IOS

Privacy in recent years is something that everybody is talking about. Some companies undersell their own devices just to gain the information that they will harvest. The others say it aloud that they put privacy on the pedestal, and that includes their devices. This is Apple.

Even if you decided to move away from devices and companies that violate your rights and decided to buy an iPhone, remember, that in the whole of this the weakest link, the hole in a privacy matter is you!

Over the last years, I forget about something called Progressive Web Apps (PWA) until one day I added to my Home Screen a bookmark to Homebridge, and, believe me, or not, I do not add bookmarks that way very often.

When I added this bookmark to my Home Screen on iOS I noticed, that it looks unusual. The icon was like a native app. When I click on the icon it didn’t open inside Safari like other bookmarks but it run on full screen like a normal native app.

Of course, it was still Safari in the background but highly limited to the scope of that single website, that it feels like a native. It certainly can be confused with an app.

We are living in a world, where everybody is trying to commercialise almost everything. If selling products and services does not bring desired income and users have had already too many subscriptions to pay for another one, there’s comes Ads.

Nobody likes Ads. They can ruin the reading experience on the website, cause our computer to choke due to excessive use of resources, or put your device or ourselves at risk due to privacy matters.

I used to use, back in 2020 ads, that display dynamically on my site, through Google AdSense. This does not even bring the return of the costs, that I put into it. What’s more annoying, using Google Ads has a huge negative impact on my website performance. Ironically, my site has been penalised by Google in their ranking, due to using their solution!

Once I migrated to Hugo and start using Netlify in their free plan, I reduced costs significantly, and because of that, I decided to banish Ads altogether. My site doesn’t have millions of visitors per month, hence it does not cost me a lot to maintain it. At the time, when I will be somehow noticed, I will gain a decent number of visitors, can imagine that I will be facing other opportunities to gain profit, and hopefully this will not be from Ads.

When I appreciate Ads system like EthicalAds, Privacy-preserving Ad Network or BuySellAds, there are still Ad systems that cause me a headache. If they annoy me, they annoy others as well.

On my devices, I am using Safari as my default browser. You may say what you like about it, but definitely, it’s not the new Internet Explorer.

I am using a dual approach. To preserve my privacy and to remove annoyances from the websites that I visit every day. Here is how I am doing that on my devices.

Do you watch YouTube a lot? Are you addicted to it, or just need it for your work?

Do the ads cause you a headache?

There is nothing better than suddenly showing an Ad in the middle of streaming from YouTube to a bigger audience (possibly on a bigger screen and using bigger, much louder audio equipment). This may ruin a lot and put distraction in time when you need people to concentrate on presented material (either video or just audio).

This may annoy you and others to the extent that you will think to pay this £11.99 per month for YouTube Premium only to get rid of this annoyance.

But what if I will tell you there is a better (and cheaper) way?