Adblockers to Help You Get Rid of Ads

AUTHOR: Katherine Fitzgerald, Law student University of Paris 8

Let’s face it – advertising is everywhere – on radio, television, posters, and unfortunately the Internet. We all know how annoying it is to try and navigate through the web and be constantly blasted with suggestive (and more frequently explicit) pop-ups. Nowadays they are never ending and crude, repetitive and distasteful.

Whilst we are sometimes shocked or irritated by such pop-ups we are (unfortunately) no longer surprised by them. The same cannot be said of our children. Pop-ups are indiscriminate and will appear whoever is behind the screen – as such adverts with pornographic images are almost unavoidable to any child ‘surfing the internet’.

On a personal note, being sick of those images popping up on my computer screen, I was advised to download a free ‘adblocker’ program that acts as a filter on my search engine, blocking all pop-ups from appearing (and sparing me quite a few unpleasant images from staying in my mind). The use of such technology is a perfect way of preventing inappropriate material appearing on the screen in front of your little one who might be merely doing a search on ‘greek gods’ for their history class.

Adblockers can be used on smartphones too – and more importantly, it also prevents cookies from tracking your child’s online activity (and targeting them through future ads).

Unfortunately some sites (such as youtube or Spotify on occasion) are wise to our new tricks and prevent access or viewing until the adblocker is disabled in the settings part of the search engine. However, speaking from experience, adblocker stops about 90 % of the pop-ups that used to plague my day.

So whilst they are not always full proof, adblockers do afford added protection at no cost and if used in tandem with parental controls (and a lot of communication), keeping your child safe on the internet will no longer seem like an impossible task.