I thought blocking ads meant I was blocking trackers too?!

So listen, my dog murdered his bed the other day, like completely ripped the bottom out of it, foam everywhere, so I was looking for another one online. Looked at maybe 5 or 6, saw the prices, decided he can enjoy his current crime scene for a bit longer and closed everything.

Later that night I’m reading something completely unrelated and dog beds start showing up AND showing up and on and on. Then more dog stuff.

Anyway I said something about being followed around by dog ads and my friend was basically like yeah no shit, you were just looking at dog beds.

And I went yeah but I have an ad blocker. He looked at me like I was an idiot lol. In my head ads and trackers were basically part of the same thing. If the blocker kills the advertising crap then it’s also killing the crap following me around the internet. I’ve just assumed this for years and never bothered checking.

Got to it in the end. Ad blocking and tracker blocking are separate!!!!

Learned they overlap a lot because advertising and tracking are joined at the hip at this point, but blocking the ad itself does not mean every tracker is gone. Get this: even if the page is completely clean it can still have tracking/analytics requests doing their thing in the background.

Checked the filter lists and felt even dumber because EasyList and EasyPrivacy have been sitting there basically spelling this out for me the whole time. EasyList is mainly for ads, EasyPrivacy is for trackers/privacy. Some lists mash ads, trackers, telemetry, malware etc together, some don’t, so “I use an ad blocker” can mean a lot of different things depending on what you’ve got enabled.

And oh gosh just realized. You know when you enable a stricter list and suddenly some site refuses to log you in or a video won’t load or some button just does fuck all? I always blamed the ad blocking. Maybe it wasn’t the ads at all and I was killing some analytics/tracking domain the site had tied into something it needed.

Again feel dumb cause I’ve used blockers for years and somehow never once sat there and thought “wait, am I blocking ads or am I blocking tracking?”

Am I the only idiot who thought “ad blocker” automatically meant most tracking was getting blocked too???