AdBlock Protect is an extension for Google Chrome that safeguards your privacy when you're shopping or banking online, catching up with friends on Facebook, streaming a video, or just reading the news. AdBlock Protect uses tracker detection and blocking technology, HTTPS redirection, and our own vetted, locally stored cache of common web software libraries to:
- stop advertisers and big data companies from collecting information about you without your consent
- ensure that connections to websites use HTTPS encryption whenever possible, rather than the increasingly outmoded and insecure, unencrypted HTTP
Learn more about why this is important - help pages use less bandwidth and load faster
AdBlock Protect goes to work the moment it's installed. In this article, you'll learn how to install, use, and uninstall AdBlock Protect.
In this article:
Installing AdBlock Protect
AdBlock Protect is currently available for Google Chrome only.
- Visit https://adblockprotect.com and click Add to Chrome—It's Free. The AdBlock Protect page in the Chrome Web Store opens.
- Click Add to Chrome.
- When asked to confirm you want to add AdBlock Protect, click Add extension.
- When the confirmation page opens, AdBlock Protect has been successfully installed.
Using AdBlock Protect
AdBlock Protect is designed to run in the background, silently and invisibly safeguarding you and your computer against data pirates and prying eyes. Rarely, AdBlock Protect might prevent part of a website from working properly. You can use the AdBlock Protect dashboard to turn off the protection feature that is causing the issue while continuing to be fully protected everywhere else.
To open the dashboard, click the blue AdBlock Protect icon in the Chrome toolbar.
- The AdBlock Protect icon; shows the number of trackers blocked on the current page and opens the dashboard
- Help & Feedback; opens our support site, where you can browse our knowledge base and open a support ticket if needed
- Options; opens AdBlock Protect's settings
- The domain of the current page
- The number of trackers blocked and connections secured with HTTPS (the colors correspond to the switches in the bottom half of the dashboard)
- Pause; manually turns off all protection everywhere (remember to "unpause" to resume protection!)
- Allowlist Site; automatically turns off all protection on this site only, every time you visit
- Ensure Secure URLs; turn this off to stop redirecting browser requests to HTTPS if you visit a site that doesn't use it
Learn more about why you should leave this on - Block Trackers; turn this off to allow websites to track you
- Enable Local Content Caching; turn this off to bypass AdBlock Protect's locally cached JavaScript libraries
Learn more about local content caching in AdBlock - Clear Browser Requests; turn this off to stop removing potentially personally identifiable information from website requests
Uninstalling AdBlock Protect
To uninstall AdBlock Protect, right-click the AdBlock Protect icon in the Chrome toolbar and select Remove from Chrome.