In late December we posted a recap of 2018 from AdGuard's point of view. But the year didn't happen in a vacuum; we are all in this together — ad blocker developers, ad blocker users, and advertisers. So anything that happens in the "world of ad blocking" concerns both us and you, the users. Let's look back at the most noteworthy events in the industry, assess their impact, and try to make some predictions for the next year.
Last time I checked, the year was 2019, and it is hard to overestimate how important information is today. It is being collected, stored, purchased, sold and stolen. And the most valuable information is information about you: the person. Companies go out of their way in attempts to build extensive profiles about online users, and other companies pay them a pretty penny for these profiles.
You might have already heard about this. Google is going to change Chrome's extension platform. The proposed change in its current state will cripple or even effectively kill a lot of extensions, and it will significantly reduce the capabilities of ad blockers including AdGuard Chrome extension.
Privacy protection is basically what we do, so I never get tired of stories about how unpredictable the ways of getting Facebook user data are. Cambridge Analytica might be dead, but the business of stealing users’ data lives on, and this article demonstrates one more example of that.
Security expert Brian Krebs decided to figure out who is behind the famous CoinHive miner (CH) and how it appeared. It’s a fascinating story with colorful characters. But first, a brief reminder about what CoinHive is.
An important note. Our monthly digests don’t just observe posts from our blog. They also contain noteworthy industry highlights that have not been covered by the blog.
Facebook is generally one of the main stars of nowadays’ data drama. Its activities consistently raise questions about privacy, ad targeting, tracking, and blocking. But this March it has surpassed itself, losing billions of market value after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Mark Zuckerberg spoke to New York Times about the latest scandal around Facebook.
Several years ago an analytic company bought the information about 50 million Facebook users from an app developer. The company claims to have used this data for influencing political campaigns and presidential elections. You'll find the full coverage of the events in the second part of this article.