, and habits.

That timeline can reveal far more than many people realize: where you sleep, where you work, which clinics you visit, which bars you frequent, when you attend religious services, therapy appointments, or someone else’s apartment at 11 p.m.

Most users would probably consider that information deeply private. The US government, however, is now arguing otherwise. And that argument sits at the center of a major Supreme Court case that could reshape digital privacy in America

The case that can change how location data is seen

The case revolves around Okello Chatrie, who was seen on surveillance footage speaking on his cellphone while robbing the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on May 20, 2019. According to investigators, Chatrie entered the bank armed, threatened employees, and escaped with roughly $195,000 in cash.

Police had few leads, but they noticed him talking on the phone during the robbery. That detail led investigators to request a geofence warrant from Google. A geofence warrant is a type of warrant that forces the company to hand over location data for every device detected within a certain area during a certain timeframe. In this case, authorities requested data for all devices within roughly 150 meters of the bank during the robbery window. Privacy advocates supporting Chatrie later compared the search area to several football fields laid side by side — large enough to sweep in nearby homes, businesses, and even a church, not just the bank itself.

Google then searched through its Location History database and returned anonymized data tied to devices that had been inside the area. Investigators initially received information linked to 19 devices. From there, without obtaining additional warrants, police requested additional location history for selected devices over a longer time window to study their movements before and after the robbery. Eventually, authorities asked Google to fully de-anonymize three accounts.

One of them belonged to Okello Chatrie. Investigators later searched his home and reportedly found around $173,000 in cash, along with firearms and clothing connected to the robbery. The location data ultimately became one of the key pieces of evidence used in the case against him.

As of 2026, the case — Chatrie v. United States — is being debated at the US Supreme Court, which will decide whether these kinds of geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches.

Private or not?

The US government’s position is essentially this: users voluntarily enabled Location History, voluntarily shared that data with Google, and therefore cannot expect it to stay private. Prosecutors also argue that location data reflects movements people made in public spaces anyway, so collecting those records is not the same as rummaging through someone’s house or personal diary. Privacy advocates and Chatrie’s legal team strongly disagree with that framing.

For starters, while Location History is technically optional, Google has spent years aggressively nudging users to enable it. During Android setup, inside Google Maps, Photos, Assistant, and other apps, users are repeatedly encouraged to turn it on in order to “improve” their experience or unlock certain features. Once enabled, the setting quietly expands across devices and services, continuously collecting location data in the background. Turning it back off is possible, but Google hardly makes that process obvious. Internal company messages cited in court filings even described parts of the interface as feeling designed to discourage people from figuring out how to fully disable tracking.

And then there is the bigger issue: just because something technically happens “in public” does not mean people expect the government and less so a private company like Google to build searchable historical records of it.

You may walk into a pharmacy in public. You may visit a therapist’s office, a casino, or someone else’s apartment building in public. That does not mean most people expect every one of those visits to be logged, stored for years, and later searchable by police through a giant corporate database.

For its part, Chatrie’s legal team argues that Location History is far more revealing than ordinary business records that the government compares it to. Over time, it can expose routines, relationships, political activities, medical concerns, religious beliefs, and countless other deeply personal details. And despite Google initially providing anonymized device IDs, privacy advocates argue that location data is notoriously easy to re-identify. A few location points are often enough to determine where someone lives, where they work, and ultimately who they are.

That concern is not theoretical. Court filings in the case note that Google itself has the ability to de-anonymize users internally. Researchers and privacy experts have also repeatedly demonstrated how supposedly anonymous location datasets can be linked back to real individuals using publicly available information.

In other words, the government is effectively arguing that one of the most sensitive forms of personal data people generate today should receive weaker constitutional protections simply because it happens to sit on Google’s servers instead of inside a filing cabinet at home.

Why it raises privacy concerns

Now let’s zoom out a bit and look at why geofence warrants worry privacy advocates far beyond this one robbery case.

