I’m old enough to remember the World Wide Web in its infancy in the early 1990s, when the focus was on information sharing. These days the main aim of the web seems to be to make money by tracking people’s habits and showing them adverts.
I missed the old experience, and I wanted some protection against being tracked everywhere online, so I installed Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi and tucked it away behind the sofa. It was very easy to set up, and has worked perfectly for over a year, protecting all of our devices from the spying panopticon of advertisers.
I have genuinely been surprised at just how much of modern internet traffic is related to tracking and adverts. In fact, my Pi-Hole has blocked more than half of the total requests for data! That’s right – there’s more stuff flying around for the adverts and trackers rather than the actual content that you see. Crazy.
With Pi-Hole blocking things silently, you end up with cleaner web pages without the clutter of adverts, and pages load noticeably faster when they aren’t reporting back to big brother too. Mobile apps and games no longer show annoying full-screen adverts and things just work much much better.
In fact, Pi-Hole blocking has been so good that as soon as I go out and about away from my home network it is very jarring to see the internet as everyone else sees it. Full of adverts and junk. Yuck. I do have a plan to fix that little problem soon though…