Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.
"We need all your info for advertising, not you can't opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you."
WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.
ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW
"Hi I'm going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal."
Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.
Luckily you can mitigate most of it by installing uBlock Origin.
i second ublock origin.
But the problem runs deeper. Sure you can hide from all those ads they display, but they can still data mine your existence and shape it with their recommendations.
You can protect from that, too, but it's substantially harder and takes a lot more effort.
I resent the idea that a normal person needs like two media studies degrees and a minor in cyber security to interact kinda safely with aspects of our society that are essentially non-optional
Fully agreed, it's fucked
It’s prohibitively difficult enough that most people will never even try, which means it’s working as intended.
No, uBlock Origin is a tracker blocker too.
I still can't see any links my friends send me if they're from twitter, facebook, insta, etc (half the time anyway, seems to let me sometimes for short amounts of time) because they block the site with a wall telling you to log in.
If you're looking to view twitter posts your friends send you, just replace the url from twitter.com or x.com to nitter.net
For added convenience, there are helpful plugins that can perform this task for you, such as LibRedirect.
Ive been using it for years and a month a go I sadly started seeing ads on youtube for the very first time.
Youtube has been trying some laughable pushback as of late. Update the addon, have it update its filters, boom, ads gone again.