The Fourth Amendment was written specifically to protect people against broad, suspicionless government searches. It states that warrants must be based on probable cause and must particularly describe the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In simple terms, the government is supposed to know who or what it is looking for before it starts digging through private information.

Traditionally, investigators identified a suspect first and then sought permission to search that person’s property or records. Geofence warrants turned that logic entirely upside down. Police now first collect data on everyone present within a digital perimeter and only afterward narrow down potential suspects. In practice, these warrants quietly pull innocent people into investigations simply because their devices happened to be nearby. Residents, employees, customers, commuters, delivery workers, and passersby can all end up inside a law enforcement dragnet without ever knowing it.

And while authorities often describe the process as anonymous, location data is rarely anonymous in any meaningful sense. Movement patterns are deeply personal by nature. A few location points can often expose where someone lives, where they work, who they spend time with, and what places they regularly visit.

We already explored how revealing mobile location data can become in our article on Webloc and the hidden market for location intelligence. The same kinds of datasets collected for advertising, analytics, and app features have quietly fueled an entire industry built around tracking people’s movements, profiling behavior, and selling location intelligence to private companies and government agencies alike. Geofence warrants effectively tap into that same ecosystem. If you want a deeper look at how valuable and invasive location data has become, that story is well worth reading.

Treating this kind of information as fair game simply because it was uploaded to a cloud service risks normalizing a surveillance model where authorities can retrospectively map the movements of entire groups of people whenever they choose. And once systems like that exist, history suggests they rarely remain limited for long.

What begins as a tool for investigating serious crimes can gradually expand into broader forms of monitoring, especially once governments grow accustomed to having access to massive pools of behavioral data collected by private companies.

Google moved location history on device, but problem is still here

Partially in response to the growing backlash around geofence warrants and mass location tracking, in December 2023, the company said it would begin moving Location History data from the cloud directly onto users’ devices, with the transition rolling out throughout 2024. By July 2025, large-scale geofence searches against Google’s centralized Location History database were effectively no longer possible in the same form, simply because Google no longer stored everyone’s movement history together on its own servers.

That was undeniably a good thing for privacy. But the bigger problem did not magically disappear together with Google’s old cloud-based database.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU, and other privacy groups warned in their Supreme Court filing supporting Chatrie, this case was never really just about Google. It is about the broader idea that companies can quietly accumulate enormous amounts of behavioral data on millions of people and that governments may later treat those databases as fair game for investigations.

Google is hardly the only company collecting location data. Countless apps, data brokers, advertising firms, telecom providers, and analytics companies still gather and monetize extremely detailed information about where people go and what they do. Entire industries now exist around buying, selling, analyzing, and sharing location intelligence.

That is exactly why this case matters so much even after Google changed its systems, and this is where the case stops being just about one robbery and starts becoming a much bigger fight over what “private” even means in the digital age.

What you can do

The uncomfortable reality is that modern smartphones are tracking machines by design. There is no magic switch that gives you every convenience feature without any privacy tradeoff.

That said, reducing how much location data gets collected in the first place still matters a lot.

If you do not actively use Google Maps Timeline or similar features, consider turning off Location History entirely and deleting old location records from your Google account. It is also worth reviewing which apps actually need constant access to your location and switching unnecessary permissions to “While Using the App” — or removing them altogether. In most cases, there is little reason to keep precise geolocation enabled all the time if you are not actively using navigation, maps, or location-based features at that moment. And more broadly, it is worth remembering that convenience features often quietly outlive the reasons you originally enabled them for.

The Supreme Court’s decision, expected later this summer, could end up affecting far more than just geofence warrants. The case may help decide how much privacy people actually have over sensitive digital data stored by companies like Google, and how easily governments can access it.

How AI helps Google detect ‘bad ads’

Google’s main claim in favor of an AI-based approach when evaluating an ad’s legitimacy is that it doesn’t base the enforcement decision purely on keywords, but rather can understand and analyze more complex signals like account age, behavioral cues, and campaign patterns. Bad actors often design their scam ads to mimic legitimate ones, and they take advantage of generative AI to quickly mass-produce different variants, so that some would eventually trick the old pattern matching-based enforcement systems.

