From Lichess’ block ads:
Lichess is safe, because it is free of ads and trackers.
But browsing the rest of the Internet exposes us to the following threats:
- Advertisement sells our screen estate and influences us
- Tracking sells our personal information to increase advertisement effectiveness
These don’t benefit us, the website users, in any way. In fact, they use a lot of our computing power and bandwidth against us.
Fortunately, there are simple and legal ways to protect ourselves from these invasions.
In case you don’t know Lichess, it is a free and open-source Internet chess server run by a non-profit organization of the same name; and you can go there and play chess vs other people. It is technically amazing –and the backend is written in Scala–.
The linked website on Lichess suggests different ways of blocking ads, but I would recommend that at least you should have an ad-blocker installed; ideally uBlock Origin because it is free, open source, and very good.
The situation with ads and tracking is getting to a point that I believe we must all take action. I don’t know if a future where ads are ethical and respectful of the users and their privacy is even possible, but current approach by big tech is indefensible and hostile to us all. I can’t even remember when I was not using an ad-blocker, but I truly believe that now it is important that you use one as well.
That’s why if you visit usebox.net main page and you don’t use an ad-blocker, the website will show a banner recommending you to install one.
Please block ads and trackers, it is completely legal and you must protect yourself when you browse the web. Don’t be intimidated by websites that want you to see ads and be tracked because their business model is completely broken and doesn’t respect you.
As a postscript, if you are using Chrome as your web browser, consider using Firefox instead, or any other browser that is not Chrome. There are plenty of reasons to ditch Chrome, protect yourself!