Curate an Ad-Free Life

But it's not limited to just experiencing advertising. That's already bad enough. The other side of that coin is tracking and measurement. That's how advertisers pinpoint your interests and your fears, making sure you see ads that push your buttons. It is arguably more important than the ads themselves. It's the very foundation on which advertising works and makes the ads more valuable.

Advertisers and Big Tech go hand in hand. We really can't discuss one without acknowledging the other.

Big Tech

Here's a list of the top Big Tech companies and how involved they are in ad-tech as of this writing (Sep 2026).

1. Meta Platforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and some other more minor properties.

Meta is the 800 lb. gorilla. It's an ad-tech company, full stop. Advertising and tracking/measurement is their core business without which they would not exist. Very nearly 100% of their revenue comes from advertising. That's advertising served to users on their platforms and via ad-tech services on countless other apps and websites.

You don't have to be a Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp user to be affected by Meta's ad-tech reach. Meta is a digital cancer whose metastasis infects every nook and cranny of the internet and our online lives -- and all to make Mark Zuckerberg one of the wealthiest men on the planet.

Meta and what they wrought belongs high on the list of the worst things to happen to modern society. I might even go so far as to say you have a personal duty to reduce your exposure, not only for your own wellbeing but for the wellbeing of society as a whole. That's your decision, obviously.

That may sound arrogant and I suppose it is. But I am far, far from alone in that thinking.

Even if you do use Meta services, you can dramatically reduce your ad exposure and tracking by following my recommendations further down.

2. Alphabet, which includes Google.

Google has a lot of services that aren't inherently advertising, like Gmail and Workspace, which is among Google's biggest offerings. But ad-tech is still the majority money maker with an estimated 75% of their revenue coming from advertising.

3. Amazon and 4. Microsoft are in a distant 3rd and 4th place, respectively. These are not ad-tech companies in the same sense as Meta and Alphabet.

Mind you, Amazon is an important player in ad tech, but its advertising business is centered around its own ecosystem. Microsoft also operates a significant advertising business, but its presence is concentrated around search, its own properties, and a network of partners rather than the sprawling third-party advertising associated with Google and Meta.

5. Apple is not a big ad-tech player. Their ad revenue is reportedly less than 1% of total revenue. What little advertising Apple does is for their own products. Apple makes most of their money on hardware sales (a rarity in big tech) and app store commissions.

So there you have it. You know who the biggest ad-tech players are and aren't. Now, how to eliminate those ads...

Assaulting ads one modality at a time

There are a lot of ways advertising reaches you. For this article, each of those ways is a modality, indicated with "▶︎".

I've discussed the ethics of ad-blocking here. But this article is not a discussion of the ethics of doing so. Some of these methods incur additional cost. But I'm discussing how to reduce advertising in your life, not how to save money.

This is going to get mildly geeky. The ideas I'm presenting here aren't too geeky but I'll be throwing around a lot of names and terms for things. I'll define them where I think I need to.

▶︎ On your laptop or desktop computer

Works on Windows or Mac.

Here's where you have a remarkable level of control, more than most other modalities.

For web access, use the browser Firefox. Not Edge, not Chrome.

Why is that?

Edge and Chrome are both built on Chromium, which is the "mother browser" maintained by Google. Google, being a huge ad-tech player, is getting rather tired of their ads and trackers being blocked. So they have made changes to Chromium which affects how well these blockers can work.

And since Edge and Chrome are both based on (children of) Chromium, then they will inherit those changes. Just like real kids inherit their parents' DNA.

Firefox, on the other hand, is not based on Chromium, so thus doesn't inherit those blocker-busting changes.

The #1 ad and tracker blocker extension* by a wide margin is uBlock Origin. uBO used to work on all major browsers. But the changes Google made to Chromium kills uBO. Firefox is the only major browser platform remaining that fully supports uBO.

* An extension is a chunk of code that you can download and install that adds new functionality to a web browser. Functionality like blocking ads.

Read about browsers here

▶︎ On your iPhone

You have less control over ad-blocking technologies on your iPhone but there's still possibilities. Android models offer more flexibility on this than iPhone.

You can use Safari and the AdBlock Pro extension. This works reasonably well. You may also install a web browser with ad-blocking already built-in, such as iPhone versions of Brave or Firefox. Brave is pretty decent. Firefox (for iPhone) is still pretty new.

But that doesn't help with app-based advertising. That is, ads that appear in your various apps. For that, you need an ad-blocking DNS service. I recommend NextDNS. The free version is plenty for most users and it works remarkably well.

What is an ad-blocking DNS and how does it work?

