Read on Twitter
An article concerning "Acceptable Ads" product from @ResPrivacy: https://twitter.com/ResPrivacy/status/1275536168860266496
My thoughts regarding some parts of the article.
My thoughts regarding some parts of the article.
We do not actually know whether the several "Acceptable Ads" products are completely independent of each other:
Adblock Plus → Eyeo
Adblock Browser → Eyeo
Crystal → Eyeo
AdBlock → BetaFish
AdBlock Premium → Betafish
uBlock (not uBO) → Betafish
Adblock Plus → Eyeo
Adblock Browser → Eyeo
Crystal → Eyeo
AdBlock → BetaFish
AdBlock Premium → Betafish
uBlock (not uBO) → Betafish
Note that the same year (2015) BetaFish (owner of AdBlock) was sold to an anonymous buyer, a new investment item, 13.466K EUR (converted from USD), was declared on Eyeo's balance sheet -- described as "shares in affiliate companies".
I think it would be interesting for an investigative journalist to go to the bottom of this, because Eyeo acquiring BetaFish -- either directly or indirectly -- would be quite significant on many levels.
One of these levels is BetaFish later acquiring control of abandoned uBlock repository and associated ublock\\.org domain name (the mentioned date should be July 2018).
A few months after acquisition by BetaFish, in February 2019, uBlock started to support "Acceptable Ads": https://github.com/uBlock-LLC/uBlock/releases/tag/0.9.5.13
As pointed out in the article, "Acceptable Ads" does not care about trackers. To the list of companies which trackers are exempted from being blocked, you can add Criteo, see https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1264615804617789441
For-profit Eyeo asks users to "donate", to "directly helps the development of ABP", see https://adblockplus.org/donate
Users might want to know Eyeo was able to distribute ~10M, ~6M, 7M, 10M EUR to shareholders in 2015-2018 as per Eyeo's statements, while steadily growing equity.
Users might want to know Eyeo was able to distribute ~10M, ~6M, 7M, 10M EUR to shareholders in 2015-2018 as per Eyeo's statements, while steadily growing equity.
