You do have a point, but… It’s not for nothing. It’s to hurt the predatory ad industry. And what you give up isn’t much: your IP address and likely the referral (so they know you visited website X that was serving their ad). It’s up to you to decide whether that’s an acceptable privacy cost to conduct this kind of guerilla ad warfare.
It would be cool if it could somehow integrate to a VPN and only do that while the VPN is active. I don’t think it’s possible, though.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 days ago
A split-tunnel VPN could do this, but it would require some advanced routing and awareness by the plugin to send the request down the other route. I think that would mean the plugin would have to have deeper hooks into OS to reach the IP stack which browsers usually don’t have, so there would be some security implications there for abuse/attack surface of the plugin.