How to Totally Escape Ad Tracking at Home Shutting down ad trackers at the network level is difficult, but not impossible Owen Williams Owen Williams Dec

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How to Totally Escape Ad Tracking at Home
Shutting down ad trackers at the network level is difficult, but not impossible
Owen Williams
Owen Williams
Dec 9, 2019·5 min read
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Photo by Tayler Smith. Prop Styling by Caroline Dorn

WWhen you go online or use an app, an array of companies quietly track your every move. Some, like Newrelic, are innocent enough, there to help companies keep track of user errors and respond to them faster. But others, like the Facebook Audience Network, collect a plethora of data as they please, from both your own devices and those on your network.

Ad blocking has traditionally been the answer for consumers looking to keep their information private, but it only works in web browsers. Many companies are now tracking you in native apps, as well. And deleting your Facebook account does not stop the company from tracking you — the social network builds “shadow profiles” to collect data from nonusers around the web, too.

While attempting to protect my own privacy, I decided that the nuclear method was best: Blocking ads and trackers on my entire home network.
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Blocking ads and trackers at the network level protects any device connected to that network. Eero, the Wi-Fi router company owned by Amazon, offers a paid service to do this, and free alternatives like AdGuard Home and Pi-hole are also gaining popularity. Most of these tools are designed to run on a Raspberry Pi, an affordable computer that starts at $35, that replaces your home’s default DNS server. When you type in a domain name like “google.***” on your phone, it’s routed to the ad blocker before it can reach its true destination. The ad blocker checks against a community-contributed list of ad servers and blocks tracking URLs that match before they even begin to load.

Network-level ad blocking allows you to control the services your devices invisibly reach out to behind the scenes, which is especially important for native apps on your phone that browser-based ad blockers can’t reach. It also extends to devices like Samsung Smart TVs, which show embedded advertising in the home screen. The ads can’t usually be disabled, but with network-level ad blocking, they are stripped out entirely because the TV simply can’t reach the ad server.

I’ve been using AdGuard for more than a year, and the difference is striking: both Twitter and Instagram have been constantly serving me irrelevant junk food advertisements, rather than the usual targeted ads. It’s quite clear that they have no good data to work with. Even better, websites I load while I’m at home have no banner ads: A grey gap fills the space where they should be.
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The biggest downside of a network-level ad blocker is the challenge of setting it up. Once you have a Raspberry Pi, AdGuard needs to be installed using the command-line before it shows a user-friendly web interface with statistics and configuration. Then, once you’ve got the server up and running, you need to update the DNS server on your router from the one your internet company configures to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi so it can intercept requests regardless of which device you’re using.

Because I have a background in computer science, I had no trouble with these steps, but it’s easy to see how they could be intimidating to someone who isn’t as familiar with home networking. Simple alternatives exist, such as the Eero wireless router’s built-in ad blocking, but they usually cost an additional monthly subscription fee.

Once you’re up and running, however, you can be confident that trackers can’t follow you around in your home. Ads are stripped automatically from every website, regardless of the device you’re using at home, leaving a simple gap where they should have loaded, and making browsing a less distracting experience. AdGuard and Pi-hole both provide statistics about the ads and trackers that are blocked the most.
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On my own network, the top offenders surprised me: Adguard reported that it had blocked my Roku TV stick from phoning home to its company’s servers hundreds of thousands of times a week — likely attempting to send data about my viewing habits. The tracking services of both Netflix and Facebook were also very active.

Blocking trackers at the network level won’t protect you when you aren’t at home, since the blocker only works when you’re on your own network, but you can use a similar strategy to block trackers when on the go. The best options for this are VPN services. These tools route your traffic onto a special network, blocking advertising in a similar fashion to network-level blockers, but using a third party service.
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Some VPN services are just thinly veiled ways to collect other data from you, but Adguard and Weblock process that data on your phone, rather than the cloud. Apple has cracked down on these options however, making choices slim on iOS.

Protecting your privacy isn’t always easy, but tools do exist to wrestle back control from being tracked by default. Now we just have to make them accessible to everybody.
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