Most advertising that you see, either on websites or inside of downloaded apps, are served by ad-tech companies -- and not by the website you are visiting or the maker of the app. Yes, the website or app maker does allow the advertising, but they don't actually serve the ads themselves. The ad-tech company does that.

When a website or app wants to display content on your device, it does so by downloading that content from a server somewhere on the internet. DNS (Domain Name System) is the service that all devices, websites, and apps, use to find the server on which the needed content is located. So when your app needs to fetch, say, a weather report, part of that request chain involves DNS.

And when the website or (usually free) app wants to download advertising it does the very same thing. It locates the advertising content server using DNS, just like it does for non ad-related content.

The good thing is the ad-blocking DNS services can tell the difference. They maintain databases that identify ad-servers from non ad-servers. So when non-advertising content is needed, those requests are honored and the content is downloaded for your enjoyment. But when advertising content is needed, those requests are denied -- also for your enjoyment as it turns out.

The end result is you see desirable content but no advertising. Sometimes, depending on the website or app, you may see an empty placeholder where the ad would have normally appeared. But not always.

▶︎ Search Results

You are probably using Google for search. There was a time when Google only returned a page of external links that satisfied your query. That hasn't been true since long before AI summaries started taking over.

Today, Google's first page is often AI summaries -- and sponsored links below that if your query is targetable for advertising. Organic links are farther down or even on the second page -- the graveyard, places no one would look.

One answer is to use an ad-free search engine such as Kagi.com (that's pronounced KAH-jee).

Kagi isn't free but there is a free no-credit-card required trial. Kagi has these benefits:

• No ads
• No tracking
• Sources search results from dozens of search engine crawlers including their own

Hurray, no ads! Also, that last point is particularly important. By sourcing results from far and wide, you are getting a more diversified result. e.g. You aren't getting biased results that may comport to a particular search engine's owner's views.

▶︎ Watching TV

Reducing advertising while watching TV takes a dual-pronged approach: Reducing Platform Ads and Content Ads

Platform Ads

The streaming menu interface included in most TVs today is full of distracting ads, often with motion, and graphics. And they also make navigating and finding programs difficult. It's nearly enough to induce an epileptic seizure. Worse, TVs today, especially budget brands*, also spy on your viewing habits, and report that back to the TV maker who then markets that data. What a world we live in, huh?

* These TV brands are more likely to have spyware installed. Most brands spy on your viewing habits to some extent. Some are better at allowing you to disable that.

• Vizio, probably the worst . Fun fact: Vizio in Italian means "vice" -- a flaw, or a bad habit. The irony is delicious.
• Roku
• TCL (based on Roku)
• Hisense (based on Roku)
• Amazon Fire TV
• Google TV

If you want a reduced-ad and reduced-tracking experience, then I'd recommend the following:

#1- Disconnect your TV from the internet. Without internet, there's no more native TV platform-level ads and no reporting back on what you watch.

#2- Purchase an Apple TV streaming device and connect to your TV's HDMI input port. The Apple TV device user interface is clean, free of clutter, and has no ads. And while Apple does track your viewing habits, it does so mainly for their own recommendation and personalization engine and you can disable that. Either way, they explicitly state they do not sell your viewing data to 3rd parties.

Now I said reduced-ad experience. Why only "reduced"?

The Apple TV device itself doesn't serve platform levels ads -- that's already pretty nice. But when you launch a streaming app from within Apple TV, such as Netflix, then you will see Netflix-based advertising. Apple TV can't stop that.

Content Ads

First of all, I recommend always subscribing to the ad-free tier of a streaming provider's service if that's possible. Yes, it's going to cost a few bucks more per month per streaming provider. But, again, the focus of this article is how to curate an ad-free life, not saving money. Dodging some ad modalities does cost money.

For Video On Demand (VOD), which is another word for streaming TV shows and movies from your streaming provider, you cannot skip past the ads on an ad-included tier. But the ad-free tier? Yes, no regular ads. You might see a pre-roll ad for another show. They don't consider that an "ad" in the normal sense, even though it is. But you should never see straight-up paid advertising or program-interrupting mid-roll ads.

What about my local stations?

Youtube TV (YTTV) is probably the best way to have a "basic cable TV" experience (without having actual cable TV) which can include your local TV channels and the usual "basic cable" channel lineup*.

* History Channel, Food Network, Hallmark Channel, Comedy Central, MTV, Lifetime, CNN, etc. There's dozens of them.

