How ads are chewing through half of your mobile data

Looks like I'm not reading their article.

We require your consent for the use of cookies and other technologies by us and our partners (393) to store and process personal data on your device.

Consent dialog is not conforming law.

And man, even if you go into the settings of the consent dialog, I hate these kinds of misleading toggles. Which option do you think is active?

Ironic.

Schaut aus als wärs an
- Genau. Ist es aber nicht. 😬
I think it's an. Was it?
- It's off. When setting it on, the An becomes bright green.
  I was misled as well.
https://archive.is/20250105195303/https://www.nextpit.com/ads-consume-half-of-your-mobile-data
FTFY

Reminder that e.g. Firefox mobile has full extension support und as such can run uBlock Origin.

DNS blockers are nice, but they can only do so much against tracking without overblocking.

Yeah, Firefox on mobile is great. It's horrible if I have to use stock Chrome for anything, ads everywhere, layers of ads, fullscreen popups, the horror
- Just don't use stock Chrome then.
  For me it only opens if I have to click some Wifi portal confirmation.
Not on iOS I don't think.
- I got excited for a second.
Great! How do I add add-ons on iOS?
- Move to EU )
- I didn't know about iOS - Firefox only seems to allow this on android unfortunately.
Reminder that e.g. Firefox mobile has full extension support und as such can run uBlock Origin.
Calling it full extension support is a bit misleading. Some desktop extensions do not work on mobile Firefox, although most work

They are not chewing through mine, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin on Android too.

After reading the article:

To test this, Enders used a browser that mimicked an iPhone 6 and accessed a total of eight "popular" news sites (though they didn't confirm what these were).

Wow yea great methodology, thanks guys. It really captures your motto of "Rigorous Fearless Independent" especially the first term.

Also good job by Santiago Luque of Nextpit to generalize the result to the maximum possible extent.

Yeah, I can't imagine raw-dogging the internet like that, even on mobile. If I opened an app or web page, and saw ads, I would just exit the page completely.
Internet without ad blocking is unbearable.
I have a setup of about 250 mb worth of blocklists on the home router (openwrt). The adblocker generates a statistic. Around 20 percent of all connections get blocked, so that's my personal traffic saved every day. On mobile your can block traffic systemwide too, so not only your browser but also app based adds.
On android just go to settings -- network -- private dns and chose one provided by mullvad for example:
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls
On ios:
https://adityarajsingh.com/dns-over-https-ios/
- I use NextHub and NextDNS on iPhone and although it is limited compared to Android, it blocks around 12% of my traffic.
- Around 20 percent of all connections get blocked, so that’s my personal traffic saved every day.
  20% of connections != 20% of data. The real percentage of data saved depends on whether the files being blocked are larger or smaller on average than the files being allowed through. I doubt that your adblocker gives you the latter statistic (because I'm pretty sure it would have to at least start to request each file to query the file size), but it'd be cool if it did.
  I wouldn't be surprised if, aside from videos, your amount of data saved were a lot higher than 20%.

If you extrapolate from that and suppose that somewhere around half of all internet traffic is ad transmissions, that means that the internet ad industry has about 20 times the carbon emissions of crypto.

Crypto bad for environment though. Corpo-net good for economy though, so environment never talked about.
- Two things can be bad for the environment. Maybe even more.
How did you arrive at that number?

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It’s the most pervasive pollution wrought upon our environments, and amplifies the carcinogenic perpetual growth delusion.

People are not willing to pay for services that they get for free.
- How, precisely, does that relate to, or negate, what I posted?
So you are willing to pay for the content you consume?
- This is a false dichotomy, and illustrates the pernicious terminal incuriosity and learned helplessness modern society incentivises, rewards, and celebrates.
  There are models other than incendiary extraction and debasement which can be implemented to value and promote creative work. Elevating the legitimacy of advertising in its current role perpetuates its abuse, and suppresses these preferable alternatives.
- I am paying for the content I consume, yet I still get ads. Why is that?
  And don't say it's due to rising costs of production, because their profits somehow also grow every year.

I had that too, my Mother was wondering why the first two Google results weren't working. Because they were the ads, and the Pihole refused to resolve the domains. She didn't even realize she fell for the Google Ads injected as pseudo results. (It's been a while I don't know if they are still around)
Even worse my ex almost payed for Firefox, because she fell for the ad links above the real Mozilla link below, when she was looking for the Installer.

It's true and I saw it first hand at an airbnb with so so WiFi. My pops needed his football fix and managed to stream but the connection kept blurry or disconnect. Asked him why he was still using chrome; he even had firefox with uBlock Origin. Following my advice, closed chrome and sure enough, no video ads and shit fixed his connection problem.

Internet enshittification is real but we can fight it.

