Advertisements

What is an advertisement?

An advertisement is a form of communication to help sell or distribute a certain product for profit (to inform, to persuade and to remind).

Which are good and which are bad?

Text advertisements (usually seen on Google), and most image/video (banner) advertisements are mostly safe, however not entirely. Some of these include: unknown websites full of advertisement(s), pop-up/pop-under, and win a free product advertisement.

Are advertisements bad?

Advertisements have been used with different techniques that can seem potentially unwanted towards Internet users. Some techniques used are:

• Banners
• Promotions
• False advertising
• Drive-by-download
• Propaganda
• Redirections
• Pop-ups
• Pop-unders
• Subliminal messages
• Pre-installation
• Optional Third-party inclusion in Installation
• Nagware
• Adware
• Scareware
• Mail and spam

Some of these strategies can be seen as unwanted or malicious, such as adware or pop-ups.

Some risks can lead to:

• Frauds, scam and phishing
• Installing adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs
• Spam
• Hijacked computer or browser
• Slower page loading
• Identity theft

How can protect myself from these advertisements?

Enabling your pop-up blocker can block most of these annoying pop-up advertisements, enabling phishing protection can secure yourself from fraud, downloading an ad-blocking program can get rid of these advertisements.

Pop-up blockers are found in all modern web browsers including Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 2+, Chrome 2+, and others.

Not going to shady websites (those with a poor rating, poor surfing habits, etc).