Long term Irreal readers know that I’ve always been ambivalent about ad blockers. On the one hand, many Web sites that provide content need to make money to survive and the only generally effective way of doing that is through advertisements. That does not mean, though, that Irreal or any of you are therefore consenting to abuse. Sites that use tracking techniques to follow you and record your online actions are not ethical and should be illegal.
So the other hand is that users have to protect themselves and unfortunately those—probably few—ethical advertisers suffer. I’ve always said that I’d turn off my ad blocker if the advertisers turned off their trackers. I doubt the makers of ad blockers have much to worry about.
Now there’s another reason to use an blocker. The abusers have themselves been abused. The TL;DR is that the digital advertiser service, Adform, was hacked and started serving malware that stole crypto currency from the infected users. Since Adform serves about 1.5 billion ads a day, that’s potentially a lot of infected computers.
Adform, of course, had nothing to do with the malware other than that their (hacked) servers were used to distribute it. That’s the point. Even if Adform delivered only ethical ads with no tracking, you’d still want to block them to avoid malware. This fact in conjunction with the ad industry’s intransigence means that it would be foolish for anyone to forego the safety of an ad blocker.