Internet enshittification
Web enshittification actually. The Internet itself still works mostly fine, apart from a few unfair peering disputes among the giants, and the Chinese and Russian disconnection efforts.
Internet enshittification is real...
Why would you even say that? It just opens the door to an argument that doesnt exist.
"Help fight internet enshittification" is a better message.
Just my opinion, and likely neither of us would even see the difference in our life times, but for what its worth, i want to help fight the good fight, even if its something as minor as this mentality.
To me its like people making really bad arguments for worthwhile causes, it just feeds the trolls and makes the cause harder to achieve

This is what is absolutely crazy about the modern internet. We pay for data -- and because net neutrality is dead, we pay more if we go over a cap. And yet, we do not have direct control over what corporations choose to force feed us through that data.*

Consider the analogy of terrestrial TV (not a perfect one, but good enough for this). Back in the day, you put up an antenna, and you received programming. There was no data limit, because it's just airwaves. Watch as much as you want. But one downside: advertising, except the case was easily made that it pays for the programming, the broadcasting, etc, so it was somewhat of a different beast. That cost was not passed to you. You "paid" for it by accepting the injection of ads into the programming.

Fast forward to today. Let's say you want to stream a show that you would have gotten on terrestrial TV back in the day. Now, you pay to access that content (not going into the deeper issue of lack of ownership here), but you also effectively pay for the broadcasting, in the old sense of the word. While it is true that companies incur costs to run their servers and dish out the data, you, the consumer, must pay to access the network it uses. And again, because neutrality is gone, you pay more if you go over your cap -- for the content that you pay to access anyway.

It starts to look shockingly like a double dip. Consider what you're doing when on a corporate website: you pay for the hardware. You pay for the data. You (often) pay for the content that uses the data. And yet, these corporations still gave the gall to inject advertising into your data stream.

It gets crazier the more you think about it.

*ad blockers and sponsorblock give you some control, but ultimately they are reactive Band-Aids on the modern system

I have Firefox with Ublock Origin, YouTube ReVanced, and a DNS-level adblocker to cover everything else; ads ain't chewing through shit on my device.

as long as data caps exist all internet advertising is theft

As long as time exists, all internet advertising is time theft.

Internet, especially on mobile devices, is becoming more and more unusable every day. Fucking ads everywhere, taking up more space than the content. Autoplaying videos overlayed on top of the content. Close buttons so small they are all but impossible to hit on a touchscreen. Cookie consent banners on every site (opt out of course). The list just goes on...

I don't even care about the bandwidth, it's just a pain to use. I've started using Safari's reader view and the new "Hide Distracting Items" option to hide most of it, but I shouldn't have to. Capitalism really does ruin everything.

You should try out Brave Browser on iOS
- https://i.imgflip.com/9fvlt3.jpg

For what it's worth, nextdns (referer link) servers block ads at the DNS level, works pretty well on iPhones and Androïd without root.

I've been using nextdns for ages and it's great.

And that's why I have pihole setup to which I connect to using wireguard.

I wonder how many lemmy users dont use adblock

There's dozens of us!
- Why do people not use adblock?

this is the main problem I have with pay as you go and data caps. It would be prefereable to me if it was only for the data I want and ads were charged back to the ad creators but its coming from my allotment of internet. Even if you block them they still will be taking up the bandwidth.

The main problem I have with data caps is that they're a bulllshit cash grab from subsized companies with a monopoly/oligopoly. There's almost nothing most of us can do, so they keep leeching more and more money.
...I also hate ads with a passion.
- yeah its like look. you can charge me based on an unlimited set pipe or by amount used (theoretially because I won't do it due to the ads using it and such) but not both. pick one.

Use VPN. Most of the fake consumed data comes from ISP recognizing your activity

What?
VPN encryption increases your network usage.
There are even shady plans where only Whatsapp is infinite, which will not work with a VPN. It is useless but thought it was interesting.
Using a VPN to browse the internet for security reasons is IMHO snake oil.
Ad traffic is still generated, even if it's going through the VPN.
Using end-to-end encrypted connections via HTTPS is much more important.
Also making sure your browser is not easy fingerprintable.

I got /e/OS installed in my Fairphone 3 developped by Murena. They got a built-in OS level tracker blocker for apps. So not just ads in my browser, but all ads + tracker in all apps installed on my phone. This month alone it blocked 28432 trackers! We live is a crazy world... not only do I save internet bandwidth, but also my battery lasts longer

https://murena.com/

Adguard provides a public DNS with ad domains blocked. You can install it as an app for easier setup, or manually change your systems DNS settings.

DNS-over-HTTPS
\ Default server
\ AdGuard DNS will block ads and trackers.
\ https://dns.adguard-dns.com/dns-query

Also not mine. If you search twice as long as you usually would you will probably find what you are looking for on a privacy friendly website which also has more and better structured information then the (as of now) popular sites. Then you just bookmark that site and if you want to find something in that topic you just click your bookmark and search the site - not having to worry about ads or you data being sold or comapnys making profiles on you. BTW: Don't use google you won't find those sites there.

Well, Mullvad DAITA does even more XD

But yeah, ads are bad. AI is worse. But less cell data.

Not mine. Almost 90% is my music or audiobooks. I dont warch a lot of video when not on wifi, and most of that is >!porn!<

When your music and audiobooks inevitably get ads injected due to enshittification (if they actually haven't already), you'll be in the same boat. It is unavoidable.
- That's gonna be real hard to happen when i still store my own music and audio books