Brave Ad Blocker - Ads vs. Trackers

Are ads and trackers one in the same or are they distinctly different? I ask because I may want to allow ads on a particular site, but not the trackers.

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Hi @MyNameIsNotBob,

They are sure different. But the reason Brave have it together as one is explained here Why does whitelisting option to 'allow ads' also allow 'tracking'?.

Thanks
:slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks. That thread is closed, so I will just reply here. From that thread:

The reason we have “ads and trackers” together as one item is because usually ads ARE trackers / contain trackers. It’s not possible to separate it out in some cases.

So maybe this issue is not truly much of an issue at all. If I enable ads/trackers on somewebsite.com, those trackers theoretically won’t carry over to another site for which I have trackers blocked, correct? If so, it seems there would be some degree of containment there after all.

And if I have ads/trackers enabled for multiple sites that all use trackers from the same domains, would I be tracked between those sites? If so, doesn’t seem like a major issue, either, as it could be argued that I shouldn’t be concerned about those trackers since I trust the sites enough to allow ads.

And why isn’t it possible to distinguish ad from tracker? It seems like you could allow the user the option of allowing HTML ads served from someadcompany.com, but not allow cookies from the same domain.

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@MyNameIsNotBob Your understanding is correct. What ever you disabled from shields(lion icon in URL) is specific to that domain. If multiple domains use the same 3rd party script then it does give a degree of tracking but like you mentioned its the user decision to let the ads/trackers to be allowed on a specific site. If you truly wish to block all trackers/ads then enabling Block Scripts will do it where you can selectively allow which scripts to run on a site. But you should be aware as to what script does what and more or less this is break the normal usage of the site since websites depend heavily on scripts.

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Thanks. This explanation is sufficient. This issue may be closed.

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