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This simple trick disables ads in Gmail - but there's a catch
(www.zdnet.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
-17 points (33.3% liked)
Technology
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Depends on what you do with it. I use it pretty much only for all the accumulated account registrations over the years.
well…with that, google knows where you are, so it can sell you to where you aren’t!
Most email providers have decent to great aliasing & filters / rules.
They do that through my smartphone, not my email. Unless you're talking about online locations. Either way they can't sell me shit since I used adblockers for all my life and forever will be using them.
Bruh — virtual where you are. What sites you are a member of (remember they know your clicks too), what sites you have cancelled, what ads worked and what ads don’t. They are reading your mail and make no bones about it.
Your profile and demographic is racked and stacked. Even if you block ads they are selling you & your abstract content themes to people who want to market to you.
Marketing campaigns and targeted messaging may include some corny sites that are intended to pitch a message to you as a category of person—gone are the days where some banner is all it is, I am talking about SEO to entice you to click.
Have you ever read some whack article on a site that didn’t quite make sense? Somebody else paid for that site to try and legitimize a messsge that is too easily blocked by ad blockers.
I am not saying you should feel bad, and despite all this metadata, when is the last time a targeted ad actually interested you? Prolly like never.
Just be aware—look at googles stock price…that is based on you using their services.
Yeah, that's fine. I'm in forum X Y and Z and use this specific bank. Big whoop. Nothing they could possibly suggest to me is actually reaching me and I'm not going to pay for such a registration dump account. Imagine you couldn't pay for it anymore and then you'd lose access to all those sites. Replacing / switching email accounts like this isn't easy, and that goes in both directions. It's possibly to have 2 decades worth of account registrations of them. That isn't something you can just switch over to some other hoster.
I would care more if I were to write a lot of personal or otherwise confidential mails, but that would be a separate account anyway.
Only weird AI written crap but that's not really targeted towards me. It's just lazy and mostly automatic content creation to get clicks.
Well, yes. Because I don't even see them. I'm allergic to ads to the point where I would quit the site if I see them. If on mobile and there's a YT link that opens the original YT app and it shows me an ad, I close it. I don't care for the video anymore. I wouldn't click on ads regardless if they're personalized or not because that's just not how I would ever shop anyway. Even if I'd see a product that might be interesting in an ad, I would then instead google the type of product, compare products with each other and then find a place where I can it the cheapest.