That is and for many, always an issue. Adverts help pay for content, be that a game or website - people literally make a living that way that it has become a bit of a defacto approach.

But when you are tied to including some code that goes off to a site that you have no or very little control over, you are outsourcing part of your company (web or app) into the hands of another in which, if they mess up. You are the the one that takes all the PR flack.

After all, if somebody slips an exploit into an AD hosted on a 3rd party site and offered up by a reputable AD serving company. Whilst the blame and fault may clearly be with the AD serving company for not screening what they offer. You are the ones that from a consumer and as it also transpires - the media as the one to blame. As we all know, corrections and retractions are always less viewed and eyeballed than the initial drama article based upon a small picture view of the issue/drama, instead of the root cause. Even with the best most respected media sites in the World, such retractions/corrections never get the same attention as the initial article of drama and doom.

That is one problem that even today, still prevails - media does an article with the finger pointing at one direction and the truth, even when it comes out and updated, never tracks as well as the initial finger pointing and is very much the old saying of "if enough mud is slung, some will stick".

{EDIT spelling and below}

With that all said, ad-blocking by the likes of https://pi-hole.net/ is more than just avoiding AD's, it's about privacy and more and more so - security.

(sorry to be picky about an irrelevance but this one grates on me. "Ad" is an abbreviation not an acronym or initialisation - so no need to capitalize it as "AD". Same for "app" over "APP". Makes things hard to read for me as it sounds like someone shouting occasional words in an otherwise normal sentence!)

I normally wouldn't do this, but it's initialism not initialisation

I'm loving such educational feedback - full stop.

A fair comment and thank you, duly noted.

Here it sounds like the malicious code was in the advertising SDK itself, so ad blocking at the network level wouldn't necessarily have helped.

Yes and I can't think of one single developer who has had to include AD's, ever scrutinising the code they are offered (though I'd bet one that they are out there and hopefully comment back), let alone been able to change it due to the terms such AD requirements impose.

Maybe, Google et all need to make sure APP's have an even more granular control of permissions in that you can seperate the APP from the 3rd party AD's. that would only help more, but alas I suspect that may never happen as that would enable AD control much more accessible at a level that goes against their revenue stream.