Who Filters the Filters: Understanding the Growth, Usefulness and Efficiency of Crowdsourced Ad Blocking

Ad and tracking blocking extensions are among the most popular browser extensions. These extensions typically rely on filter lists to decide whether a URL is associated with tracking or advertising. Millions of web users rely on these lists to protect their privacy and improve their browsing experience. Despite their importance, the growth and health of these filter lists is poorly understood. These lists are maintained by a small number of contributors, who use a variety of undocumented heuristics to determine what rules should be included. These lists quickly accumulate rules over time, and rules are rarely removed. As a result, users’ browsing experiences are degraded as the number of stale, dead or otherwise not useful rules increasingly dwarfs the number of useful rules, with no attenuating benefit. This paper improves the understanding of crowdsourced filter lists by studying EasyList, the most popular filter list. We find that, over its 9 year history, EasyList has grown from several hundred rules, to well over 60,000. We then apply EasyList to a sample of 10,000 websites, and find that 90.16% of the resource blocking rules in EasyList provide no benefit to users, in common browsing scenarios. Based on these results, we provide a taxonomy of the ways advertisers evade EasyList rules. Finally, we propose optimizations for popular ad-blocking tools that provide over 99% of the coverage of existing tools, but 62.5% faster.