Study claims more than half of Americans use ad blockers
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What I wonder is… how?! A quick search shows that half of people in the USA use Chrome, another 30% Safari, 8% use Edge, and only 5% Firefox. This study was done by Ghostery so perhaps they chose a biased subset of the population? It just seems weird to me to think that more than half of average users use ad-blocking, these days.
According to statistics on my server, it’s 57% Chrome, 14% Safari and 12% Firefox. Also 10% use Linux. I’m not hosting anything tech related though.
Anyways, adblocking is kind of essential. Even the boomers ask what’s wrong when ads start showing. The only people I’ve seen browsing without adblock are Apple users.
iPhone or Mac?
Yes
My mom knows nothing about adblock, and is still blocking ads. You better believe all of the kids having to fix their relative’s computers will set up some free antivirus and ad blocking right away.
Can’t comment on the sample size though, Ghostery might indeed be somehow biased and measure devices where their software is installed vs. total number of internet users or something? But users of ghostery are more likely to be tech savvy, so there’s a higher chance of them having more devices that are equally sanitized.
I’d have to dig through the study and see if the sampling mechanism is made public.
Those mfs have got a way to go if they’re setting up free antiviruses. Free anti-virsus will hurt your system probably more on average than actual viruses
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Bitdefender Free is great and doesn’t nag users to upgrade.
Just use Windows defender already. It’s been good enough for ages. All the others downplay this to justify their existence.
Why are people recommending Microsoft spyware in a privacy thread??
Here we are spaking about that this Spyware is pretty resistant against all kind of malware, not about that it’s needed to gut it from all kind of telemetries, bloatware and not needed services before the first use, that is another thing.
The better option is not to use windows at all, but if you are, I don’t think disabling windows defender will stop them from getting whatever they want anyway.
Some years ago, the Windows Defender certainly was a joke, but currently is very capable with an detection quote of 100%. A cause that Windows, as the most used OS was always also the most atacked by malware, but the devs of MS at least had made a good job. Windows is certainly an privacy nightmare, at least if used in default settings, but in question of security is currently maybe the best protected with safe boot, a good sandbox system and Defender, and, well, the Firewall is good, but sometimes overreacting with the need to whitelist some downloads and apps. But at all, there isn’t anymor need for 3rd party AVs.
I have an inherent distrust to all things Microsoft. And their firewall is so terrible that I don’t want to find out they were as negligent when it came to developing their antivirus.
Exactly. If you run windows, the default defender anti virus is just as capable. Don’t use 3rd party anti virus software or use the"free" ones.
Yes it is available. It in turn points to another site Censuswide, but does say: