Pi-hole

Eat unwanted online nasties by sending packets to the Pi-hole. David Rutland helps you protect your browsing data with the ultimate in a paranoid’s delight!

Adverts are a plague on the internet – although we’ll grant that in their current form, they’re less intrusive than in days A of yore. It’s easy to look back on the late 1990s and early 2000s web through the haze of rosetinted glasses and view it as a utopia of high-quality independent blogs, free websites for everyone, and an explosion of experimental design along with non-predatory social media.

Lay your spectacles aside for a moment and consider that most of what you recall is wrong.

The internet at the turn of the century was never a utopia. Yes, you could get a free site from GeoCities, but you can make a better one today with GitHub Pages. Visually, the web was horrific, and adverts were both gaudy and omnipresent. Pop-up ads and pop-under ads would obstruct your browsing and slow your computer to a crawl. Webmasters (as they were then known) would do anything to make a buck.

Google did a great deal to clean up the web and the advertising space in general. When was the last time your PC crashed due to an infinite stack of adverts appearing out of sight under your active window? Do you recall the whack-a-mole of fighting against endless cascade of pop-ups appearing in random locations, and hammering the big red X, only to discover that it was a trick, and you’ve actually launched a new wave of attacks?

That doesn’t happen any more, and it’s largely down to Google’s dominance in the advertising space.

Even without running any kind of ad blocker, your browsing experience is much more pleasant and less brazenly predatory than it was two and a half decades ago.

There are trade-offs, of course, and the biggest is privacy. While websites no longer assault your visual cortex with an epilepsy-inducing assault, they instead quietly note what you’re looking at. They measure how long you’re on a web page and how you interact with it. Fair enough, you may say. Website owners need to know which articles are doing well and what people like to read. They’d be shouting into the void otherwise.

But consider how many websites you visit in a day. Your metrics, engagements and interests are noted down on each one, and tied together into a profile, which if it fell into the wrongs hands, probably wouldn’t paint you in the best possible light.

The detail of a profile constructed from search and browsing data is alarming, and tracking companies can and do collect data on (deep breath) your age, location, devices, sex, sexual orientation, religion, income, contraceptive use, fertility, political views, race, health, your friends, your business dealings, how often you call your mum, and much, much more.

It doesn’t stop when you’re not using your computer either – thanks to that ever-present lump of metal, plastic and glass in your pocket. As well as the usual players, third-party companies pay impoverished developers to slip SDKs into their apps. If given appropriate permissions, these SDKs use Wi-Fi signal strength to map your location to within inches and beam that info back to the mothership. All of this means that you get ads that are tailored to your interests – it’s mildly irritating and gives you a mild sense of paranoia that you’re being stalked, but at least you know about the latest Black Friday deals.

It may not look like much, but Pi-hole does more than just keep adverts out of your browser. It protects your privacy, too.

CREDIT: Magictorch

But consider what that intensely personal information could be used for in the hands of someone who wanted to do more than shill toasters.

There are many things that are illegal now that didn’t used to be, and some texts that were popular in the 1990s are now criminal to possess.

In parts of the United States, women’s search histories are being used as prosecution evidence in reproductive health cases. In November 2023, Russia outlawed the “international LGBT public movement” as an extremist organisation, meaning that gay people could be treated as terrorists (always a handy go-to).

Never having visited this site without Pi-hole before, it’s odd that Reach considers this writer the type to bet on sporting fixtures.

Rather than relying on search history, an ‘advertising profile’ would be far more useful in rooting out potential law-breakers and bringing them to justice. And God forbid that a malevolent actor could use your profile data to influence elections or referenda.

Ad blockers are a great solution, and this writer employs the UBlock Origin add-on for Firefox on his two laptops and two mobile phones. But there is a total of five ‘proper’ computers in the household, plus an additional three phones, a couple of Chromebooks, a streaming TV stick, an iPad, a few Raspberry Pis, and many other connected devices.

It’s a pain to set up ad-blocking extensions on every device, and on some – such as the Chromebooks and Roku stick – it isn’t even possible.