The Adtidote

An ad that doesn't track you, and a browser it has nothing to hide from. I didn't plan the pair -- privacy-first is just how I think.

by Richard Whitney

People assume a browser that blocks ads and an ad that blocks nothing must be a strategy -- some clever two-step. It wasn't. I didn't set out to make a stand against surveillance, and I didn't set out to build an ad that ignores you. It's just the way I think: privacy first, by default, in everything I make. Two things fell out of that instinct -- an ad, then a browser -- and only later did I notice they proved each other.

Start with how most of advertising works. You look at one pair of shoes and they stalk you for a month, across every site and every device, because somewhere a graph decided who you are and sold it. The whole industry treats that surveillance as load-bearing -- no tracking, no revenue, no free web. I've never thought that way, so when I built an ad, it didn't come out that way.

Part 1 -- pixboard: the adtidote

The ad came first. pixboard is a pixel board -- an advertiser buys a small tile that links to their site, and it appears in a slim column on pages that choose to carry it. That's the whole ad: a picture and a link. What it isn't is the point -- no tracking script, no cookie, no fingerprint, no beacon phoning home, no profile built, nothing brokered or sold. The site carrying it serves the tiles from its own server, first-party, so there's no third-party frame or script riding along to watch you. Relevance comes from context -- the kind of place it runs, not a profile of you -- the un-creepy way ads worked before someone decided they needed your name. And it's measured the honest way, did it show and did someone click, as plain counts -- not a dossier.

I'll be straight about where this is: pixboard is young -- a handful of sites, the first ads, live today but no empire. But it works, and it proves the one thing the whole industry insists is impossible: the surveillance was never the necessary part. That's the name, spelled out -- ad + antidote, misspelled on purpose. The adtidote.

Part 2 -- Splitser: the browser it has nothing to hide from

Writing pixboard made me look hard at the world it has to live in, and it's filthy. The pages are wall-to-wall trackers. The readers who'd most appreciate an honest ad are the ones running blockers that -- rightly -- nuke everything, clean and dirty alike.

Around the same time I'd been tinkering with a small browser extension for splitting the screen into panes, and it kept growing until it was easier to make it a whole browser. Same instinct behind it, so it came out the same way: Splitser is a real desktop browser -- same Chromium engine as the big names, not a skin over someone else's -- with ad and tracker blocking on by default, at the network level, before a single spying request leaves your machine. Not a plugin you remember to install. The floor. It's not anti-ad. It's anti-surveillance -- it blocks the trackers, the fingerprinters, the cross-site graphs, the machinery that turns "a person read an article" into "a dossier for sale."

(It's also, for what it's worth, a genuinely good browser -- it tiles your logged-in apps side by side in resizable panes, so you run six things at once instead of drowning in tabs. Same rendering speed as anything on the same engine; I measured it. Different article.)

And that's when I noticed the two things I'd built without planning to had quietly completed each other. pixboard is exactly the ad Splitser doesn't block -- because there's nothing to block. A blocker stops surveillance; a first-party tile that runs no tracker gives it nothing to stop. The clean ad sails straight through the strictest browser I could make -- not by sneaking past it, but by having nothing to hide from it. Which is also why it works for the advertiser: it reaches the one audience surveillance ads can't, the people blocking them, and shows up where AdSense shows a blank. You give up the dossier and get something better -- an ad that actually appears, in front of people who chose to allow it. Splitser gives pixboard a place to prove exactly what it is: the cure that looks like the disease, minus the poison.

Part 3 -- Utility without surveillance

None of this was a master plan. It's a matrix of one habit of mind -- privacy first -- expressed more than once, and I only see the pattern in hindsight. I keep building the useful thing without the surveillance, because it never occurs to me that the surveillance is the point.

• MIR -- a reputation signal without surveillance. It records what an entity actually did over time, with hashed IDs and no personal data -- an account's history without the human's name.
• Splitser -- the web without the trackers.
• pixboard -- the ad without the dossier.

None of them ask you to give up the thing you wanted -- trust signals, a browser, advertising that pays for the free web. They just refuse the surveillance everyone told you was the price. The industry's excuse has always been "but it has to work this way." It doesn't -- and the proof isn't a strategy, it's a reflex. Here are three things that came out of one.

The ad that spies is a choice. So is the antidote.

pixboard -- the adtidote.  Splitser -- your logged-in apps, side by side, no trackers.