Adblock Plus, the #1 most popular browser extension for blocking annoying online advertisements, today announced that it has doubled the number of tracking filters in its EasyPrivacy block list in order to expand its usefulness as a do-not-track privacy tool. Adblock Plus is known primarily as an ad-blocking tool, built upon a series of open-source, volunteer-maintained filter lists which must constantly evolve to respond to new ad formats and delivery methods.
The story of advertising online in the last year has significantly also been a story about the rise of ad tech — ways of serving users more relevant ads, and ways of monitoring how users have responded to them. Unsurprisingly, this has also translated into a big rise in tracking technology: Adblock Plus, the popular German-based open source project that creates browser extensions and an Android app to block “annoying and intrusive” online ads, says that it now blocks 8,600 different trackers — cookies, scripts and tracking pixels on sites that run usually in the background when you visit a web site – in its EasyPrivacy filter list, more than double the number it blocked a year ago (4,200).