One of YTTV's neat tricks is letting you watch your local broadcast TV channels or cable channels as though it were old-school cable TV. And it has a "TiVo"-like feature that lets you record your favorite broadcast TV or cable shows on channels like those above. Program YTTV to record, say, "Modern Family" and then you can watch it later. And just like an old-school TiVo box or VCR, you can skip through the commercials!

YTTV is not cheap, costing around $83 a month at the time of this writing, but then neither was cable TV. And, once again, we're talking about curating an ad-free life, not saving money. What is it worth to (very nearly) eliminate commercials, and other advertising, from your life?

For a deep dive on TV, including how your TV is spying on you, see my article TV Today.

▶︎ Movie night

If you're a bit older then you'll remember when movie theaters did not show commercials. You might even remember the quiet, internal rage you felt that day when you first saw a commercial at a movie theater. Sure, you had the trailers*, sometimes too many, and the always reliable "Let's all go to the lobby" ditty to get your snack on. But there were no full-on paid commercials. And that's also when tickets only cost around $5, yo!

No longer.

Mainstream multiplex cinemas now hammer you with sometimes upward 30 minutes(!) of various pre-roll cruft before the feature film ever sees light from the projector. Some theater chains play commercials, then the trailers, then more commercials. Not for me, buddy, not for me.

You can't force a movie theater to not play commercials. But you can choose to avoid that theater in protest. I've not been to a multiplex since the original Avatar dropped in 2009. We do support and visit our local arthouse theater, Ragtag Cinema. They don't play commercials.

I also buy movies on Blu-ray and watch movies via streaming. All with no commercials. And I can pause them to make a kitchen run or whatever else.

* Make no mistake. Trailers are ads! But the movie industry would like us to believe they're not. Put the trailers at the end and see how many people stick around. That would be a good gauge of how much people like them.

▶︎ Junk mail

Junk mail is alive and well in the 21st century. More than half of USPS mail volume is marketing mail. But you can reduce this irritant as well -- and save some trees, too.

Contact these organizations and clearinghouses to help reduce the amount of junk mail you get. All these can be reached online.

• DMA Choice -- Association of National Advertisers. This is the biggie!
• Opt Out Prescreen -- Mainly for credit card and insurance advertising.
• Catalog Choice -- This complements DMA Choice, do this one, too.
• Valpak Removal -- Stop getting those blue envelopes full of coupons.

Each of these have their own policies and procedures for stopping junk mail. Check the details for each by visiting their site.

These clearinghouses sometimes don't work for companies that you have actually done business with. So you might need to contact those companies separately.

And be patient. Mass mailing campaigns generally take several weeks or maybe a couple of months from inception to completion. So even if you do all the things above, it could still take a while to notice the difference -- for the pipeline to clear out. But it will happen.

▶︎ Listening to radio

Radio, both AM and FM, is replete with advertising. If you enjoy a daily one or two hour regularly scheduled program, you are certainly hearing a lot of ads or other breaks mixed in. Here's where some online savvy can save you.

Most radio shows offer podcasts that you can listen to online at any time. Radio producers know that radio is losing listeners, so by making program podcasts available, they are making it easier for you to experience the show. And if you listen to those podcasts using a podcast app then you can skip the prerecorded ads and other breaks. Podcast apps have time configurable skip back and skip forward buttons to help you navigate past commercial breaks.

iCatcher and Overcast are two popular podcast apps. There are plenty more.

n.b. Your local public radio station, likely an NPR affiliate, has no traditional advertising. They are listener supported. At most, you'll hear a few sponsor lives reads per hour. These are usually a few seconds long and are voiced by station talent, not an advertising company production.

▶︎ Telemarketers

This has got to be one of the oldest scourges that we still have to deal with -- being called on our own phones that we bought and pay monthly for, to be pitched-to by unethical telemarketers externalizing the expenses of their business onto their hapless victims.

How about we kill that dead, yes?

I've assembled a nice system based on MagicJack that fixes that. It works for both mobile phones and landlines.

If you are my client and have ever called me then you've heard it in action. If you want to hear how it works, hear what a telemarketing robodialer* would hear, then call my number and have a listen. Look on my home page for my phone number.

If you do me call and correctly follow through with the short verbal instruction you are given, then my phone will ring and I'll answer if I'm available. If you just listen to the instruction and do nothing, or if you do it wrong, then the call is dropped without ringing my phone. That's the key. A robodialer cannot perform the simple required task so those calls never ring through. This technique is called "challenge / response".

I went from receiving easily 100+ robocalls per month down to essentially zero. The 2 or 3 that made it through over the last few years had live dialed, which is rare. Yes, AI may "fix that" one day. But my system is too arcane and most people don't do it so it's unlikely there will be an automated workaround anytime soon.

* Nearly all telemarketers today use a computer (a predictive dialer or "robodialer") to initiate the phone call. That's because they're faster and if no one answers, or if it's an answering machine, the robodialer can dump the call and proceed to the next number on the list. If a human (that's you) answers, the call is transferred to a "closer" (live person). That's the tell-tale silence you hear after saying "hello". That saves a lot of time and money for the telemarketer because most calls from unknown numbers are unanswered these days. No need for the closer to waste time fruitlessly dialing and dialing.

▶︎ Grocery Shopping

There's a brave new world of in-store advertising that's becoming more and more rampant today.

• Ads on the store's PA system -- easily the worst offence on this list.
• Ads on the shopping carts
• TV screens playing ads, often with audio, scattered about in product displays
• Ads printed on receipts.
• Graphical ad mats stuck to the floor in front of a product's location on a shelf
• Ads on cooler doors that also obscure the items behind them, requiring many more door openings
• Shelf hang tags by the hundreds beckoning for your attention.

Not much you can do. I simply ignore these ads. If I'm particularly peeved that day, I'll actively not choose what's being advertised.

The best option is to shop at stores that minimize that.

Walmart stores, shockingly enough, have "sensory friendly hours" every day from 8a to 10a. This new program started in late 2023.

During these sensory friendly hours...

• Walmart Radio is off. This, all by itself, is gold.
• TV/video displays are changed to static images, no motion or sound
• Lighting is dimmed where possible (where it's safe, or capable of being dimmed)
• Store is generally is not as crowded during these hours

If you've avoided Walmart because of the chaotic, noisy, crowded shopping experience, then sensory friendly hours might be for you.

As I mentioned up top, advertising and tracking go hand in hand. So while reducing the ads you see and hear will make your life better, you'll also want to reduce the tracking that goes along with it. Usually these go together -- reduce ad exposure and (at least some of) the tracking goes away also. But not all of it as we'll discuss next.

Next level tracking in grocery and dept. stores.

Not all advertising has a tracking component. e.g. highway billboards, print ads, broadcast radio and TV ads -- those ads have no tracking component. But to the extent an advertiser can track you, it can make tracking-enhanced advertising much more targeted to you, sometimes down to you personally.

For example, the Target chain is rolling out technology that involves tracking devices installed on the hand-carry baskets and wheeled carts that shoppers use. This technology can tell where the hand baskets and carts are in the store, breadcrumb path taken, dwell time (how long they hang around in one spot), etc. from the time you enter to the time you leave.

If you pay using a regular credit or debit card, then that shopping visit, with all that juicy detail, is easily associated with you, as an identifiable person. And if you use the Target shopping phone app while in the store, the level of reporting detail is even greater.

This tracking data is used to do many things, one of which is to build a profile of your shopping habits in order to tweak advertising to have maximum effect.

How to avoid? Don't use the Target app, especially while in the store. Pay using cash (the best option) or a prepaid debit gift card that's not tied to your identity. Some retailers could still identify you with facial recognition and Flock-like cameras in the parking lot that record license plates and other identifying characteristics of your vehicle.

These in-store trackers use BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) wireless protocol, which transmits a signal that is picked up by sensors scattered about the store. Aluminum foil wrapped around the BLE transmitter that's attached to the basket or cart can sometimes degrade signal quality enough to make your basket or cart "invisible" to those sensors.

Defeating the entire chain of identifying technology is becoming increasingly difficult today. But the more effort you make, the noisier and less reliable the tracking data becomes. You don't have to eliminate all of it. Simply making it less reliable is a meaningful accomplishment.

▶︎ Loyalty Programs

Sidebar discussion: Loyalty may seem like a simple thing, but it's quite a complex thing, indeed. Loyalty starts as the idea of a relationship commitment that's built on something deeper. OK, so far, so good. When taken far enough, it may require acquiescing to an uncomfortable condition, which, ok, staying loyal isn't always convenient. That's part of what it means to be loyal. But then taken even farther, say, to the extreme, one may have to sequester one's own ethics or morality in service to that loyalty. That would be blind loyalty -- and that's when loyalty goes bad.

Like boiling the frog, the escalation isn't always noticeable. The arc of loyalty from none to absolute is generally a smooth one, with few or no checkpoints or gradations to mark your progress along that arc. It leaves the object of your loyalty free to define the terms of that loyalty -- what that loyalty may require of you. And that can be a dangerous thing indeed.

"You were always loyal before to (whatever), but now you aren't?"

