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this was about privacy right? apple based for saving you from ads ?

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Seth Miller

@sethmills21

Jun 3

the audacity....after decimating an entire economy

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lmao remember when Google used Chrome to do exactly the same thing several times for exactly the same reason and using exactly the same rationale

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"we're saving you from all the bad advertisers out there who are completely unlike us in respect for users (and also coincidentally do not provide us with huge stacks of cash)"

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They didn't really do anything with that because they were scared of anti-trust action if they started blocking ads on sites with ads hurting usability. They added a content filtering engine to Chromium and distributed EasyList in an optimized form but.. it's not really used.

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The filter lists block their own ads too. The concept was that it would get applied to sites with invasive ads (in terms of usability and performance, not privacy) until they fixed the problem and appealed. As far as I know this never actually happened and it was an empty threat.

4:04 PM · Jun 6, 2022Twitter Web App

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Chromium still has this content filtering engine, tooling to generate optimized content filtering lists for it from EasyList style filters using the same syntax and they ship a version of EasyList as a component called Subresource Filter Rules (look at chrome://components).

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Safe Browsing is used to determine if it should be used. It's possible they enable it on sites that are considered malicious by Safe Browsing. I haven't heard of a single case where they deployed this based on the intrusive ads policy they were supposedly going to be enforcing.

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This one definitely did apply for a little while btw, lots of 🏴‍☠️sites were killed by it

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They likely use it for sites blocked by Safe Browsing for distributing malware, etc. but I haven't seen it get used in any case based on the intrusive ads policy they proposed and were supposedly going to be enforcing. It's a punishment on top of Safe Browsing warnings AFAICT.

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