Finding Ways to Skip an 'Ad'verse Situation

As ads creep deeper into digital life, with even subscription services running ads, privacy enthusiasts and digital rebels are fighting back

- Shephali Bhatt

Imagine if your brain started serving targeted ads to people around you, the way your phone dishes them out to you when you're browsing online. In Common People, the Season 7 premiere episode of Netflix's dystopian series Black Mirror, Amanda (Rashida Jones), a schoolteacher, undergoes surgery to replace her inoperable brain tumour with synthetic tissue connected to a tech company's cloud server. The procedure saves her life, but there is a catch. Stuck on its cheapest subscription plan, Amanda starts spouting ads mid-conversation without realising it. She pushes a snack brand to her students in class, recommends a religion-based counselling site to one of them, promotes a dating service to a senior colleague, and suggests lubricant to her husband Mike (Chris O'Dowd) during an intimate moment.

The ads soon take over every part of her life, turning her into a human billboard. As it starts affecting her job and married life, Mike, a welder by day, resorts to performing degrading acts on a livestreaming platform at night to earn enough money to afford an ad-free upgrade for Amanda.

Going to great lengths for an ad-free experience resonates deeply with many tech-savvy users. Arnav Gupta, a 31-year-old software engineer working with an MNC in London, has built a digital fortress to block ads from his screens. He uses a modified app called ReVanced for YouTube—"it skips not just ads, but even sponsored segments"—and a VPN called AdGuard on his phone that blocks ad servers across all websites he visits. "It's easy to see how things could spiral the way Black Mirror shows," he says. "It's already happened to so many digital services, like MyGate, which started as a simple visitor approval app for gated societies, and now runs ads."