Will 2016 be the year web advertisers realise we don’t want to be monitored?

Everyone hates web adverts - except those people developing intrusive technology to force them on us.

On 16 September 2015, Apple launched the latest version of its iPhone operating system, iOS9. One feature of the new system is the option to install an ad blocker, preventing the phone's Safari web browser from loading most web ads. The following day, the top-selling application in the UK was Peace, an ad blocker by celebrated software developer Marco Arment.

An estimated 150 to 200 million people use ad blockers on their desktop or laptop ad browsers and that number is growing at 41% a year. As ad spending shifts from desktops to mobile platforms, ad blockers such as Peace terrify both advertisers and proprietors of services that rely on advertising for their revenue. Yet the demand for mobile ad blockers makes perfect sense. Mobile phone users pay for the bandwidth they consume, and on many websites the bandwidth used to load ads and their accompanying tracking information is greater than the bandwidth used to load the content.