Before AI, these older systems looked more like a checklist, checking whether an ad contains certain words, symbols, URL mismatches, formatting tricks, or policy-triggering product categories. Does the ad use banned wording? Does the landing page match the display URL? Does it contain suspicious formatting like F₹€€!? These checks are useful, but they are also fragile and much easier to circumvent by inventive word choices and other clever ploys. For example, something like ‘Lose 20 pounds in a week!’ would be rather easy to detect and flag even under the old system. But imagine a landing page full of false claims, fake testimonials, and hidden subscription terms — and it becomes much harder. No single element indicates a scam, so the checklist approach has a high chance of approving the ad. But an AI system that understands context has a better chance of marking the ad as ‘bad’ with a higher degree of certainty. A good analogy would be airport security marking an individual as suspicious not just based on the illegal items they have in their baggage (the old system), but instead because of their weird behavior, like using different names, only buying one-way tickets, or changing routes frequently.

Gemini takes all this context into account to determine the intent behind the ad and is (at least according to Google itself) very good at identifying scams — over 600 million ads associated with scams were removed and 4 million accounts were suspended for scam-related activity in 2025. Another thing going for Gemini is the ability to automatically process user feedback. According to Google, its teams were able to take action on four times as many user reports as in 2024 as a result of AI integration.

AI shift is happening in ad blocking

The clash between the old and the new approaches to detecting bad ads in Google’s ad ecosystem is not without similarities to ad blocking in general. Many years ago, blocking an ad was as simple as matching the server used to deliver the ad to a set list of ‘bad’ domains. Anything coming from adserver.example.com would get blocked, and that’s that. DNS filtering still works more or less in the same way: it is less flexible, but very efficient, lightweight, and system-wide. Today, ad blockers face entirely different, much harder challenges. Ads and other unwanted requests often blend in with the useful content. Modern filtering rules are nothing like the short, simple rules from the early days of ad blocking. They are extremely complex, and filtering syntax resembles a literal programming language more than anything else.

Ad blocking syntax has been constantly evolving to keep up with ever steeper challenges — so far, rather successfully. But the fact that the traditional, filtering rules-based approach hasn’t been replaced by AI so far doesn’t mean that ad blocker developers have dismissed the thought of using AI in ad blocking. On the contrary, they have been exploring AI’s potential in the context of blocking ads, and often in quite unexpected ways. Attempts to use various forms of machine learning (ML) for ad blocking go as far back as at least 2019, when Brave developed AdGraph, a tool that blocked ads and trackers in real time. It showed surprisingly high accuracy, but required deep browser integration and constant maintenance, so it didn’t take off in popularity. There were a few other experiments and research projects that tried to take advantage of ML, but none managed to achieve widespread adoption.

In recent years, with the rapid advancement of AI technologies, the idea of using AI for ad filtering has come up increasingly often. For instance, it was one of the main points of discussion at the last year’s Ad Filtering Dev Summit. At AFDS 2025, several speakers touched on the role of AI in the ad-blocking landscape in their presentations — Ritik Roongta from NYU spoke about how AI can help evaluate ad content, especially for allow-listed ads that may be non-intrusive but still harmful, and Anton Lazarev from Brave explained why ad blockers will stay highly relevant even in the era of AI agents and agentic browsers.

AdGuard’s experiment: Can an LLM spot an ad?

AdGuard has been exploring the same direction. Maxim Topciu, AdGuard’s Web Extensions division Team Lead, has conducted his own research to answer the question: can a blocker understand what appears on the page and decide whether it should be hidden? As we already mentioned, filter lists remain powerful but have limitations: they require manual maintenance, struggle with native advertising, and face additional constraints, like the ones introduced under Manifest V3. Wouldn’t it be great if an ad blocker could determine what is an ad and what is not all by itself? The idea itself wasn’t new, as is evident from the past attempts by Brave and others to achieve similar results, but Maxim went a bit further. One of the advantages of LLMs is that they can make it relatively quick to turn an idea into a working prototype. So Maxim created not one, but three of such prototypes, each analyzing and blocking ads in its own way.

