Facebook's Efforts Against Ad Blocking

by John Paine

"Null Routing Facebook" from 37:1 inspired me to share with fellow hackers a story about Facebook's determination to force ads into your head.  A friend of a friend I met this March at an industry event told me how the machine works.  What follows focuses on Facebook, but other online advertisers like Google work in a similar fashion.

Most of Facebook's revenue comes from ads, so they direct most of their energy at keeping them safe.  Whenever there is a sudden change in the flow of ad money, alarms ring and directors, project managers, and engineers announce an incident, a so-called "sev," and rush to fix it.  Sometimes a real world event draws a lot of people away from their Facebook, so its a false alarm.  But sometimes it's a real problem.  This happens a few times a week at any hour of the day.  Hundreds of employees are on call 24/7 because of this.  Ads are serious business.

Ad blockers are an obvious threat to this machine.  There is a dedicated team of engineers tasked with fighting ad blockers: Ghost Owl.  They describe their discussion group as, "...a home for discussions, updates, and resources on our work to defend Facebook against ad blockers."  Their goal is "revenue recovery."  Their rate of success is around ten percent.  They have tools like Ad Guard and Scrambler that are supposed to fool popular blockers.  They are locked in a race against open-source volunteers that keep improving ad blockers.  It's a tit-for-tat game without an ending.

The engineers are paid handsomely and the company has deep pockets.  They have access to ad blocker source code.  They keep an eye on that always to keep up with new developments.  "On 3/26 we detected Changes to AdBlockPlus source code which included advancements to Anti-Scrambler tooling."  They're determined.

Their language is surprisingly aggressive.  Their work is about "defending Facebook," "anticipating another attack," "having several mitigation on standby for H2," and "they (ad blockers) mention zero interest in giving up attacking Facebook."

Learning all this made me happy.  It means that open-source ad blockers have become a large threat to Facebook and similar companies.  Serious enough to catch their attention and divert money and people towards keeping an eye on them.  I like to think that everyone using an ad blocker takes a wee bite out of Facebook's empire.  I like to think that we're keeping them on their guard.  I like to think that the future might unfold in our, the ordinary people's, favor.