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The year 2017 was a tough one for privacy protection and ad blocking apps, but a good one for their users. But any paradox seen here is illusory.

It was back in 2016 that the ad and marketing industries acknowledged the impending crisis. Ad-blocking growth statistics created great concern for many advertisers and publishers. Extrapolations showed that in a year or two almost nobody would see ads. Advertisers got ready to sell their lives at a high price. That was the year that ad reinsertion startup companies like PageFair, Admiral, Sourcepoint, Secret Media propagated, offering technologies to push ads through ad blockers.

It also was the year when the Coalition for Better Ads emerged.

Zirconium, a group of 28 fake ad agencies, has been exposed by security researchers from Confiant. They built business relationships with 16 ad platforms and generated a billion impressions (ad views), showing among other things fake software update requests and all sorts of tech support scam.

Good news from browsers keeps coming. Mozilla has recently added opt-in tracking protection in the new version of Firefox Quantum. Previously the protection worked only in the Private Browsing mode, now it can be turned on in settings and be active all the time. Besides privacy protection, the option provides faster web experience, it takes less time for web pages to load without trackers.

Android is an awesome operating system that provides us developers with incredible capabilities. There are quite a few great apps and features Android users benefit from that are simply impossible to implement on other platforms.

Unfortunately, nothing comes free, and this wide array of capabilities is the main reason why Android is so vulnerable from privacy and security standpoints.

In our latest research, we decided to focus on the privacy issues. We took a look at the top 1000 Android apps to find out if they collect any sensitive personal data.

We are slowly getting back into the usual release rythm, and the honor of being the first AdGuard release of the year 2018 goes to Browser extension! The last bugfixes have been implemented and the new version has been uploaded to the stores.

Note: Safari store is traditionally on the slow side in terms of reviewing and approving extension updates, so it will take some time for the new version to get there. Other browsers' users can already download the fresh version.

Only 52% of US shoppers are ready to share their email address with an e-commerce website, the research by SAP Hybris shows. Just 53% of the French and 55% of Germans will comply with requests for email addresses, compared with 68% of respondents from India, 66% from Korea, 62% from Russia and 60% from Canada.

We have warned you about cryptojacking scripts on websites and in apps: they use your device to mine cryptocurrencies. We have warned you about malicious ads that are linked to all kinds of cyber threats.

And now guess what? correct: ads have been caught for stealth mining.

There are more than 1000 game apps in Google Play that include software for detecting TV ads. Once installed, an app uses a smartphone’s microphone to identify audio signals in TV ads and shows, even when the game is not played, and the phone lies still in the owner’s pocket.

Finally we are ready to announce the results of the New Year giveaway!

Hello everyone!

Last time we promised to make AdGuard for Mac releases more frequent, remember? We stand by our words! Today we present the next version, v1.5.3. As a trade-off, this release is not as feature-heavy as the last one, but there's still some cool stuff to check out.