Google Chrome said it will block ads with features that are turned on by default — pop-ups, videos that play as soon as you land on the page, and ads that force you to sit through a count down before the content. Chris Bronk is a professor at the College of Technology at the University of Houston.
“The laws regarding advertising content on the internet are pretty few and far between. Large players can dictate a lot of how things will work.”
Basically, internet advertisers are trying to get your attention.
“If you can get that through a pop-up ad, through a video playing, we are permitting some pretty nefarious behavior as far as getting our attention, and we really don’t have any rules about it.”
Google and Facebook control the bulk of online advertising. Professor Bronk said there are bigger things to worry about than annoying ads or automatic videos.
“Pop-ups are pretty easy to defeat. What is kind of unsettling is when you know you’re being profiled. I’ll do a search on something one of my kids wants for Christmas. And then I’ll see that items about that are now showing up in my Facebook feed all the time. That’s the stuff I worry about.”
Google’s new ad policy starts on February 15th.