Loyalty mustn't override ethics but the demand to do so by the object of your loyalty is not exactly uncommon. One only need observe the chaotic political world we're living in today to see the damage that absolute blind loyalty can bring.

Absolute loyalty also has a strong tendency toward sycophancy. If loyalty requires you to suppress criticism, excuse wrongdoing, or agree when you would otherwise object in good faith, the distinction between loyalty and sycophancy starts getting awfully thin.

So, enough of me deconstructing the idea of loyalty. Let's discuss loyalty programs.

Loyalty programs are very much advertising-adjacent and a feature of many companies that have a consumer-facing or retail component. It taps into a psychological imperative -- the need to belong to something. That's why you'll hear companies thanking or praising their loyal customers. Loyalty, even extremely so, is framed as a virtue. It can be a mind drug.

But that company is playing up the loyalty program to their advantage, not yours.

By cultivating your loyalty:

• The program dissuades you from comparison shopping.
• Offers "points", which they hope changes your concern from "Who has the best deal?" to "How many points will I get?"
• Encourages greater spending by offering point multipliers or other perks for meeting certain purchase thresholds.
• Gives the loyalty program exquisitely accurate data on your spending habits which they will monetize in various ways, including price discrimination and ad targeting.
• The points are "funny money". They're (usually) only spendable where you earned them. If they are exportable, like airline miles, the exchange rate is terrible.

In short, loyalty programs use your loyalty against you. Could it possibly be any more cynical?

You may save a few bucks on a particular transaction or get that hard-earned freebie, but you give up a lot in terms of privacy and, quite likely, real money over the longer term. Companies are not altruistic. They are not rewarding you from the goodness of their corporate hearts. If having the loyalty program wasn't generating significant additional revenue over not having it, then it would not exist. Where's the additional revenue coming from?

Think about that for a minute. I'll wait...

An analogy on opposition incentives: In casino blackjack rules, if the dealer's up card is an Ace (meaning a dealer blackjack is possible), then you'll be offered insurance on your bet. Should you take it? Unless you are counting cards and know how the deck is trending, then the answer is always no. Going purely by the odds, it's a bad bet. But you don't even have to do the math to know why. The very fact that insurance is offered is good, prima facia evidence that it's a bad bet.

If you do take the insurance and the dealer has a blackjack, then you come out ahead. It's similar with loyalty programs. They aren't always 100% a bad deal. But unless you are an extraordinarily disciplined consumer, then it will not work to your advantage. And given how wildly popular loyalty programs are today, what with very nearly every retailer offering one, then evidence shows they are working as intended.

This one is easy. If you are uncomfortable with the tracking and personalized, targeted advertising, then cancel whatever loyalty programs you're in. Is that really worth saving 37 cents on that jar of mustard?

▶︎ Pumping Gasoline

Numerous gas station chains have added commercials to the screens on their gas pumps hawking hot dogs, energy drinks, and whatever other crap the little store sells. You are subjected to video and rather loud audio (to overcome all the other noise around you) that you cannot escape while you fill 'er up. There was a neat trick for a while where you could mute the audio by touching a certain combination of buttons but that reportedly no longer works.

I'm not recommending that you do this, but back in my gas-buying days, I'd insert a small block of wood in the pump handle, holding the valve open, then return to inside the car until the pump finished. Who wants to stand in the heat (or cold), breathing in gas fumes, and hearing that damn speaker blaring ads?

But now I drive an EV. No more gas pump ads for me. Hell, I don't even buy gasoline any more. I charge at home!

Perhaps overkill if all you want to do is avoid ads. But, really, driving an EV is superior in so many ways.

See my EV article here for a deep dive on EV ownership. This article honestly and fairly hits all the pros and cons to EV ownership.

In Conclusion

Yes, this is a lot of advice. You may decide that eliminating some of these advertising modalities are too complicated or maybe the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. I can respect that. Not everyone is equally bothered by ads.

But others who are bothered may not know all the ways available to reduce ad exposure. Alas, most people resign themselves to just accept advertising as a consequence of living in our modern world. I'm telling you that you don't have to resign yourself like that. The solutions above work! And I can help you deploy them if you need it.

To me, advertising is one of the circles of hell and I'll do very nearly anything to eliminate all I can from my life -- and I have largely succeeded. About the only advertising I'm still subjected to is passive, like highway billboards (literally passive) and that sort of thing. I just don't look at them.

But the ones I'll fight tooth and nail to eliminate are the intrusive ads that actively hector me, that interrupt whatever experience I'm currently engaged in. I'll enjoy my life on my terms, not those of Big Tech and their ad-tech monster.

I've helped many people curate a (nearly) ad-free life.