
Or they ask you to contribute financiallyīy whitelisting a website, you can restore its functionality and show your support to the site owners, while at the same time reducing your defense against the risk of malvertising.Īnother option would be to temporarily disable content blocking and re-enable it as soon as possible, which avoids the need to update the whitelist later on. Some websites display a banner saying that they detected the usage of a content blocker: When trying to purchase a product on some e-commerce sites Like the "new mail" button in Yahoo webmail Some portion of the website functionality could be inadvertently disabled: When third-party ads are replaced by simple images hosted on the main website server When they are whitelisted by the content blocker What to expectīefore diving into the how-to section of this post, let's review the anatomy of a good content blocker, as well as the potential pitfalls that you might experience.ĭisplays information about blocked contentĪllows you to disable blocking on a site-by-site basis (also called whitelisting)
#1BLOCKER IPHONE INSTALL#
To be able to install content blockers, your iPhone needs to run at least iOS 9 and must be an iPhone 5S or superior. If you've heard about Jailbraking (the act of removing the software restrictions of iOS), it is only feasible when exploiting security flaws in iPhones, which can been done through Safari. If those scripts leverage a known yet unpatched or unknown (aka zero day) vulnerability, there is a risk of getting your iPhone compromised. On mobile devices, content blockers have the added benefit of slightly reducing power consumption and therefore improving battery life.Įven when surfing on a respectable website (like The New York Times or BBC), there is a risk that a hacker injected a potentially dangerous script or that the online ads contain malicious code, also known as “malvertising”. This is why content blockers can help speed up your browsing experience and reduce the data consumption when you're surfing on your mobile Internet network (3G or 4G). This means that in practice, it can substantially increase the time it takes to display the content of the page. This is why, after searching for Tesla cars in Google, you start noticing either ads or suggested content about Tesla, on websites that you visit subsequently.Īdvertisements and tracking scripts force your web browser to fetch more information that what you're interested in, sometimes up to three times more. Your gender or age (while still logged into one of your social media accounts) Here is the kind of data that is collected: Third party analytics companies (Comscore or Google Analytics) Social sharing buttons (Facebook, Twitter) What few people know is that web pages contain hidden and benign scripts whose sole purpose is to track what we do online, whether it is via: Motivationįirst, let’s explore the reasons for blocking undesirable content while surfing the web.
#1BLOCKER IPHONE HOW TO#
In this post, I will show you how to block undesirable content in Safari on your iPhone (running iOS 9 or superior).
