If you are an AdBlock user you may notice some new advertisements today. On Saturday March 12, 2016 AdBlock will replace certain ads with banners supporting World Day Against Cyber Censorship. Advertisements you may normally see will be covered with new advertisements supporting World Day Against Cyber Censorship. The advertisements are typically yellow and black and contain text on them that say “WHY DID ADBLOCK ALLOW THIS “AD” TODAY”?
The AdBlock banners are linked to articles written for Amnesty International by various privacy and free speech advocates like Edward Snowden, Ai Wei Wei, and others. The banners will fill the blank spaces you’re accustomed to not noticing and other non-intrusive advertisements that are shown by default.
You can chose to disable the AdBlock World Day Against Cyber Censorship advertisements in your web browser in general options. There is feature added that can be disabled titled ”
AdBlock claims to show you advertisements today on World Day Against Cyber Censorship in order to support your privacy and freedom of speech. In a statement released by AdBlock, they say that they want to protect your digital privacy. They say that ordinary citizens are being pulled into the privacy debate and are being forced to consider what their privacy is worth. AdBlock believes users should be part of the conversation about online privacy.
In the statement AdBlock says “What if instead of merely blocking ads, you could see content that was relevant and enjoyable to you? What if you could support the content you like to see on the Web without having to give up your privacy? We’d like to move in that direction.”
The primary Amnesty.org article that is being syndicated in the AdBlock advertisements makes for quite a read. If you support this issue or not it still might be something you want to read. The article claims that “the government is granting itself the power to police every citizen’s private life.” It says “every man, woman, child, boy, girl. It doesn’t matter who you are, how innocent or not innocent you are, they (the government) are watching everything you’re doing. They’re intercepting it, analyzing it and storing it for increasing periods of time.”
It may seem a little extreme to some, including me, but it is still noteworthy.
The article also brings up the fact that the GCHQ is looking through people’s webcams and that the NSA is collecting billions of phone location records each day. This allows the NSA to know where you got on the bus, where you went to work, where you slept and what other cell phones slept with you.
The article also battles the the common statement “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” The website claims that this is the wrong response to mass surveillance for various reasons.
If you would like to know more about this topic I suggest that you read the articles published by Amnesty.org and AdBlock for further information.
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