Maxim tested the prototypes on X’s feed. One blurred all the posts, analyzed their content, and then unblurred the ‘good’ ones. The second prototype did the same, but analyzed each post as an image, not as a block of code. The third one allowed the user to set certain criteria, and the LLM would check if the post matched them before deciding whether to hide the post or not. All three approaches worked, but all had their own drawbacks — after all, they were prototypes and very far from being end products.

The experiment showed that AI-based ad blocking is technically possible, but at the same time it became apparent that AI is not yet ready to replace the traditional filter-based approach.

Google’s use of Gemini to identify ‘bad’ ads and AdGuard’s own experiment, despite all their differences and despite serving different purposes, are pointing in the same direction: ad filtering is becoming more semantic. AdGuard’s experiment showed that LLMs can classify content by meaning, not only by selectors or URLs. A vision-based approach can analyze what users actually see, which helps when text is minimal or HTML is obfuscated. The crux of the decision when blocking an ad gradually shifts from “Does this web element match a rule?” to “What is it trying to do? What was the intent behind it?” If you could reliably detect every ad, sponsored post, tracker, and scam by determining their intents, there would be no need for filtering rules. But, evidently, we are not there yet. LLM-based approaches are still largely limited by cost, speed, and practicality. It appears that, while the role of AI in ad blocking is going to grow, it is not going to realistically replace traditional ad blockers in the near future, but rather complement them where filtering rules alone struggle.

Platform safety is not the same as user control

But this is also where the comparison between Google and independent ad blockers ends. The fundamental difference between Google’s use of Gemini and ad blockers’ use of AI lies in their goals. Google uses AI to enforce its own ad policies, while ad blockers exist to enforce the user’s preferences. Currently, users set these preferences by selecting the desired filter lists or by adding custom filtering rules. But AdGuard’s experiment showed that it is entirely within the realm of possibility to introduce user-controlled criteria to a future AI-based ad blocker, too. This is different from Google’s algorithms that do, indeed, block or restrict malicious and dangerous ads — which deserves praise — but doing so also lines up with Google’s own interests. Users don’t have any say in what exactly gets blocked and what comes through. An ad doesn’t have to violate Google’s guidelines to be unwanted. There are plenty of reasons why someone wouldn’t want to see an ad: it may be distracting, privacy-invasive, heavy, or simply irrelevant to the viewer. This is where the roots of the conflict lie: Google’s only concern is whether an ad is allowed inside its ecosystem and follows its rules. From the user’s point of view, the question is broader: do I want this ad on my device?

The anti-scam work that Google does is necessary, but also expected: it is its direct responsibility. The Ads Safety Report should not be read as a final answer to the problem of bad ads. Blocking billions of ads is cool, but even more ads remain. These numbers really put into perspective just how much harmful or questionable material flows through the online ad ecosystem. And this is where the true reason behind Google’s efforts lies. Google is an ad company first and foremost. Its business model is not based on selling Android phones or anything like that — it is centered around the ad ecosystem it has built, and most of its other, numerous branches support it in one way or another. Google has shown time and again that protecting its advertising business weighs heavily in its product decisions. Its safety work is no exception: it is also a necessary concession to keep users within the Google ad ecosystem.

We are not trying to say that Google’s anti-scam efforts are meaningless — of course, it’s better to have no, or close to no, fraudulent and dangerous ads on your phone. It’s even better when you, the user, are the one who controls what else you want or don’t want there. Google’s Ads Safety Report demonstrated how efficient AI can be at identifying unwanted content. Now it’s ad blockers’ turn to find an even better use for this powerful weapon and make it serve a good cause.