Understanding the Privacy Implications of Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads

In this paper we collect historical updates made to Adblock Plus’s exception list and real-world web traffic by visiting the top 10k websites listed by Tranco. Using such data we analyze not only how the exception list has evolved over the years in terms of both contents unblocked and partners/entities enrolled into the Acceptable Ads initiative, but also the privacy implications of enabling the exception list by default